Game History

that is how it all began…

8-bit memories charm

Once upon a time, in the early 90s, when I was the owner of one of the greatest computers of all time (Commodore 64). A small game fascinated me and some of my friends. 'Movie Business', because it had a title, made us spend many happy afternoons and evenings in front of the screen…

As you can probably guess it was a movie production game. Despite a lot of playability, it had a few shortcomings. The first of them was the German language version, at a time when we were still teaching Russian language at the primary school, so German language was not very friendly for us. The second major disadvantage was that the program was crashing !!! (Here the footnote for younger readers, decent computers do not crash – a C-64 jak już wspomniałem należał do tej kategorii 😉 ).

In connection with the above and the fact that the game had several limitations, and we have several new ideas, I decided to write a new version of this game. (Yes, I already had programming skills). Here, then, was created (probably at the turn of my second and third year of high school) Biznes Filmowy aka Movie Business for C-64.

The game was written in BASIC 2.0 (WOW!). It occupied almost all available memory (it was 38kB available for BASIC – until at some point I had to make some compression/optimization, because it showed me the message OUT OF MEMORY…). However, the final result was successful, because we abandoned the original and played only my version… and even much longer.

The carefree times of high school have passed, I got to the polytechnic, and with this event, I received my first PC. So I started learning a decent, structural programming language, which was PASCAL, and in one of the holidays a new version of Movie Business was created, this time for PC… Of course, it was not an ordinary port, because the greater hardware capabilities (640 kB of memory;)) allowed to spread the wings.

Millenium and the era of Windows

The year 2000/2001 is a fascination for the new (for me) Visual C ++ tool. At that time, I also had an Artificial Intelligence course at my university. The doctor conducting the classes allowed us to choose any topic within the laboratory, using this opportunity, for entertainment and education purposes, I decided to write a Movie Business in… Windows version… (with computers as producers – use of artificial intelligence algorithms).

The final effect was so interesting that I decided to share it on the Internet… Soon after, a man named Joel (Michal Zacharzewski) place a note about the game on the portal gry.wp.pl… and it was just beggining… the game gained more and more popularity. the project, which in terms of functional I thought as finished, grew with new ideas.

The increase in its popularity was also caused by placing it on several CDs attached to the largest contemporary Polish periodicals devoted to computer games (Komputer Świat – The Game, The World Of Computer Games, Click!). New players send their comments and ideas. Well what to do… a decision was made about the creation of Movie Business 2.

Movie Business 2: Road to Hollywood

However, the "Road to Hollywood" was long and bumpy. The new version of the game is again an excuse to change the technology into a more modern one (this time it fell on .NET and C# language). After the promising beginning, there is a longer break in the work on the project (caused by several important, in the author's life, events: writing a master's thesis, starting a career – and hence the tight deadlines at the first projects, in the end of the trip… for, as it turned out, a one-year mission abroad).

Many have already doubted that MB2 will appear at all… and yet,… The beginning of 2005 and the first versions of Alpha MB2 reach a wide range of players… and meet with warm reception.

Year 2006…

This year will not be very well remembered by fans. In February version 0.5.0 BF2 is released. And… work is suspended. Again, some important life decisions that take a lot of free time mean that work on MB is not continued… grief expressed in the comments of loyal fans do not helps a lot, until…

MB2 Reloaded

… end of year 2009, when it turns out that I will have a bit more time and decided to vacuum the neglected project. By the way there were a few new ideas and solutions used in modern games (I bought my first console – PlayStation 3 – hence new inspirations). Version 0.6.0 is a breakthrough in the history of Movie Business introduces a lot of new, innovative ideas to the series, the set of creators and reviews has also been significantly expanded.…

From this point, further updates are already quite systematic. Which does not mean that there are still no unpleasant surprises.

Along with version 0.6.5 for the first time there is a service with online players statistics – BFStats. The idea, though somewhat skeptical of fans, is gaining acceptance. Unfortunately a few months after launch, hosting is dead along with the entire contents of the database. At the same time, the free terramail server is closed, where the Movie Business has been hosted almost from the beginning of its existence.

In 2011, the game is transferred to new commercial hosting. The website with statistics is also reactivated this time with new features called MovieStats. At the beginning of 2012 year I decide to migrate the official project page, created so far in HTML for a more professional and easier to maintain WordPress.

Biznes Filmowy so called Movie Business

In November 2013, there is another milestone for the game, version 0.8.0 and multi-language support. In the first place, in addition to the Polish language, the English version of the program appeared. Of course, both the official website and the MovieStats website are also made available to those who speak this language.

Finally, a year later, the version marked with the 0.8.5 number appears with one functionality that many players have been waiting for a long time – save the state of the game.

I am glad that for many years there are many old fans with me who are refreshing their game from time to time.

If you do not know the Movie Business yet, give it a chance, it will not charm you with graphics, but if you're a fan of movies and cinema, there is a chance that you will spend some time with it.

Feel free to download the latest version of the game

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