The troubled reveal of the new King Kong game has fans of the 2005 adaptation reminiscing over how good that game was.
Yesterday saw the unveiling of Skull Island: Rise of Kong, the first new King Kong game in 18 years. Between viral clips of stilted gameplay and comical visuals, viewers swiftly labeled it a "scam," and it's clear that this is far from what monkey fans have been waiting nearly two decades for.
In fact, Skull Island has those fans looking backwards, to 2005 and Peter Jackson's King Kong. The Lord of the Rings director received critical acclaim for the film, which was nominated for four Oscars (winning three), and Ubisoft's official video game adaptation seemed to live up to that legacy, with impressive sales and good reviews.
18 years later, fans are still singing its praises. Twitter user MajoraZ said that the adaptation is "actually [a] pretty damn good survival FPS game." Those first-person sections are the meat of the experience, but Kong himself does appear in some third-person gameplay that also holds up pretty well. A coworker even tells it me was one of his favorite PS2 games, largely thanks to its rock-solid gunplay and "incredible" spear-throwing mechanic that let you pin dinosaurs and giant bugs to walls. Now, with the existence of Skull Island, several players have whipped up some gameplay clips and comparisons between the two games.
Just gonna remind people that the 2005 Peter Jackson King Kong game is, while not perfect, actually pretty damn good survival FPS game where you really struggle against the Island's creatures and every bullet you get matters, and you have get the creatures to attack and prey on… pic.twitter.com/DXWaMGBCl2October 17, 2023
The difference is NIGHT and DAY. A comparison between King kong's 2005 game on the PS2 vs. Whatever the hell this is meant to be (Please excuse 15 year old me, the gameplay is from my LP lmao) https://t.co/q7jL0iRYsM pic.twitter.com/79DuB5VtLOOctober 16, 2023
To my shock, a new King Kong game (left) came out today and it visually looks a lot worse than the King Kong game from 2005 (right). The new game is bad in a lot of other ways but it's just especially sad that they couldn't at least make it look better than an 18 year old game. pic.twitter.com/IB0pnSN31LOctober 18, 2023
I'll be the first to admit that when I first saw Skull Island clips, I likened it to a PS2 game, but having watched some of these clips from Peter Jackson's King Kong - a game that actually launched on the PS2 - I realize that was unfair. The 2005 game looks better at pretty much every turn, and while your time as Kong might not be the main event, even those sections outshine the 2023 alternative.
Getting your hands on Peter Jackson's King Kong isn't even too difficult. You might be out of luck with the PS2 version, and it sounds like it might be a bit tricky to get it running on PC, but the Xbox 360 version is backwards compatible on Xbox One and Xbox Series X.
It's worth noting that there are stylistic differences between these two games. In the spirit of the live-action version, 2005's King Kong is a grittier, more realistic game than the more deliberately cartoonish art of Skull Island. That said, three console generations of technical development later, you'd hope that a brand-new game might hold more of a candle to an adaptation that was originally developed more than 20 years ago.
Here's our list of the best PS2 games, so you can see how it actually looked to play in 2005.
