PETER JACKSON'S KING KONG THE OFFICIAL GAME OF THE MOVIE

HOW DID THE TALENTED TEAM AT UBISOFT MONTPELLIER COPE WITH THE CHALLENGE OF CREATING A VIDEOGAME BASED ON AN ACADEMY AWARD-WINNING BLOCKBUSTER FILM? WITH AS MUCH PASSION AND DEDICATION DEVELOPERS COULD PROVIDE TO ACHIEVE A UNIQUE PROJECT. THIS IS THEIR STORY

- GUY MIQUEL-ALBERT

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

Elisabeth Pellen, lead level designer on King Kong remembers, “As a Time To Market project, we had less than two years to develop the videogame, since we needed to synchronise 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 Elisabeth.

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 Florent, “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.”