Lionhead's secret best game, and one of the greatest ever abandonware games - The Movies - turns 20 today

Many people are very eagerly awaiting the return of Fable next year, and rightly so - it's a British classic and at this stage of the gradually unravelling disaster clearly an increasingly important piece of Microsoft's gaming portfolio. But if I think about the games and series spawned by the late Lionhead Studios, Fable has a rival at the top - 2005's The Movies, which turns 20 years old today.
Sometimes a milestone birthday is cause - or an excuse, really - for Eurogamer to talk about a specific aspect of a game, a mechanic it did well, a fond memory, or whatever. My love of The Movies is honestly quite a bit more general, though: it's just a bloody good business simulation game, and the sort of thing that deserved far more success and attention back in 2005, and deserves to be remembered far more widely now.
In a sense, I think of The Movies as a distinctly post-Sims game. There's something very Sims-like about how its cast of simulated movie stars and studio executives act - and that drives a different level of interaction with the business you're running. If you haven't guessed, this is a game that tasks you with running a Hollywood film studio, building up stars, directors, franchises, and of course the required infrastructure to leverage those things.
The big twist at the time was that the films you made could be exported and shown to your friends. This went for the automated stuff that your in-game script writers and directors would cook up, but you could also take more granular control of productions - so this was part-game, part creation-tool.
The most-watched The Movies film I can find on YouTube is a Dungeons and Dragons film with half a million views uploaded a whopping eighteen years ago. I see someone also made a knock-off of James Bond, a creation based on gaming's Hitman franchise, and a shot-for-shot recreation of the trailer for The Dark Knight. These facsimiles are ropey, but they're also pretty impressive creations from within a game that's 20 years old.
There was even a film of significance made within the game - short political film The French Democracy, which garnered mainstream media attention in France and beyond with its recreation of real-world civil unrest in France. That also speaks to the strengths of what Lionhead created. An unknown was able to produce a lucid thirteen-minute commentary on political unrest, racism, and identity within the tools - and cause a public stir with the result.
It was this dedication to being both a game and a functional (if clunky) storytelling tool that set The Movies apart from other business simulation peers of the day - and even those today. It also in hindsight feels rather ahead of its time - a year before Gary's Mod became a smash hit for making film with game assets, and releasing only six months after the launch of YouTube, meaning it of course couldn't truly take into account how that website would utterly shatter the video-sharing landscape online.
But the thing is - The Movies is also just a damn good biz sim title. It's got that cheeky Lionhead energy and sense of humour, a real pep in its step, and clear ambition. For all the talk of Peter Molyneux's highfalutin dreaming with Fable or Kinect or whatever else, it's probably The Movies that is Lionhead's single most ambitious game. I still love it for that.
The real crime, of course, is that there is no real natural and legal way to play The Movies today short of picking up a second-hand disc somewhere, or a download from archive.org, and wrestling with compatibility issues. This is one of the best games that has been truly abandoned - forgotten first by Lionhead itself, and then likely truly buried with Microsoft's 2016 closure of the studio. It was on Steam for a long time, but has long since been delisted. Then there's the mesh of publishing rights, with three different companies having put out various versions of the game originally. Who knows where that all stands.
Especially when a game is abandonware, the need not just for it to be playable but for perhaps reimaginings and spiritual successors becomes more pressing. The most prominent for The Movies is Blockbuster Inc - but that game doesn't quite manage to capture the magic. And so, 20 years on, I find myself still searching for something to scratch that itch - and thinking about the likes of Two Point Studios, where some of the minds behind The Movies still reside. At any rate, if any concept deserved a Hollywood-esque 'soft reboot', it's this one - and I really hope it happens someday.