Become THE Playboy in Hugh Hefner’s First Video Game – Playboy: The Mansion

by Louis Bedigian

 

“You step into the shoes of a Playboy photographer, which is probably the second most desired profession next to being Hugh Hefner.”

 

 

There I was, all alone in the dark room, minding my own business when suddenly a beautiful woman walked in.  Then another came in.  And another.  Before I knew it the room was filled with beautiful women.  Even Carmen Electra showed up, and for unknown reasons, Tom Arnold dropped by as well.  It was a dream come true!  (Aside from Tom Arnold being there.)

 

And that’s all it was – a dream.  If only there was a way to experience the magic of being desirable without having to get out of bad and actually do something with your life.  Well now there is!  Playboy: The Mansion is here and it’s got all the nuts, bolts and other “parts” to turn you into Hugh Hefner. 

 

The Naked Truth

 

Playboy: The Mansion’s lead designer is Brenda Brathwaite.  “Isn’t it weird to be a woman designing a Playboy game?” she asks, expecting the masses to assume that it is.  “The answer to that is no.  I think Cyberlore really wanted to create a serious game out of this, not just take a brand and run with it.

 

 

 

 

“So when they offered the position to me, I hadn’t run across a Playboy in my life.  I knew obviously of the magazine, but I didn’t have a little stash of Playboys.  I ended up doing a ton of research on it.  I learned a lot about him, I learned a ton about his magazine.  You can actually read it for the articles.    It wasn’t that weird being a woman, though I probably know far more about the nude female form than most men I know.”

 

When asked the obvious question – is there nudity in this game – Brenda gave a surprising answer.  “There is nudity in the game – topless nudity.  You’ll see that in a few places.  You invite people over to your mansion, it’s fun-loving and a lot of wild parties are going on.  They might take their top off.  They might decide to go swimming in the pool or in the Grotto, topless.  When you have a photo shoot with the Playmates you can go into the wardrobe editor and select which clothes you want them to wear and which clothes you don’t want them to wear.”

 

 

“But,” she says, knowing that we’re aware that the game is not rated Adults Only, “we did keep the bottoms on.”

 

Smile!  You’re On Playboy Camera

 

Brenda Brathwaite: “You start the game as Hugh Hefner.  You’re sort of a one-issue-wonder.  You start from the basic content like he had.  Your mission is to build up your empire up to a mansion that includes a pool, the Grotto, and all that kind of stuff.  There are two different ways you can do that.  One of them is the Mission Mode, where you play through 12 different missions that take you through his life from this one issue all the way on up to the 50th Anniversary Party.  We have a lot of the milestones: the Playboy Foundation, the Playboy Jazz Festival, Playboy.com.  You need to make all the connections and build your empire through those connections.

 

“The other part of the game is Free Form mode where you can go in and make your own way to the top.  You’ll have different milestones: first reach 10,000 circulation, then get 100,000 circulation.

 

“Obviously in both cases you’re going to put out the magazine, which is very entertaining to do.  You need to hire and manage your staff, and once you get your staff together, you need to get six pieces of content together every month.  You do that by making contacts, by having parties.  You know once you build up a relationship with somebody you can ask to do a photo shoot for a cover shot.  You’re obviously trying to create quality content.  The better the quality, the more circulation, the more money you’re gonna make.  The more money you make the more famous you get, the more parties you can throw, the better celebrities you get.  We also have over 100 real celebrities in the game.  We actually have important stars.”

 

 

If You Think Obtaining Fame Is Hard, Try Obtaining Those Who Are Famous

 

Jay Adan, Marketing Director, Cyberlore Studios: “One of the things that we learned during the process is that to get a celebrity in a game, not really a big challenge.  You throw a bucket of money at them, you work with all their people and eventually you get to them and it’s done.  When you try to get 10 celebrities in a game, or more like 100, it becomes this massive feat of endurance, and stamina, and money.  With every Playmate who has essentially earned her own brand of fame outside of being a Playmate became a lot more difficult [to acquire].  Like Shannon Tweed or Pamela Anderson.  They were just…we couldn’t even get a hold of them in a reasonable period of time.  By the time we were trying to get celebrities wrangled into the game, we were dealing with celebrities just gobs and gobs of Playmates.  And then after the fact they were, ‘Well how come I’m not in the game?’  Because you had five layers of people who wouldn’t let us talk to you.”

 

Dirty, But Not Too Dirty:

 

BB: “There definitely were, historically, wild periods.  But more recently, and by more recently I mean the late 80s, 90s, and definitely 2000.  It’s pretty controlled there.  It’s quite possible that when you’re walking through the game and you walk past the Grotto you see something happening.  So that part isn’t removed.  People will have sex.”

 

JA: “We did avoid any reference to drug use or anything like that.  Although that might have taken place, it wasn’t something that they promoted.”

 

Emerging And Established Artists

 

Playboy: The Mansion includes a huge soundtrack with music from new artists and MTV regulars.*

 

• Aquavibe

• The Wylde Bunch

• Start Trouble

• All-American Rejects

• Sugarcult

• Petey Pablo

• CD Tracks Remixed By DJ Felix Da House Cat (in stores now!)

 

*This is a small sampling of the full soundtrack lineup.

 

 

 

 

A Q&A For T&A

 

Is the nudity strictly polygons, or are there actual naked women in the game?

 

Brenda Brathwaite: There’s both.  You’ll have topless women in the game, and in the unlockables, there’s actual photographs from Playboy.  Some of them aren’t nude but a lot of them are.

