By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2011
In July 2011 FishbowlLA reported one of the more unexpected line extensions in entertainment-news history: Nikki Finke’s Deadline.com was getting a Facebook game.
Then
Deadline.com, in partnership with Paramount Digital Entertainment and Liquid Entertainment, announced a Facebook game — one that, FishbowlLA joked, did not center on fearful studio executives and all-caps emails.
Instead, players would live out the experience of arriving in Hollywood nearly broke, with their progress shaped in part by the real industry news posted on Finke’s site. Finke said in the press release that she had been thinking about a realistic Hollywood game for years, inspired by interviews that began with someone arriving in town with $50 and living in a car.
FishbowlLA noted it had already pre-registered, and imagined a possible game narrative modeled on Jay Penske — the man who, it wrote, came to Hollywood with an oil-fortune inheritance and was rewriting the rules of showbiz news through his recently renamed Penske Media Corporation.
Now
The Deadline Hollywood Game is a near-perfect time capsule of its moment. The Facebook-gaming boom that made such a tie-in look like a smart bet — the Zynga era of FarmVille and its imitators — collapsed within a few years, and branded social games largely vanished.
The game itself did not become a lasting part of Deadline; the outlet’s future was in news, video and events, not casual gaming.
The throwaway line about Jay Penske proved the most prescient part of the post. He did keep rewriting the rules of showbiz news — not through a Facebook game, but by building Penske Media into the company that came to own most of the entertainment press, Deadline included.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.