Based on the Hit Film is a series of articles looking at the video game spin-offs and adaptations of popular horror and movies.
It was a rainy mid-December day in 2005 when my mom chose to take me—her 10 year-old monster-loving son—to see Peter Jackson’s epic-scale (in runtime and craftsmanship) remake of the 1933 Cooper and Schoedsack King Kong which, as it turns out, was aptly named King Kong. Besides sharing a similar through-line plot and title, Peter Jackson’s film is very, very much its own being. Like Kong, it is big and, amongst other things, it feels dangerous. My mom, bless her heart, didn’t know what we were in for. Hell, it was all fun and games and buttery popcorn fingers up until the bug-pit set-piece. That was where Jackson’s film careened into full-on horror.
Despite my love of monsters, my 10-year-old self could not handle what was being projected onto the big screen—sailors being ripped apart by giant scorpion-like bugs with sharp pincers, Tommy Guns shredding the carapaces of various other too-big-for-my-liking bugs, bodies being feasted upon by giant centipedes and, finally, that slug(s) scene. That poor, poor cook. Once his head was writhing under the toothed maw of a slimy giant slug, I lost it.
We left the theater. My mom, seeing my current state of mind, felt bad. So, we walked over to the Media Play that was next to the theater (remember Media Play?) and she said I could get a video game of my choosing as an early Christmas present, and, dear reader, this was the rarest of occurrences.
Like any good 10 year old boy, the horror of bug-pit scene was two Coca Colas and a box of Sno-Caps behind me. In a sugar-induced haze, I had forgotten the unease it made me feel. Game after game, I looked and looked. The Xbox 360 was new and there was not much to choose from. I already had Call of Duty 2, I wasn’t allowed to play GUN, so what was I to choose? Well, as fate may have it, my eyes and sticky fingers landed on the video game tie-in for King Kong which was (horribly) named: Peter Jackson’s King Kong The Official Game of the Movie. A horror of copywriting, that name is.
Even more importantly, the King Kong tie-in video game is a horror game. Well, to me it is and I shall endeavour to tell you why. Yes, the game scared me as a 10 year old, but as an adult I have gone back and played it from beginning to end (it is now a part of Microsoft’s backwards compatibility lineup). It is a AAA survival horror experience in the guise of a T-rated forgettable movie tie-in game. But it is so much more than just a piece of forgettable pop-culture ephemera.
For the majority of the game’s 6 hour run-time, the player controls screenwriter-turned-survivalist Jack Driscoll as he fights his way across Skull Island in search of Ann Darrow. The damsel-in-distress narrative is a tired and often gross trope, and it is no different here. But what makes this title so special and so specifically scary is how Driscoll fights his way across the island. Eschewing popular trends of the time, King Kong (I refuse to type in the game’s whole name again) does not contain a HUD.
Everything the player needs to know about their character is contextual in the world of the game. This was a truly fascinating, but not wholly original, design motif for such a mass-market experience. If the player wants to know how much ammo Jack’s pump-action shotgun has, they simply press a button (“B” on an Xbox controller) and he checks his ammo and calls out how much ammo he has left. If he is out of ammo or needs a gun, the player can make Jack interact with a fellow companion to either borrow ammo or take someone else’s firearm. There are no context clues, just common sense (and clever tutorials).
Health is read through screen darkening a la Call of Duty 2. The player must chart their own path which happens to be quite easy due to the game’s linearity. This obfuscation of common design elements and necessary information builds tension, and combat encounters become all the more harrowing.
Furthermore, how the player fires their weapon is, oddly enough, quite similar to Resident Evil 4 even though King Kong is a first-person experience. The player’s weapon is not always aimed as it is in most other first-person shooters. The left trigger must be pulled in order to shoulder the weapon and only then can it be fired, but unlike Resident Evil 4 the player can move—albeit at a slower pace—while firing. Making firing a weapon a two-button action not only slows down how quickly a player can react to a threat, it makes the player become more methodical, and as player’s are overrun by enemies, it makes the playing of the game genuinely scary.
