"I adored working on this level of the game, but it gave us serious problems" – The making of Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie

When it comes to adapting a blockbuster film into a video game, many challenges surface. The main one remains the amount of time allocated to game development.

Elisabeth Pellen, lead level designer on King Kong, remembers it well. "As a Time To Market project, we had less than two years to develop the video game, since we needed to synchronize the game's release with the film's. Reaching the expected quality level in such a short period of time was the main challenge for the team."

Peter Jackson accordingly picked Ubisoft Montpellier to develop the game among many project proposals because he wanted to work with Michel Ancel, who directed Beyond Good & Evil, a game he really enjoyed playing. "About a hundred developers worked on the Montpellier site, split between the Jack and Kong maps and the PS2 and GameCube versions," says Pellen.

The beast within

Florent Sacré started to work on the project as a graphic designer, creating all the textures of the game in its different versions, including Xbox 360, and eventually took the role of lead artist, recruiting about 20 graphic designers.

He had originally been in charge of creating a 3D model of the jungle that was sent to Peter Jackson in order to convince him to pick Ubisoft Montpellier as a collaborator. According to Sacré, "The team behind the game was very motivated, on the same wavelength. We knew each other really well, were very excited and passionate about working with Peter Jackson and we never considered our project to be Time To Market, we gave everything we had."

Ubisoft Montpellier had to cope with another challenge – it had to develop its adaptation with very little knowledge about the film itself, since it hadn't been released yet. "From a level design point of view," explains Pellen, "we had to be very imaginative creating a variety of maps since we hadn't watched the film."

Sacré remembers, "We didn't have access to all the data. 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."

Total immersion

The team definitely wanted an experience as cinematic as possible, providing a strong immersive feeling for playing Jack Driscoll, the scriptwriter unwillingly transported by ship to Skull Island, the home of Kong.

This was mainly possible thanks to the use of a first-person view, and also thanks to, "The diegetic approach wanted by Michel Ancel and Peter Jackson," says Pellen. As a result, there is no UI visible on the screen, absolutely no HUD or target mark. When Jack gets almost short of ammo, for instance, he only roughly indicates verbally his magazine's condition. If Jack gets injured, the screen takes a red hue.

"Developing this approach was a true challenge, one of the most exciting in my career, but the resulting immersion eventually remains unique" says Pellen. Immersion also relied on the graphics quality of the game, on its mostly natural environments created by Sacré and his art team. Sacré says the aesthetics imply the use of, "Chiaroscuro cinematography, a lot of work on lights, and on characters' outlines."

He also tells us, "To create a sense of danger, I had to create a disequilibrium in the natural environments. A background that tells a story could be considered as my personal touch, I believe. I wanted to fully master the art direction and that was very complicated, since we were only a team of 25 people. I had to reduce the graphic scope of the game, and ask the team to overuse the already designed material kits and objects before I could create new ones. I was the source of all the data used in the game. It was also the method I used during Beyond Good & Evil's development years. It became too overwhelming and I stopped working like this in the following projects."

Ubisoft Montpellier's team used BG&E's graphic engine again to develop King Kong, a strong asset considering most of the team was very familiar with the Jade Engine.

"We were in complete control of our production, the problem being everything was kind of handmade, nothing was really automated," explains Sacré. "If something wrong happened, and that happened quite often, through a change of design, for instance, such as adding a piece of map here and there, we had to partly destroy the work done. It led to many fights inside the team, but of course, I couldn't blame the designers, because ultimately they were reporting what the play tests emphasized."

Sacré strongly asserts other videogames have never been an inspiration to his art. "Originality is absolutely essential. As video game developers we have a digital leisure entertainment culture of course, but we must never refer to it in a video game production. In my work, I would talk about painting, painters, cinema, novels, and obviously about comic books and illustration."

Immersion also means believable non-playable characters. Jack Driscoll is not always alone on Skull Island. He can interact with Hayes, a crew member of the ship, Carl Denham, the film director, or the actress Ann Darrow. He can shoot giant insects to free his friends, and they can give him guns and ammunition. Ann can open new paths for the player by interacting with the environment, in a way Yorda wouldn't disavow when she helps Ico in Fumito Ueda's eponymous game.

"Jack being often followed by NPCs, the challenge was to make them move and react synchronised with the player, and adapt their animations to the rugged terrain," Pellen specifies. "Creating scripted sequences combined with gameplay features was an essential task in implementing the level design."

Jack attack

To improve this immersive and realistic feeling, the actors featured in the film, including Adrian Brody, Jack Black and Naomi Watts dubbed their polygonal counterparts.

"I didn't attend the recordings but I participated in choosing the voices to use in some sequences, " Pellen explains. "I couldn't know which to pick when it came to Naomi Watts. Her acting showed how involved she was embodying Ann Darrow."

