Uh oh, that King Kong game everyone's dunking on was only in development for a year
Take one look at it and you won't exactly be surprised.
.jpg?width=70&height=70&fit=crop&quality=60&format=png&auto=webp)
Oh boy, it turns out that the recent King Kong game everyone has been dunking on was developed in just over a year.
If I had nickel for every time a game based on a beloved IP that was incredibly broken upon release this year, I'd only have two nickels, and it honestly wouldn't be that weird. The Lord of the Rings: Gollum was the first of the two to take the heat for coming out far less than perfect, but it doesn't exactly sound like development was a smooth ride. Last week saw the arrival of Skull Island: Rise of Kong, and yeah, it certainly looks like that. Unsurprisingly, a recent report from The Verge has shed some light on why the game was released in such bad shape, and found that the game only started development in June of last year.
"The development process of this game was started in June of last year and it was aimed to end on June 2nd this year," said an anonymous staff member at developer IguanaBee. "So one year development process." IguanaBee is an indie studio based in Chile, having worked on both original and licensed titles in the past. It's also worked with GameMill as a publisher on numerous titles, who also served as publisher for Skull Island: Rise of Kong.
According to another, former developer at IguanaBee, who didn't work on King Kong but has worked on other GameMill-published games, spoke negatively of the publisher, saying, "It was very common for us not to be provided with all the information about the project… Which was quite frustrating when working because we had to improvise with the limited information we had on hand."
It's really important to point out that IguanaBee isn't an amateur developer - a previous game it made, What Lies in the Multiverse, won Best Game: Latin America at the Best International Games Festival, so it clearly knows what it's doing. This is just an all too common case of crunch forcing a developer to put out a subpar game way before it should have.