Movie Mogul

Back in the 80s, sometime after 1985, I receieved a LoadStar 5.25 floppy for my C=128…yeah I actually had the 128, even though no one really used the double memory. On that disk was a game called Movie Mogul.

Game Play

The premise was, simple. You produce a movie. You get a bunch of stars, which my teenage mind only recongnized maybe 50% of, and assign them to roles. Various events happen during production, and your movie is released. You watch weekly box office returns…movies used to stay in theaters at least 2-3 months…and watch the money roll in. You might win one of three Oscars and get rereleased.

Finally, if you do well enough, or poor enough, you enter your initials into the high scores. I know when I played, I had some crazy version of Demon Dusters end up in the theaters for over a year and made over 1000% profit, which broke the high score screen. I’m looking forward to getting that sort of roll again.

But Why?

When I found the old vice emulator and the actual D64 disk back in 2015, I was intrigued. How could I reverse engineer this, and create a web based version of this. It would be sweet to be able to have anyone play.

I analyzed BASIC. Discovered why the movie reviews were never really random the first time you played. Realized this was actually a port to C=64 from a different computer system. But really ended up not getting very far because of life.

How

When I ended up deciding to try again, I thought I’d use this as an experiment to work with Claude Code. Certainly it could quickly help by converting the code, and getting it on the screen quickly and at least help me avoid needing to spend all day in web frameworks.

This worked better than I expected. In my spare time over three days, I went from the D64 image with BASIC and Sequential files, to a working game on desktop and Mobile, with playwright tests to keep me honest. I cannot complain about the productivity. I had a lot of problems with mobile browsers, and getting playwright enabled helped to fix those issue quickly.

Thanks

A special thanks to Anthony Chiang for creating this game, and for Alan Gardner converting it for the Commodore. I don’t know if either of you is out there, but if you do find this, I hope that it brings you positive thoughts.

I appreciate you very much. Games like this one are one of the reasons I ended up in this profession. I’m sorry it took me a decade to get this conversion done.

Play

The game is available at https://mcornell.dev/games/

Give it a shot. High scores are local to your browser. Don’t ask about cheat mode. Maybe I’ll post about that later.

If you’re so inclined, you can see the code here: https://github.com/mcornell/movie-mogul

There are still quirks and things that might not work quite right.

Now, pretend it’s 1985 and go out there and try to avoid your biggest star getting caught with cocaine!