Movie Mogul Now Has a Global Leaderboard
A second deployment at moviemogul.mcornell.dev moves the game engine server-side so high scores are shared across all players and impossible to fake.
The original Movie Mogul deployment at /games/movie-mogul/ stores high scores in localStorage. That means your scores are local to your browser. Clear your cache, switch devices, or open a private window and they’re gone. There’s also nothing stopping you from editing localStorage directly, but you’d be a horrible person if you did that.
Since I forgot to cancel Claude Code, a new deployment is now live at moviemogul.mcornell.dev with a global leaderboard — shared across all players, persistent, and tamper-proof.
How It Works
The global version runs the UI as a fake C64 terminal. It displays output and sends player choices. Everything else — movie selection, actor pool generation, production events, critic reviews, box office simulation, Oscar results, scoring — runs in a Cloudflare Pages Function (Worker). Game state lives in a D1 database row for the duration of a session and is deleted when the game ends. The leaderboard rows are permanent.
Because the browser never computes a score, there’s nothing to fake. The client only receives display data — actor stats and RNG state are never sent to the browser.
The architecture fits entirely in Cloudflare’s free tier. Cost is $0/month.
The Leaderboards
These are the original categories from the game, top 5 per category:
- Highest Profit — raw dollar profit
- Greatest Revenue — total box office gross
- Best Percentage Returned — profit as a percentage of budget
- Biggest Bomb — most money lost (a leaderboard for the truly committed)
Scores are submitted with three-character initials, same as the original game.
One Other Change
Cheat mode (?cheat in the URL) is disabled in the global deployment. Because what fun would cheating be at this point!
The local version at /games/movie-mogul/ is unchanged. If you want to poke around with cheat mode, run locally, or just don’t want your scores visible to anyone else, that’s still there.