They Came From Hollywood

They Came From Hollywood, or TCFH, is a PC game under development by independent studio Octopus Motor that involves the player smashing cities as a monster in the style of cheesy 50s and 60s monster movies. The creators of the game refer to the movies of B-movie director called Harold Haxton as a source of inspiration. Haxton however is an entirely fictitious director of their own creation. The game has been in development since early 2001.

The game
According to the developers TCFH plays much like a traditional Real Time Strategy game; however, the player is only in control of a single monster that they use to destroy the city. The player must maintain various needs for the monster such as hunger while simultaneously wreaking havoc upon the city.

The game pays great attention to detail, and as such virtually everything can be destroyed, picked up, eaten, etc. The game goes into even greater detail by having other stuff happen such as the army coming in to try and stop your monster, scientists that try to study your monster so that they can then find out its weak spot (which in turn leads to even tougher resistance from the city), news reporters that come near your monster to try and film it for news stories around the world (which leads to yet more army forces trying to stop you) and so forth. Even super heroes will eventually come and try to stop your monster.

There are 12 selectable monsters in the game, all of which are based on monsters from old monster movies, and 6 different U.S cities to destroy (modern NYC, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Seattle, 1960s Custer's Tibia, Nevada, and 1940s Los Angeles).

Vigoda or Lincoln?
TCFH has had an extremely long development cycle that started before anyone seems to know. The official web pages's first news post dates back to March 22, 2001 although development of the game seems to have started a while before then. The expected release date for the game was constantly pushed back, although progress reports of what was being worked on in the game were constantly added (and still are being)

In December 2004, the news page was updated with an 'Abe Factor' that compared the games status to either Abe Vigoda or Abraham Lincoln, suggesting that if the games status was 'Lincoln', then the game has been canceled, but if it was status 'Vigoda', then the game is still under development. This is in reference to the fact that Lincoln is obviously dead, and people only think that Vigoda is dead (due in part to a joke in the 1980s by People magazine that falsely declared him dead) Every news post on the official website has since been accompanied by the 'Abe' factor, and as of the most recent news post the game is indeed still status 'Vigoda' (which means the game is still under development).

One reason for the game taking so long to be completed is that Octopus Motor (composed of 2 people) have since stopped working full time on the game in order to take on various other 'real work'.

Release Date(s)
TBA