They Came From Hollywood

This link will take you to the website of the upcoming computer game They Came From Hollywood. It’s a straight forward “destroy as much of a city as you can with a monster of your choice while fighting the military” setup and features a selection of twelve different giant monsters and seven cities (complete with famous landmarks) to demolish.

In an amusing maneuver reminiscent of This Is Spinal Tap, the creators have incorporated an internalized mythos into the game’s setup- the monsters are all supposedly based off a series of old B-movies from an Ed Wood/Roger Corman-like film director named Harold Paxton. You can read the fictionalized details of his biography and body of work here.

From the preview material that has posted on the site, the game is looking pretty good. I’m very much reminded of an old Commodore 64 title called The Movie Monster Game which was also about giant monsters smashing city environments and employed a similar 3/4 –downshot perspective:

Some more screenshots from TCFH:

All of the monsters are clearly inspired from famous (or infamous, depending on your tastes) movie equivalents, with the exception of two- the giant, sword-wielding Ray Harryhausen-esque skeleton (aptly named “Harry”) and an enormous green pea (uh... ooo-kay). There was also a squid character that had appeared in the earlier developmental stages, but was recently dropped. The creators have stated that they would like to put it back into the game as part of a future expansion pack, however.

I’m actually rather surprised that there isn’t a giant ape in there, but perhaps something like that may appear in the aforementioned expansion. Another monster archetype up for consideration would be flying creatures like Rodan and Mothra (although I suppose that the UFO technically counts as a “flyer”).

Overall, They Came From Hollywood appears to be shaping up nicely- hopefully a release date will be forthcoming sometime soon.