But it is rated T, how can it be scary? Gore, viscera and jet-black themes are not needed for horror. There is enough tension and uneasy imagery in King Kong to make it seem like a true horror experience.
The gameplay is purposefully clunky, ammo is scarce, and when ammo is dried up, the player must use Skull Island, itself, as a weapon. Spears can be set on fire and tossed into shrubbery to spread a blaze that keeps monsters at bay and/or kills them outright. The fire is dynamic—one cannot help but think that the fire physics in this game were a testing ground for what was to come in a later Ubisoft title, Far Cry 2, but the beasts of the island also act like animals. There is a simple ecosystem at play. Big animals eat smaller animals and the player can weaponize this system in order to survive. Injure a small animal and maybe a larger beast will finish the job for you. But these beasts are not your friends. In fact, the animals that inhabit Skull Island is where King Kong most obviously becomes a horror experience.
Giant crabs erupt from shallow water with murderous intent, prehistoric centipedes move in an otherworldly manner just before they stiffen and cock back right before they pounce at you (more on this later), and there are even dinosaurs that will want you dead. But these are not the clean Spielbergian dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, no, these beasts are made to be scary rather than to elicit awe.
The first time the player encounters a T-Rex is one of the scariest and most memorable experiences I have ever had in a game. All is still and then everything is chaos. The T-Rex breaks through the tree line, men scream in fear, men scream in agony, men die, and the beast roars with prehistoric bloodlust. Fighting the dangers of Skull Island becomes a game of forethought, of preparation like many other survival horror games. Things go well, then they don’t, and then the player must improvise. But how does one try to remain strategic when one of the scariest monsters in all of video games is vying to kill you?
The answer to that question, for me, is that I threw all strategy out of the window the first time I saw one of the in-game colossal centipedes. The base idea of a giant centipede is scary enough, but how it moves is something else entirely. The habitus of these centipedes if familiar yet otherworldly. They have lots of legs, their feelers move of their own accord, their mouth-pincers click and clatter, but how they move and interact with their surroundings feels not of this world, not of the game’s world. They are unique in their terror. The centipedes flail and move with a sense of rapidity that is spine-chilling, and they may be easy to fell with a shotgun, but I was most afraid of them when I’d throw a spear at them.
The spear would pin them to a wall or the ground and their bodies with writhe with a desperate desire for freedom of motion and from their immediate pain. That is when the player is supposed to kill them, but sometimes they’d get away. Sometimes they’d get to close. And when they are close to the player, their bodies stiffen and rear back like a rubber band stretched between one’s pointer finger and thumb. Their potential energy becomes deadly, and it is then released in a kinetic force of pincers and teeth and limbs that creates a rapid-moving image that I will never forget. They are the scariest and most unnervingly animated beings I’ve ever encountered in a video game. They made me forget all of my survival horror skills and left me with just a desire to not have to cast my eyes upon them anymore.
Ubisoft’s King Kong is an odd little survival horror experience, that much is for sure, but what happens when player-control is shifted to Kong? What happens to the survival horror elements that have been laid out and expanded upon over the past few hours? They are immolated in a mass of gargantuan muscles, fur, and teeth. Kong is the biggest and most dangerous thing on Skull Island. There is nothing to fear when playing as him; it is a power-trip that serves to make the return to controlling Jack Driscoll all the more terrifying and humbling. Kong rips jaws from T-Rexs, he drums his chest knowing he will forever remain unchallenged on Skull Island, but he is eventually brought to New York City against his will. The concrete and steel megalopolis is unknowable to him, controlling him in New York City is a balancing act between power and fear-of-the-unknown.
Eventually, the city gets the better of him. He slumps bullet-ridden and leaking from the Empire State Building and falls to his death. Even giant beasts—one of a kind monsters—have something to be afraid of, and Ubisoft’s King Kong makes fear malleable, it scales fear up and down to a dramatic and, usually successful, effect.
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