Hollywood Game Design

Making Video Games is a tricky business, and is described on our Useful Notes page Video Game Design.

Hollywood... well, they get it right about as often as they get anything else right. In Hollywood, it's quite possible for one person to to make a blockbuster video game in his basement, without any help. (Just like it's possible for one person to to make an Oscar-worthy movie in his basement, without any help.)

See also: Pac-Man Fever, Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 (misconceptions about games and gameplay) and Small Reference Pools.

Examples of Hollywood Game Design include:

Advertising

• Commercials for Westwood College and Collins College follow this trope, as seen here and here. It's a good thing that guy was there to notice the graphics need tightening up.

Film

• The 2001 horror movie How to Make a Monster was based around the premise of a monster from a game killing off its creators. As a remake of a movie which originally used a movie monster, it makes some mistakes. According to the typically vitriolic Something Awful review, in it, a team of three people (responsible for AI, sounds and weapons, respectively) is given a month to make a computer game. No wonder they manage such an Epic Failure that the game actually starts killing them.
• Grandma's Boy is essentially this trope layered over a Stoner Flick.
• The live action version of 101 Dalmatians had Roger's profession updated from music composer to games designer. The process of making a game apparently involved him taking a game (which he presumably made on his own) to a group of suits who let an obnoxious child review it (apparently having played it for a few minutes) and give him feedback.
• The eponymous game of Stay Alive was apparently made by one guy drawing creepy pictures in a notebook. Over the course of the movie we see almost his entire house and he doesn't even have a computer.
• The David Cronenberg film eXistenZ depicts Allegra Geller as the world's premiere game designer of the eponymous game. Aside from egregious playing straight of No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup, none of her associates even seem to have the slightest idea what eXistenZ is actually about. Justified, as none of the people playing transCendenZ are professional game designers.

Literature

• The chick-lit novel Lucy Crocker 2.0 by Caroline Preston. The heroine is a housewife and one-time artist who helps her programmer husband make wildly successful computer games. Unfortunately, Preston can't even accurately describe a woman checking her e-mail, much less what goes into designing a game. The process seems to consist of Lucy Crocker painting something with watercolors, and her husband scanning the image into his computer.
• Averted in John Sandford's "Prey series" where Lucas Davenport only comes up with the storylines and rules (he started out doing wargame scenarios) and leaves the coding to first, one expert, and later an entire building of them. He started out trying to do all the coding himself, but quickly realized that it was beyond him.

Live-Action TV

• One episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent featured a game designer as the murderer of the week. It portrayed him as being only one of two people working on a game, asking whether the lighting on a level he was designing was OK (a designer places lamps in a level, and the engine uses them to light the level) and a review apparently not only mentioned him by name but criticized his programming as being "sterile". As anyone who's read a review will know, an individual programmer won't be known by name, nor would a programmer be criticized for the graphics (that would be the job of the designer). But it turned out that the level had an Easter Egg of the designers name, and the designer was one of the owners of the company.
• CSI: Miami had an episode where a game executive provided some teenagers with TEC-9s and encouraged them to act out events from his GTA clone to build up hype.
  • And to add insult to injury, made him much more of a Jerkass than even the most hated of real game industry suits.
• There was an episode of Veronica Mars where two geeks make a world-class video game in their dorm room, all by themselves.
• NCIS: Los Angeles had Calen go undercover as a game tester. It quickly becomes apparent that he is horrible at it so the team cuts the power to the building before the real testers in the company can discover that he is faking.
  • In addition to this, it ignores the fact that a mixed pool of testers (and thus less skilled players) would be quite desirable for QA purposes.
• NCIS episode "Kill Screen" has the lead programmer for an online game insert a sophisticated piece of code into the game with the intent to create a botnet supercomputer able to hack into the Pentagon. The company he works for is portrayed as a fairly large and successful organization and it is quite implausible that he would be able to sneak something like that into the program without it being detected by other programmers and testers (particularly since it ignores the fact that the software would be tested as above). Perfectly possible in reality, especially for a lead programmer. Programmers are usually responsible for a distinct part of the app and are too busy to check what others are doing. Of course, the ideas that a) the Pentagon would be vulnerable to such a botnet and b) an MMO would be the best way to create one are... dubious at best.

Web Comics

• Deconstructed in an episode of Three Panel Soul, where the creators point out that video games aren't programmed by randomly mashing the buttons on a video game controller. Also, the last panel has one guy lamenting that his friend's mother's dementia is growing worse and worse every month.

Western Animation

• In an episode of King of the Hill, two nerds at the community college make a full-length Grand Theft Auto clone, with Hank as the protagonist, just to mock him. After giving Hank the only copy (which naturally works perfectly), they apparently just get bored of it and never release the game at all.
  • It could be a mod of an existing game, which would be much more believable for two people to produce. And Hank is shown playing online with at least some other people.