Hollywood Monsters is a 1997 graphic adventure game developed by Pendulo Studios and published by Dinamic Multimedia. It takes place in an alternate-history 1950s, where the creatures from Golden Age monster movies are played by real monsters who lead otherwise normal lives. Controlling reporters Sue Bergman and Ron Ashman, the player seeks to unravel a mystery surrounding the murder of Frankenstein's monster. In the process, the player undertakes a globetrotting journey to locations like Transylvania and Egypt, while solving puzzles and interacting with characters such as Count Dracula, the Invisible Man and the Mummy.
Development of Hollywood Monsters began at Pendulo in mid-1994. The company sought to heavily improve its design practices, graphics production and engine technology over those of its first game, Igor: Objective Uikokahonia (1994). While Igor had involved six people, Hollywood Monsters required roughly 40 contributors, most of them outside contractors. Pendulo's goal was to create a traditional adventure game with nonlinear gameplay and difficult puzzles. At the request of Dinamic, the team worked with Spanish new wave group La Unión to create a theme song for Hollywood Monsters. After a challenging development cycle that lasted two-and-a-half years, the game was released in Spain during December 1997.
The game drew attention in Spain as a major release from the country's small game industry, which had collapsed after the golden age of Spanish software. Spanish publications cited it as evidence that domestic games were maturing; listeners of the popular radio program Game 40 voted it the best Spanish-made game of 1997. In Spain, Hollywood Monsters sold 250,000 units and helped to establish Pendulo as an important developer. However, the game's planned English version was never released, as Pendulo failed to find publishers beyond Southern Europe. The game has retrospectively been labeled a "classic" by Spanish outlets, and as one of the country's greatest graphic adventure games. Longstanding fan demand led to the spiritual successor The Next Big Thing (2011), named Hollywood Monsters 2 in Spain.
Gameplay
Hollywood Monsters is a graphic adventure game in which the player collects items, converses with non-player characters and solves puzzles. The player maneuvers the player character through the game world via a point-and-click interface, mousing over the screen and selecting hotspots with which to interact. At the bottom of the screen, a pop-up menu allows the player to pick one of seven actions, including "Talk" and "Look", and mouse over an appropriate hotspot, such as a door or character. This creates a verb-noun combination in the message line at the bottom of the screen; "Look door" or "Talk Joseph", for example. The player may then execute the action with a button press. As an example, executing "Talk Joseph" will begin a dialogue tree. An eighth action—"Go", for moving the player character—is automatically enabled when no other action is chosen.
Hollywood Monsters features a nonlinear system of progression, although the player character cannot die or reach a dead-end state. After the opening sequence, the player may travel to most of the game's areas unimpeded. The game contains roughly 50 characters and 120 collectible items. Once taken, items are stored in a pop-up inventory, and may be combined with each other to create new objects. The player employs items from the inventory to solve puzzles; for example, giving a glass of punch to a doorman as a distraction. Other types of puzzles in Hollywood Monsters include those based on timed action, on conversations, on pixel hunting and on repeating the same action multiple times.
Setting and story Hollywood Monsters takes place in an alternate-history 1950s, where the monsters from Golden Age monster movies exist in the real world and live everyday lives. These characters work in Hollywood as actors. Movie monsters recreated in the game include the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, Count Dracula and Frankenstein's monster. Hollywood Monsters portrayal of Hollywood has been described as a parody, and the game directly lampoons famous films such as the 1931 Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff.
As the game starts, reporter Sue Bergman of The Quill sets out to cover the Film Academy Awards Ceremony for Monster Actors, held in Hollywood. The event is a major gathering of Hollywood's monster talent at the residence of film producer Otto Hannover; Sue's goal is to interview the attendees. There, she notices that Frankenstein's monster ("Frankie") is distressed and searching for the Invisible Man, so she attempts to interview him. However, Sue is then kidnapped and Frankie is cut apart. The following day, Quill reporter Ron Ashman learns that Frankie and Sue have disappeared. He returns to Hannover's residence to look for evidence, after which he attempts to find Sue and revive Frankie. It is revealed that Frankie's body parts were hidden inside the trophies given to the previous night's winners: the Mummy, the Wolf Man and Count Dracula. As Frankie had witnessed Sue's kidnapping, he must be reassembled to solve the mystery.
Ron proceeds to undertake a journey around the world. The Mummy resides in Egypt, while Dracula lives in Transylvania's Mountains. Other visitable locations include Switzerland, Scotland and Australia. Ron completes a series of favors to obtain the trophies from their owners, such as aiding in Count Dracula's attempt to lose weight. In a Swiss lab, Ron rebuilds Frankie, who reveals that he had overheard a plot by Hannover and his associate Dr. Karloff against Hollywood's monster actors. The pair hopes to replace them with body doubles that can be easily controlled. Ron returns to Los Angeles and helps Sue to escape from Hannover's captivity, but the pair is soon ambushed by the producer and Dr. Karloff. The villains explain that the real monsters have already been replaced, as they had grown independent and had increased their fees; their doubles are mindless servants. Ron ultimately defeats Hannover and, alongside Sue, breaks the story of his plan and frees the real monsters.
