Maximum Capacity: Hotel Giant

An eye-candy simulator signed by Hong Kong-based game designer Trevor Chan, Maximum Capacity: Hotel Giant enables you to choose between engineering the inns of your dreams or meeting the AI customers' wants and needs (no, for some reason you can't do both).

Unused Models#

Unused Hotels#

A further scrutiny at the contents of the firm directory makes it clear that, at one point during Hotel Giant's building, its mood board had some room for a way more fantastic scope, when the retail versions still keep remnants of models from buildings à la Theme Park World - from skyscrapers with giraffe pillars to WonderLand replicas - that little have in common to the down-to-earth, (sub)urban simulacrum aesthetic that the used hotels are made of.

Textures#

Graphics-wise, the few resources that were left from the concept are a couple of outdoors-mocking textures - whose intention was to be printed at the building's main entrance from the interior, simulating the external view - found at textures\firm\ex-h.res, that give one a superficial perspective of the scrapped buildings' original look.

Of note is that the thematic approach was also meant to be likewise carried away by the game's item sets, observed in leftover textures and thumbnails of unused objects.

It is also possible to have a shy peek at a finished H-EGYPT within Resource\jpg\SCENARIO.RES, as one of its image resources suggests a deleted scenario, being precisely a render of the elusive Egyptian building.

Unused Locations#

Players are offered a number of real-world cities where they build hotels at, synthesized as 3D icons upon a 3D globe, symbolizing their respective landmarks. However, an extra number of them are never used in any scenarios.

Texture Oddities#

Textures from The Sims#

The standards of Hotel Giant‍ '​s whole body of character textures and meshes indeed follow The Sims‍ '​ footsteps. To the point where remnants of graphics from that title can be found within Giant's repository of textures, albeit unused.

body, sampled off of The Sims‍ '​ original B003MAFitlgt_Dad02.

head, samples C005MAlgt_Hipster.

hand, samples the generic hand textures for adult light-skinned Sims.

Vending Machine#

DTVENDINGM-001 is the texture graphic for one of the two available beverage vending machines in the game. While its real-time mesh sports a made-up "Belly-Wash" branding, its pre-rendered thumbnail reads "Coca-Cola", which undoubtedly was an innocuous mistake in the context of the developers' purging of all the real-world references within the game, foreseeing potential lawsuits against them.

TV#

ELECT is the only animated loop that plays on all televisions in the entire game (same applies to its sequel!). It unsurprisingly is a short excerpt from a real-life television broadcast; most precisely, an infamous stunt in Kelvin Cato's career (American former professional basketball player) as a member of the Houston Rockets: He scores two points... off a failed dunk attempt. This moment took place on February 28, 2001 and can be seen in full here.

Magazine Rack#

LIBRARY-004 is the texture for the Magazine Rack, an important item that can be bought for Library facilities in the game. What players may fail to notice is the small peek of a photograph depicting American singer Michael Jackson in the midst of the many reading materials the item has, plus a miscellany of real-world shout-outs, including a Limp Bizkit poster and a Britney Spears photoshoot, published in 1999 by the Rolling Stone magazine.

Early Demo Graphics#

The free trial build of Hotel Giant saw a production state not too far along from that of its retail counterpart - they're about two months apart. Yet, this would be more than enough for the staff to consider a few last-minute reworkings into the game's graphics down the line, rendering a number of leftover graphics minimally different from what was in fact for show.

Early Textures#

The coverage of the early textures is restricted to those items belonging to the Guest Room and Lobby facilities, as these are the only ones that the trial release has files for, and uncapped user access to. Likely for the sake of reducing the est. download time in times of dominant use of dial-up connection, this particular version has resources of half the original size, hence the quality contrast between the samples shown in the table below.

Motivations for the changes may include the need for removing anything that could be mistaken as a deliberate real-world product placement, addition of visual artifacts as to harden the distinction between the texture with its real-world original counterpart, or mere facultative aesthetic tweak.

Early Facility Thumbnails#

Of note is that these are still present in the final game, hidden away within its early repository of thumbnail graphics, item.res and itemSet.res, as opposed to the used Nitem.res and Nitemset.res.

Unused Sounds#

Footnotes#