I’ve always loved playing and making games. As a kid, we were dirt poor and couldn’t even afford cardboard, so I scavenged the insides of empty cereal boxes—sometimes not even waiting for them to be emptied—to sketch out board game layouts I had dreamt up. Player markers were whatever I could find: bottle caps, pennies wrapped in medical tape so I could draw tiny characters and objects on them. Rules evolved on the fly during test plays, the games grew more complex with each session, and through it all, creativity flowed and fun was never in short supply.
Nearly two decades ago—during a brief and somewhat questionable period when this website existed on the Internet for about a year—I built a Flash-based game called The Name That Movie Game.
The idea behind it was simple: pay tribute to the artists behind the camera. The production designers, cinematographers, costumers, set builders, and all the other creative minds whose work gives a film its identity. Actors, of course, play a vital role—no denying that—but I wondered: if the actors were removed, would the craftsmanship of everyone else still leave a scene recognizable? Would it linger in the mind’s eye strongly enough for someone to name the movie anyway?
To my surprise, the game was modestly popular.
My Google Analytics steadily climbed during its run. Nothing to write home to Mum about, mind you, but it went from the usual family-and-friends pity traffic to a few hundred visits a month from actual human beings. Not relatives. Not sympathetic acquaintances. Real people!
Analytics even revealed that one such visitor from New York City logged in reliably at 3:15 p.m. every weekday and played for about fifteen minutes. I always imagined a weary office soul—not unlike myself—working for some ungrateful company. Their break time closely monitored, they would quietly laugh in defiance while accessing forbidden non-work content on company equipment.
It brought me a surprising amount of joy to know the game was being played—and appreciated.
Of course, it didn’t last.
Being built in Flash meant the writing was already on the wall. The Internet had begun eyeing Flash as a playground for hackers and assorted digital evil-doers, thanks to its ability to pull in data from other sites. In the wrong hands it could cause real trouble. The concern was valid. If the game was going to survive, it would eventually need to be rebuilt.
But fate had other plans.
Not long after that realization, my brother—who had handled the technical side of the site while I supplied most of the creative nonsense—called to inform me that the server running the whole operation had quietly died in his basement while he and his wife were away on vacation.
Worse still, neither of us had ever made a backup.
Some individual files survived: a handful of drawings, a few animations, scattered pieces of the wreckage. But the site itself was gone.
Then life did what life does. My brother moved to a sunnier climate, and I was promoted into management at work, which has an uncanny way of absorbing every spare moment you might otherwise devote to creativity. For a while he kept the site alive through paid hosting, and a few of us posted the occasional thing, but the spark was gone. Eventually it was taken down entirely. No point paying for something no one was tending.
Fast forward to today.
My brother still toils away at his 9-to-5, but I find myself within weeks of the end of mine. After more than 35 years, the workplace that employed me has decided my services are no longer required and has been politely—but firmly—guiding me toward the exit for about a year now.
Which leaves a person with time to think.
I like to believe I’m a creative individual, and creativity tends to demand somewhere to go. While I’m more of a graphic artist than a developer, I’ve picked up a few coding tricks along the way. And at my wife’s continued insistence that I resurrect both the site and the game, I’ve finally done just that.
An updated and improved version of the old game. Some of the original images survived and have been reused. Others had to be recreated. A few are entirely new.
The premise remains simple:
You have 30 seconds to type the name of the movie represented by the scene on screen. Correct answers earn a point. One incorrect answer ends the run. Your score is the number of correct guesses you can string together in a row.
I hope you’ll give it a try.
It was, after all, a labour of love.
Love of cinema.
Love for fellow creatives.
And a deep appreciation for the 3:15 p.m. types who just need a small break from it all.