It was an unwritten rule in the early 2000s that, if you were working on an adaptation of a Peter Jackson film, your game would be ridiculously good. I don’t know why Jackson’s movies had this secret sauce, I’m merely reporting the facts.
I poured endless hours into EA’s action RPG take onThe Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, pushing siege ladders off the walls of Minas Tirith and attempting to unlockevery secret interview with cast members hiding on the ornate level select screen. Though I put less time into the Two Towers adaptation, it also whipped ass. But the best of the bunch might not come from cinema’s greatest trilogy at all. Ubisoft’sKing Kong— otherwise known as Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie — was a game of the year contender when it launched in November 2005, and it absolutely deserved to be.
Carl Or Kong? Pistols Or Pterodactyls?
Running around an atmospheric Skull Island and shooting giant centipedes and T-Rexes was a damn good time, and that was onlyhalfof the game. The rest of the time, you were playing third-person levels as Kong himself, ripping dinosaurs apart and/or using smaller dinosaurs as projectiles to hurt bigger dinosaurs. The two best kinds of games are the ones where you fight giant monsters and the ones where you play as giant monsters, and King Kong lets you do both.
Another major point in the game’s favor? All the major cast members from the film returned to do voice work, which is absolutely wild in retrospect. Jack Black, Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis, Jamie Bell, and Colin Hanks all got in the booth and recorded new lines. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King had similar turnout, with much of the film’s cast recording new dialogue for the gameandtaping interviews. Was Peter Jackson just really good at this? Did their contracts all have clauses about chipping in for the video game? I don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t the standard then and isn’t the standard now.
‘Twas A Lack Of Backward Compatibility That Killed The Beast
Though Peter Jackson’s name was the only one on the case, the GameCube, PS2, and Xbox FPS was really the meeting of two equally important minds. Jackson was a producer on the game, and obviously leant it his film’s aesthetic, characters, and storyline. But the creative director was Michel Ancel, creator of Rayman and the director ofBeyond Good and Evil.
Ancel is retired now, so it’s easy to forget that he was a key industry figure in the ‘90s and ‘00s. Getting Ancel to lead development on King Kong would be a little like Christopher Nolan convincing Neil Druckmann or Hideo Kojima to make tie-in games for his upcoming spy movie.
It was a major collaboration between Hollywood and Ubisoft, at a time when most movie tie-in games sucked. But King Kong didn’t suck, it absolutely ripped. As a kid who grew up on Nintendo consoles, it was one of the only first-person shooters I was able to play on the GameCube.
I thought there might be a bit of nostalgia at play here, but Lead Features Editor Jade King played the game during the Covid lockdowns and believes it held up.
It’s a bummer that this game is stuck on the consoles it originally launched on. That’s the case for most tie-in games, but King Kong wasn’t most tie-ins. If you have a disc, you’re able to play it on an Xbox One or Xbox Series X|S. That doesn’t help me one bit because I have a diskless One S, and it isn’t backward compatible anywhere else. So, here’s my pitch to Ubisoft: I know you’re having a hard year. I knowStar Wars Outlawsunderperformed. I know you’reshutting down XDefiant. I know you’ve got a lot riding onAssassin’s Creed Shadows. But, I promise you, if you port Kong to modern consoles, I will buy a copy on every platform I own and convince my friends to do the same.