Interacting with a living environment was an essential feature to implement for Michel Ancel's team. Jack Driscoll can set a wooden stick on fire to burn areas of vegetation to trap dinosaurs or free a path to another section of the map, for instance.

According to Pellen, this was Philippe Vimont's idea. "Philippe was working as an engineer on the project, always suggesting new ideas, and one day, at break time, he told us, 'I know we don't have any more time but it could have been great to implement a fire propagation system. Just imagine, the player could lure giant scorpions into bushes and then throw an ignited spear to burn them all at once!' Three hours later he asked us to come to his office. He had already coded the feature."

All these features added to the game led to one of its most intense sequences. In a wide canyon where a never-ending herd of Brontosaurus in motion threatens to trample the player at any moment, the objective is to bring a wooden handle to a specific spot in order to open a gate. To make progress in the canyon, Jack needs to set bushes on fire and keep this fire alive using small basins here and there. The task is not easy, all the more so because smaller dinos keep attacking Jack.

"I adored working on this level of the game, but it gave us serious problems," recalls Pellen.

"One of the difficulties we encountered was to make the Raptors the player could fight with to move around between the Brontosaurus' legs without generating collision bugs. Synchronizing the Brontosaurus' scripted sequence with the dynamic fights also required a lot of adjustments."

"We had to work a lot on the audio, since no UI was implemented, in order to let the player spot the Brontosaurus' out of his field of view, when they were coming to his back, once at the centre of the canyon. The scale between the Brontosaurus herd and the environment also required adjustments in order to maximize the monumental aspects of the dinosaurs and the cliffs."

"Displaying all this was a true challenge," she continues. "Michel didn't want only one Brontosaur, but a whole herd, let alone the fire propagating here and there. The fog helped us balance all the level's parameters to eventually achieve a fun and epic sequence."

Jean-François Le Quéré already worked as a level designer on Beyond Good & Evil. He started working on the King Kong project at the same position, specifically on Jack's levels but also doing research on the Kong phases at the same time.

"At some point, considering the project's size, the game had to be developed by two teams: the Jack FPS sequences would be developed by Ubisoft Montpellier while the Kong phases needed Ubisoft Montréal's talented developers. But it didn't work this way and the Kong part work came back to Montpellier, with a few members of the Montréal team. I became the lead level designer of this team from this moment on."

Absolute cinema

He considers his personal style implies a very cinematic approach to level design. "I worked a lot on the camera with Fred Houde, a developer, to really understand how to shoot King Kong sequences, during fights and parkour scenes," he continues.

"My biggest challenge was to preserve King Kong's might from the film to our video game project. In other words, I had to make him look very big. I wanted to keep the camera close to him. It required many tricks in order for the player to understand where to go and with what to interact. We didn't really need any HUD to achieve this, thanks to the art team. They succeeded in laying emphasis on game elements using textures and contrasts against the background."

This meant extra work, though. "We wanted him to be able to fight many creatures of varied sizes and to keep his gorilla ability to pick up tree trunks or climb some areas, still using this special camera that sometimes changes angle or keeps Ann in the foreground," continues Le Quéré.

"Concerning the parkour sequences, we used a few tricks to make them enjoyable and spectacular. Kong is a giant gorilla who could never fall down or miss a jump in his own jungle environment. It means that the parkour gameplay could never be based on succeeding a jump or not, but on the sense of urgency felt to make Kong reach a specific place in order to save Ann from a giant bat or a V-rex."

With that in mind, the team made some creative decisions. "Kong's movements needed to be powerful and dynamic when he runs on creepers or swings, or is hanging on a piece of tree or background," says Le Quéré.

"I worked a lot on these sequences' pace: jump, slide along creeper, jump, run on a wall, etc. I also worked a lot on the way to shoot them. A trick we used was using Kong's short animation time during which the player can't interact, to insert special cameras. I'm thinking about this specific moment when Kong swings and I create a bottom view cut to see him moving above us."

Not every aspect of playing as Kong worked though, with the section that sees Kong navigating the streets of New York being particularly tricky.

"We wanted a more open part with a street maze, a new environment where Kong had to feel lost," explains Le Quéré, "but with the change of cameras on cars shooting at us and the streets all very similar to each other, it was the player who eventually felt lost."

While a lot of the fun from playing as Kong is using his brute strength and his impressive agility, the team also wanted to capture the special relationship he shares with Ann. This is shown in-game by Ann deliberately helping Kong at certain points. Kong can carry Ann and drop her in higher places so she can interact with the environment using fire, for instance, to help him get through a path. Le Quéré feels "there is some Ico behind this too."

On release, the game received critical acclaim, scoring excellent grades, including 9/10 in Official PlayStation Magazine and 8/10 in Edge, however gamesTM surprisingly gave a quite severe score of 6/10 in comparison to other reviews of the time. There is no doubt, though, this blockbuster film adaptation achieved one of the best Time To Market products ever, driven by a truly passionate team. An ambitious video game that, in many ways, was ahead of its time.

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