Ubisoft’s surprisingly ambitious King Kong game faced a sudden change because Peter Jackson’s son didn’t like the ape’s face: “I had to rework Kong’s head, alone in the studio”

Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie isn’t an all-time classic, but it was a surprisingly ambitious and well-crafted game for a mid-’00s movie adaptation from a storied developer in Ubisoft Montpellier. The studio began work on the game largely because Peter Jackson was a big fan of Beyond Good & Evil and wanted to work with director Michel Ancel, but Jackson wasn’t afraid to share notes on what needed to change – even if those notes actually came from his kids.

Jackson and his son played an early version of the game together during the approval process, as art director Florent Sacré tells Retro Gamer in issue 270, and the younger player found something wrong with Kong’s face. “I had to rework Kong’s head, alone in the studio,” Sacré says, “because there was some detail to change, like a muzzle too big and a disgracious eyebrow.”

Of course, Jackson had more influence on the game than just last-minute vetoes on Kong’s design, and some of those influences are pretty unexpected. “All the textures, all the materials used to create the jungle soil, trees and leaves were created out of photographs he took in the Cévennes, a range of mountains in south central France,” Sacré explains.

The King Kong game became the butt of a lot of jokes on its launch in 2005, thanks partly to its ostentatious title and the six-hour ride to 1,000 easy achievement points it offered at the Xbox 360’s launch. But its HUD-free presentation and unique blend of survival-focused gameplay as a human character and brutal combat as Kong still feels unique, and you can probably put down its flaws to its incredibly short development cycle.

“We had less than two years to develop the videogame, since we needed to synchronise the game’s release with the film’s,” lead level designer Elisabeth Pellen says. “Reaching the expected quality level in such a short period of time was the main challenge for the team.” That timing also meant the game was entering production well before the film’s production materials were ready, so Ubisoft Montpellier had to find some unique solutions to get the project underway.

“We didn’t have access to all the data,” Sacré says. “I received partial data six, eight, twelve months after we began working on the project. I had to rely on the 1933 film to implement a proper artistic direction. I knew Peter Jackson’s fondness for this motion picture and I based my work on this first version of King Kong.”

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