Movie Games: The Introduction

Ever since I was old enough to know what the POWER button does, I was a video game fanatic. I grew up in the golden era of the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Colecovision ... damn, I'm old. But I was born at just the right time to chart the evolution of the modern video game. Hell, my dad even worked in a Radio Shack and, yes, once brought home an amazingly clunky Pong system. I wasn't TRULY infected by the movie bug until I was about 14, but I was a wizened old video game junkie by that point. (And yet I still had time to eat, sleep, and read books. I was like a prodigy or something.)

So yeah: My two passions have always been movies and video games. Unfortunately, things don't always work out so well when people turn video games into movies -- but I thought it might be fun to flip that equation the other way. As in, a semi-regular feature in which I (or someone else) focuses on a video game that has something to do with movies. And I'm not talking about every single X-Men, Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings tie-in that falls off the xBox / PS3 assembly line (although we'll get to those once in a while), but games that actually deal with movies in general.

As an example I'll use one of the coolest, smartest, and most durable movie games out there: Yep, the Hollywood Stock Exchange. has been kicking for well over a decade, and it remains one of the most popular activities available for hardcore movie nuts who have half a brain for facts, figures, and decimal points. I know the interface is a lot less complicated than it looks, but I'm still kind of intimidated by the HSX. (I believe my last transaction was about three years ago when I invested four million dollars in Twister 2.)

Of course in the future the Movie Games feature will offer a lot more information on much newer games, but that's why this was called "the introduction," right? If you have any suggestions for online movie-centric games that deserve some love, well that's why we have a comments section.

UPDATE: As luck would have it, HSX has been taken offline temporarily as the good folks over there prepare for a relaunch next week. We'll let you know when it's back up so you can check out what they've done with the place.