 

Are these photographs from the collection of images that you already created or were these new images that you took for the game?

 

BB: These were from the Playboy archives.  It was really cool.  They gave us access to all these different photos and we were able to decide which ones we wanted to put in the game.

 

And you can take your own pictures, right?

 

BB: Absolutely.  That’s really cool.  You step into the shoes of a Playboy photographer, which is probably the second most desired profession next to being Hugh Hefner.  You select the model and decide where you’re going to have the photo shoot.  So let’s say you pick the pool.  You can change her pose, change her wardrobe.  You can change anything about her.  Her hair style, her hair color.  What jewelry she’s wearing.  Everything that a photographer can do you can do here.  Once your photos are all done you decide which ones you want for the centerfold or which one you want to be the cover of your magazine.

 

Can you have multiple Playmates pose together?

 

BB: No.  You know that’s not the first time someone’s said, “You know it’d be really cool if…”  So consider that on the radar.

 

Expansion packs are planned but not yet announced.

 

Is the photography feature considered a mini-game or is it part of the entire experience?  How do you define it?

 

BB: I think both.  It has its own distinct mini-game quality, but it totally fits in with the framework of the game.  I’ll tell you why.  Before digital cameras, remember how you’d go somewhere, take a whole roll of film, and you couldn’t wait to get it developed and see what it looks like.  You see the exact same thing when you’re doing these photos.  It’s just like a live action photo shoot.  It becomes a really addictive thing.  Another designer and I in the office have a competition going to see who has the best cover.  And I would say that he probably has the best cover.

 

The relationship between the model and the photographer matters.  The mood that they’re in, the interest that they have.  If your photographer and your Playmate are in love, wow, you’re probably going to get an incredible photo shoot out of that.  If you get a Playmate that can’t stand the photographer, and she’s in a bad mood, and she’s exhausted, you’ll get 10% quality out of that one. 

 

 

 

Can you cheer her up?

 

BB: Yeah.  You’ll know right away, you’ll see right on the screen what their mood is, what it is they want to do.  Maybe they want to be entertained.  Maybe they want to be talked to.  So you can say, “Hey, come here,” talk to her, play games with her, tell her jokes to cheer her up.  You can improve the mood if there was fighting in the mansion, and that happens.  You can tell ‘em to work it out.  There’s all kinds of stuff that you can do.  That’s the social simulation part of the game.

 

Are the pictures rated?  How does the game determine what a good shot is?

 

BB: That’s a good question.  We actually thought a lot about that when we were designing it.  The whole relationship between the model and the photographer is really important.  Their mood, their interests, their IQ, etc.  Now their actual photographs – that was the challenge.  We were thinking about ranking the photos, but when we sat down and thought about it, we [wondered] what makes a great photograph.  How do you decide that?  It’s something I think I’d like to explore, but in this game you can decide what makes a great photograph.

 

Can you share photos with others?

 

BB: On the PC you can.

 

Going back to the celebrities, what do they do in the game?  They come to the mansion, they want to party, but what do they say?  How do they interact?  What’s the purpose of them being there other than to say, “It’s a celebrity.”

 

BB: It depends.  There’s some that will just show up in your roster.  There’s Playmates that you can hire.  You can ask them to do shoots for you, or just invite them to a party.  Then there are other celebrities that we actually worked into the mission.  In [the fourth mission], this is the point in the game where some of the relationships you built up start to go sour.  This is to teach the player how to get things back on track when things get off track.  We actually worked people into the game that way.  In one mission you really have to get Carmen Electra to host this Playboy reality TV show.  You need to get Tom Arnold to MC an event.  So we actually do work some of the celebrities into the actual goals in the game.  Otherwise they’re there, they’re on your list, so invite ‘em over.

 

In one of the recent simulation games released, The Urbz, you’re running around frantically trying to complete all these crazy things.  How much downtime is there in this game and how much work do you actually have to do?

 

BB: You directly control Hef, so if you wanted to you could go into the game, stand there, hire your staff, and everyone would walk around happy but no work would get done.  What you need to do is go write an article, go do a photo shoot.  You need to direct people, and you do it playing as Hef.  It’s all highlight stuff.  You don’t have to wash dishes, you don’t have to go to the bathroom, you don’t have to pick up garbage.  Nobody thinks of the mundane parts of life when they go to the Playboy mansion.  Nobody. 

 

 

 

Can any of the missions be lost or skipped?

 

BB: You can really screw it up bad.  You can lose the game by running out of cash, in which case you’re going to have to start over.  You have to go into the game and play in a super aggressive manner.  Tell people to do things that they didn’t want to do.  Some of the goals, like if you don’t do them…let’s give an example.  There’s this one actress in the game and she will only be on the cover if you get this writer to write an essay for her.  Let’s say you go ahead and publish the magazine anyway.  She’ll get really ticked off at you, and you’re going to have to do other things to make up for that.

 

How do you beat the game – by having an affair with all of the Playmates?

 

BB: [Laughs]  It’s by successfully throwing the [50th] Anniversary party.  It sounds like an easy thing to do, but there are so many little pieces to it.  Every single thing that you’ve learned in the game you’re going to have to do.  It’s the ultimate boss level.  I wouldn’t say it’s ridiculous, but it’s a challenge.

 

Thanks to Brenda Brathwaite, Jay Adan and everyone at Kohnke Communications for having a wonderful conference call.