That bad King Kong game was only in development for a year

Earlier this week, images and clips from Skull Island: Rise of Kong started popping up on social media. Released on October 17th, the game was roundly mocked for its dated-looking graphics and gameplay. IGN reported that players were calling it the worst game of 2023.

Though it is easy to see why this game might have earned that moniker, after speaking with developers involved in making the game, one fact becomes clear — Skull Island is the best it possibly could have been because it was produced under restrictive circumstances imposed by its publisher, the Minnesota-based game company, GameMill Entertainment.

The Verge spoke with developers involved with the game, who explained that though the team at IguanaBee, which developed Skull Island, is extremely talented, that talent was not able to be fully expressed because GameMill only allowed one year for the team to develop the game from scratch.

“The development process of this game was started in June of last year and it was aimed to end on June 2nd this year. So one year development process,” said a developer at IguanaBee, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal.

IguanaBee is an indie developer based in Santiago, Chile, that has worked on a number of games, including original and licensed properties. It has worked on a number of projects for GameMill Entertainment, including Little League World Series Baseball 2022, which, according to sources, was also only allowed one year for development.

In fact, GameMill seems to have a reputation for contracting smaller developers to make licensed games under short turnaround times with varying degrees of success and quality. 

“It was very common for us not to be provided with all the information about the project,” said a former IguanaBee developer who did not work on Skull Island specifically but other GameMill-published games at IguanaBee and wished to remain anonymous to protect future employment opportunities. “Which was quite frustrating when working because we had to improvise with the limited information we had on hand.”

They spoke about how, even though GameMill was funding a particular project, the funding apparently wasn’t enough to keep experienced staff on hand.

“I remember very well that they let go of a colleague who had been there longer than me,” the developer said. “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.”

Games can be made in a year depending on things like scope, the size of the team working on it, and whether there are existing materials to work from. However, with a game like Skull Island, which, according to sources, was made from scratch with anywhere between two to 20 people working on it at a time, a one-year development timeline would be a challenging task.

The Verge has reached out to GameMill and IguanaBee for comment. 

The unfortunate situation is that IguanaBee will suffer for this despite the fact that it is a studio with talent capable of making excellent, award-winning games. Last year, in collaboration with Studio Voyager and published under Untold Tales, it launched the original game What Lies in the Multiverse. The puzzle platformer has positive reviews on Steam and won Best Game: Latin America at the Best International Games Festival — an indie game festival focused on games developed in Latin America.

Though the former developer didn’t directly work on What Lies in the Multiverse while at IguanaBee, they did say their colleagues who did seemed happier.

“To be honest, they seemed much more motivated and enthusiastic than the rest of the team working for GameMill. Who knows why.”

Many employees we reached out to refused to speak on the record for fear GameMill would stop contracting the studio.

“It’s a love/hate relationship because they are the ones who accept or give the projects and Iguanabee doesn’t have the means to develop almost anything on its own because well, money,” said the developer at IguanaBee who worked on Skull Island.

They described it as a vicious cycle. Though the studio wants to make original games, it needs money to fund those projects. But the only money coming in is from publishers like GameMill to make licensed games. Then, with predominantly licensed games in its portfolio, the studios are only approached by publishers who want to make even more licensed games. 

Furthermore, the restriction that a studio must make a game within a year leads to an environment where any setback threatens the entire project. In game development, setbacks happen often; personnel changes, changes in a game’s scope, and all the events that happen over the regular course of game development get amplified when a studio’s livelihood depends on meeting an unreasonable deadline imposed by a publisher. 

This was true of Skull Island. 

“The crunch was really set in motion in February,” said the developer. “I was on automatic pilot by the end of February because all hope was lost.”

Despite the negative sentiment on social media, some of Skull Island’s developers are proud of what they’ve done, possibly because this game still got made in spite of its many challenges.

“We did what we could and we had a great time developing it,” read a translation of a post on X (formerly Twitter) from a developer on Skull Island. “Proud of our monkey.”