Skyrocket your way into the cinematic hall of fame in the Blockbuster Inc.
Blockbuster Inc. is a simulation game where you can create a movie studio and skyrocket it into the cinematic hall of fame. Blockbuster Inc. was developed by Super Sly Fox, a small independent studio based in Athens, Greece. The publisher of Blockbuster Inc. is Ancient Forge, a game development and publishing company from Poland known for games like The Tenants.
Blockbuster Inc. is a business simulation game where you can build and manage your own movie studio but that’s not all there is to the gameplay. You can direct each movie individually on top of the almost Sims-like building mechanics that allow you to decorate and build your studio lot. When you start the game, you start with an empty lot on which you can build your movie studio. You can choose which decade you can start your movie studio.
When you first start the game you can choose any decade 1920 until the 2010s, the starting genres and themes you work with and, you also select your budget which decides the game’s difficulty, 300k being easy, 200k being your normal difficulty and 100k being hard difficulty.
The starting decade influences how many research points you have. Research Points or RP is what you need to unlock new technology, The research tree is split into four categories: Equipment, Production, Facilities and Employees, Genres, and Themes.
In the equipment research tab, you can research everything from cameras to special effects, and microphones. In the Production Research tab you can research new budgets as well as post-production edits that allow you to get better-quality movies and TV shows out.
In the Facilities and Employees tab, you can research new facilities such as doctors ’ offices to keep your stuntmen and actors in good health as well as a classroom to increase their skills. Last but not least is the Genres and Themes tab. This allows you to unlock new age ratings as well as themes and genres to create your shows and movies.
Besides building your studio and managing your income like any other business simulator or management sim you need to keep an eye on your employees. If there are no prospective hires that you like you can jump into character creator and customize a character that you can use throughout any playthrough.
Luckily in Blockbuster Inc., you have full control of how you run the studio. You can control when your employees are away from the office if they are on a lunch break or have some downtime between shooting movies. You choose the food budget for meal times, although in the beginning, you start with a low budget before you can upgrade it to better quality food.
Your employees act almost like sims characters would, they build up relationships with co-workers and have their own needs and wants. If you have your actors and actresses doing stunt work there is a chance they could get hurt. Depending on the decade you started you may have the facilities to completely heal them quickly or you’ll have to wait for them to heal up on their own.
Starting in the 1920’s you’ll have very little in terms of research and you will have to wait every five to ten years for new research to unlock whereas if you start in 2010 you will have almost all the research available to use.
Since you can control the schedule you can either push them to their limits and get movies done quicker or you can make a more fair schedule with plenty of breaks. Making sure you have enough money for that and for budgeting your movies is enough, You make sales on movies until they stop having ticket sales meaning you can quickly make back the money you spent on movie production.
The media in Blockbuster Inc. also plays a huge impact on your movies and employees for example a director who gets a bad rep from the media can become sullen or even withdrawn sometimes refusing to come to work or not showing up to classes you set up for them.
Much like many other business simulators you have competitors. While they can’t exactly buy you out entirely there are a few mechanics to do with them. One of the mechanics is an award ceremony that happens at the end of the year. The awards you win can buff many things such as an increase in studio fans as well as ticket sale boosts. You can also buy shares of your competitor’s studios allowing you to receive a monthly profit from them.
The biggest mechanic of Blockbuster Inc. by far is movie creating which is what the game is all about. You do a lot of the work which for some can become tedious, you can edit everything about the movie. You can construct your own ideal sets such as western, pirate, or medieval, and outfit it with props and everything else you’ll need to make a convincing backdrop for your movie.
Then you jump over to the creator mode, once you have some actors, producers, writers, and crew members. This is incredibly detailed as well. You can change everything from budget, who you want to work on the movie, which sets they use, and what maturity rating they make use of.
You can edit the writing as well such as determining if you want more Lore and world-building more romance or suspense, and even the amount of conflict and gore in the movie. The sliders save so you can go back and use similar sliders for the same genre until you have the perfect number on each slider if the movie does really well.
You can direct each scene individually if you want to. Changing the actors’ costumes, the camera height, adding special effects, and even changing what animations the actors use are some of the things you can edit when you direct a scene. You can also add post-processing once you unlock it giving the finished product a better quality video and even typewriting.
To get the perfect movie it demands a certain level of patience to edit every little thing. You can also edit the video that gets produced, changing around the order of scenes, how long each scene lasts, add in subtitles and even sound effects before you finish the product and release it. When you release a movie it gets rated. The rating is part of what influences your ticket sales meaning you can either roll a profit or a loss on the movie.
Whether you choose to be a slave driver and work your employees to the ground or you nurture them and give them good leave and decent time off is up to you. Besides the schedule, there are small events that pop up every now and then that influence both the employees and the studio in negative and positive ways. Sometimes it’s to help remove negative traits from your employees by completing a task, other times it’s to handle some PR when your actors throw outrageous parties in their time off.
Blockbuster Inc. has some great sound engineering. There is a lot of background noise while you people run the studio and film and there are notification sounds for when a film finishes and when it gets released although you can turn it off if you want. The soundtrack is good but it can get tedious after long hours of playing.
The graphics of Blockbuster Inc. are good and seem a little reminiscent of Sims graphics, although there aren’t a lot of design options as of the current build, you are still able to create a greatly designed movie studio. The costume designs for your actors are greatly varied although a little stereotypical when it comes to movie cliches such as vampires or slashers.
Overall, Blockbuster Inc. is a great business management sim for both players new to business management simulators and veterans looking for something more relaxing. There is a lot to do and build in the game that will keep you busy for hours on end.
