After wrapping up The Lord of the Rings trilogy, director Peter Jackson set his sights on an entirely different project, trading Middle-earth for monsters, all for the 2005 King Kong film. This featured a pretty stacked cast, and while it arrived to a decent reception, didn't reach the heights that the director was known for with his prior three award-winning films.
But that film was accompanied at debut with a tie-in video game called Peter Jackson's King Kong, a game that was developed by Ubisoft Montpellier. Now, we've heard a little more about that game, as a Ubisoft developer has spoken with Retro Gamer for issue 270 (thanks, GamesRadar+), and revealed that during it's incredibly tight turnaround, a lone developer was tasked with going above and beyond to "fix" Kong's face because Jackson's son wasn't a fan of the original appearance.
Art director Florent Sacré said, "I had to rework Kong's head, alone in the studio, because there was some detail to change, like a muzzle too big and a disgracious eyebrow."
Unlike many tie-in video games, Jackson was seemingly quite hands-on with this project too, even sharing the photographs he snapped in south central France for the film with Ubisoft so that they could authentically nail the terrain and whatnot.
"All the textures, all the materials used to create the jungle soil, trees and leaves were created out of photographs he took in the CĂ©vennes, a range of mountains in south central France."
However, the issue with creating a movie tie-in like this was that the movie was not available for the creative team to align with, meaning the developers instead "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."
Did you play Peter Jackson's King Kong and do you have a particular memory of the game?