Development Origins
Spanish developer Pendulo Studios began Hollywood Monsters in mid-1994, directly after the launch of Igor: Objective Uikokahonia, the company's debut adventure game. Pendulo had announced plans for another adventure title before Igors release; art director Rafael Latiegui said that it was very clear to them that they were going to make more games in the genre. Because co-founder Miguel Angel Ramos had left the team after its first project, the company's three remaining core members—Latiegui, Felipe Gómez Pinilla and Ramón Hernáez—gathered to brainstorm their second game. The trio sought to diverge from the design process used in Igor, whose whole production Latiegui later called "absolutely amateurish".
The central idea upon which Hernáez, Pinilla and Latiegui agreed was to make a "classic" adventure game, including a high level of interactivity, a visual look akin to animated films, a comedic tone and a lack of player death. Hernáez and Latiegui disliked the trends in graphic adventure games at the time, especially what Hernáez saw as an overreliance on cutscenes. Pendulo "wanted to run away from anything like an interactive movie", according to Pinilla. For the plot, the team conceived a story about movie monsters from the Golden Age of Hollywood, set around the 1940s and 1950s. Pinilla said that the designers "had the idea of going against all the preconceived notions" in the public mind about such characters. Dinamic Multimedia jumped at the chance to publish the game, redoubling its efforts to sign Pendulo after its failed bid on Igor.
Pendulo's co-founders developed the Hollywood Monsters script full-time for between three and six months. This process was collaborative: Pinilla noted that the three leads held equal weight in decision-making. The script ultimately detailed all of the puzzles, dialogue, characters, areas and objects set to appear in the game. Pendulo opted for a "very open, non-linear" design that emphasized player freedom, according to Latiegui. He, Pinilla and Hernáez also purposely increased the difficulty of Hollywood Monsters puzzles compared to those in Igor: they saw their first title as overly short and easy, and hoped to remedy these issues in their next game. Hernáez cited the then-new project's large size as another aspect of its increased difficulty. The team estimated an average playtime of around 100 hours for Hollywood Monsters, according to PC Manía.
Production Pendulo began developing Hollywood Monsters with the same game engine used by Igor: Objective Uikokahonia, a project coded in Pascal. However, the team's concerns with engine quality led to two full rewrites of Hollywood Monsters underlying technology during production. After finishing Igor, Pendulo upgraded that title's codebase for use in the developer's future projects. This new version employed protected mode and offered support for voice-overs, enhanced scrolling, a 320x200 screen resolution and other features. Nevertheless, competing adventure games began to outpace Pendulo's older code, according to Ramón Hernáez. In response, the team chose to rewrite the engine again, which resulted in the final version used in Hollywood Monsters. The engine that ultimately shipped with the game, built to support SVGA and a resolution of 640x480, was coded from the ground up in C. In 1997, Felipe Gómez Pinilla summarized that "quite a lot of time" had been dedicated to engine development for Hollywood Monsters.
As with the engine and game design, Pendulo "started from scratch" in the creation of Hollywood Monsters animated graphics, according to Pinilla. The company began production of the visuals by concepting the environments and key objects, while seeking an art style that suited the team's goals. MeriStations Jordi Espunya reported that Pendulo settled on a stylistic direction inspired by Spanish comics, in particular their use of esperpento and satirical imagery. All backgrounds, characters and other art assets were designed on paper first, then realized digitally. The developer hired graphic artists and background painters to fill out the art staff as production ramped up. Including the voice cast, roughly 40 people contributed to Hollywood Monsters, most of them outside contractors. Hernáez said that managing the large number of contributors was the "most important change" to Pendulo's development process since Igor, which had involved six people. Hollywood Monsters backgrounds took roughly one year to complete. As the art team worked on the backgrounds, it added unplanned visual red herrings for the game's puzzles; Rafael Latiegui noted that Pendulo was "amused by the idea of getting people a little dizzy with some false trail[s]".
During development, Dinamic Multimedia suggested a plan to hire a well-known band to compose music for the game. Pendulo was uncertain at first about whom to contact, but ultimately settled on the Spanish new wave group La Unión. According to Latiegui, the team "thought that [La Unión] could do a good job and that their style fit the game very well". Dinamic subsequently secured a deal with La Unión's record label, Warner Music Group, on the condition that Hollywood Monsters advertised the band's next album. As a result, La Unión composed the game's main theme, "Enigmas". Latiegui said in late 1997 that the collaboration had gone smoothly and that La Unión had "got[ten] along very well" with the team. In 2002, La Unión similarly recalled that working on Hollywood Monsters had been "a very fun experience", and reported that it was pleased with the results of the collaboration.