Skull Island: Rise of Kong Developers Speak Out About Bad…

Summary

Skull Island: Rise of Kong was developed in just one year, which contributed to its poor quality and negative reception.
The game's tight budget and limited information provided by the publisher hindered the team's ability to produce a high-quality game.
IguanaBee, the developer of Skull Island: Rise of Kong, has created good games, but negative feedback on this release may harm their reputation and future funding opportunities.

The team behind the recently launched and widely panned Skull Island: Rise of Kong have spoken out about the game’s bad reception, revealing that it was only in development for a year. Released on October 17, Skull Island: Rise of Kong features a young King Kong on a quest to avenge the death of his parents. He sets out across the eponymous island, growing from a young orphan to a mature and powerful ape, to seek out the land’s alpha predator, Gaw.

Before Skull Island: Rise of Kong even officially released, images and clips of the game began appearing on social media. None of the accompanying captions were favorable, with the majority mocking or expressing disbelief at the state of the game. In short, it looked like a PS2 release that was fit to challenge The Lord of the Rings: Gollum for the title of Worst Game of 2023. Even at the time of writing, Rise of Kong has only 57 reviews on Steam and sits at a Mostly Negative rating.

Some of the game’s developers at IguanaBee in Santiago, Chile, spoke with The Verge and revealed that the game was only in development for a year, which essentially doomed it from the start. In other words, Skull Island: Rise of Kong fell victim to a development cycle that often afflicts licensed games: a tight turnaround time and an even tighter budget. Members of the IguanaBee team, who spoke anonymously for fear of repercussions from the publisher, stated that work on the game began in June 2022 and crunch kicked in around February 2023, with development expected to be completed in June 2023.

Skull Island was published by an aptly named company, GameMill, which apparently regularly contracts small indie developers to crank out games quickly. This inevitably compromises the quality, even from workers who might otherwise produce good work. One former IguanaBee employee, who didn’t help with Skull Island but had experience with other GameMill titles, stated that the team very often didn’t receive the information necessary to do their job well. This “was quite frustrating…because we had to improvise with the limited information we had on hand,” the developer said.

The tight budget of course further impacted the successful completion of projects. GameMill would simply not provide enough money to retain experienced staff, and another IguanaBee developer recounted the story of a colleague who was laid off despite having been on the team longer. “Deep down, I knew it was because the publisher didn’t provide them with enough funding to maintain a certain number of people for an extended period.”

Despite appearances, the development team at IguanaBee is capable of producing good games. In March 2022, the studio collaborated with developer Studio Voyager and publisher Untold Tales to create What Lies in the Multiverse, an award-winning puzzle platformer that currently has a Very Positive rating on Steam. What’s unfortunate is that a product like Skull Island: Rise of Kong will have negative repercussions on the reputation of IguanaBee, which will therefore be less likely to receive funding for the games it wants to make. Instead, the developer will have to keep accepting contracts from GameMill and other publishers that only want licensed games.

Skull Island: Rise of Kong is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.