When it comes to adapting a blockbuster film into a video game, many challenges surface. The main one remains the amount of time allocated to game development.
Elisabeth Pellen, lead level designer on King Kong, remembers it well. "As a Time To Market project, we had less than two years to develop the video game, since we needed to synchronize 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 Pellen.
