While movie-goers around the world await the thunderous arrival of the new King Kong re-make in cinemas next month, the giant ape is already rampaging towards department stores and Christmas trees in the form of a computer game.
Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie bellows its pedigree with all the force the legendary primate and the Oscar-winning director of the blockbuster Lord of the Rings trilogy can together muster.
Released this month by Ubisoft, the French video game company, it already has a tighter grip on end-of-year gift lists than that exerted on Fay Wray, and looks to be a must-have title for owners of PCs, PlayStations and Microsoft’s much-hyped new XBox.
“It’s really cinema-like, as if the dinosaurs never disappeared,” Ubisoft’s supervisor of the 80-strong team that worked on the game, said Michel Ancel in his Montpellier studios.
“Peter Jackson wanted to make a high-grade game, a sort of extension of the world seen in the three-hour-long film, with a chance to dive into it in an interactive way,” he said.
So far, early reviews of the gaming experience have been glowing — reassuring the legions of teenagers and 20- and 30-somethings who have learned to treat film tie-in games with wariness.
“A lot of movie games suck,” one review website, Gamespot, said, adding that, in the case of King Kong, it asked itself whether Jackson and Ubisoft could come up with a product that could rival the big-screen adventure the New Zealand director has made.
“After frantically shooting and running our way through the roller coaster that is the game’s first couple of hours, the short answer seems to be a resounding yes,” it said.
Initially a first-person shooter that puts the player on a Skull Island inhabited by pre-historic monsters, the game sweeps one on to eventually moving King Kong as a third-person character roaring his way to Manhattan, where, in the films at least, he meets his tragic end.
“King Kong is basically a nonstop thrill ride,” the website said. “This certainly seems like a game that will beg for a really big television and a really loud home theatre system.”
Such laurels bode well for Ubisoft, which has invested €10-million ($12-million) into making the game, and another €15-million in marketing it.
“It’s the biggest game Ubisoft has ever done in less than a year, and which comes out on eight platforms the same day in the world,” said Ubisoft’s marketing coordinater, Loic Gounon.
The game was released on November 17 and, according to the French financial newspaper Les Echos, the company aims to sell 80% of the five million copies it has shipped before the end of the year.
Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot told a meeting of Wall Street types early this month that the company expects the title to be number one in Britain this Christmas, and that King Kong heralded a new strategy of basing many more games on Hollywood movies in a bid to double revenues over the next four years, according to the movie industry magazine Variety.
The worldwide release of Jackson’s $200-million film version of King Kong — the third to tell the tale of the love-lorn simian ripped from his dinosaur-infested island to be an uncontrollable exhibit in New York — on December 14 will only boost sales further.
But in a new phenomenon underlined by the fact that sales of video games and consoles generated $10-billion in sales in the United States last year, outstripping the $9,4-billion made from movie ticket sales, the reverse may also be true: interest sparked by playing the game could also boost the film’s box-office success. – AFP