... a point of staying involved in the production of the game about the ferocious but misunderstood primate.
"Of course, Peter Jackson was very busy with his movie," said Poix, "but he took a lot of time to help us with our game. We went to New Zealand (where Jackson's production company is) five times. We showed him what we had and we got his feedback."
Cooperation between teams can go much further than mere feedback from the director, though, and can give game producers big advantages over the process of creating games from scratch.
A significant head start
For example, the game developers benefit from being able to use assets — characters, environments, behaviours, creatures and the like — from the films. Further, while the idea is to make a game that goes well beyond the story of an associated film, having the basic elements of a film as a starting point represents a significant head start.
"When starting a video game, you of course have to have some idea of game play, but you also need to design a world," Poix said. "You need a universe. When getting a movie licence world, you already have these."
By all accounts, the cooperation between the two productions paid off for Poix and his team. Most reviews of the "King Kong" game have been positive, and it was by far the best-seller at Microsoft's Xbox 360 November launch party in California's Mojave desert.
Yet according to Hall, creating high-quality movie-based games that launch in tandem with their associated film can be difficult.
"When a movie is officially green-lit and set into production, the amount of time [until release] is shorter than what it takes to create a AAA video game," Hall said. "So you get this chicken-and-egg thing where you don't want to develop a game unless you're sure you have a movie. People end up cramming the production of the video game and that creates a qualitative degradation."
That leaves video game production companies with unappealing choices, said Hall: Wait to launch until movies come out on DVD or accept the likelihood of turning out a flawed game.
But because the video game industry is now turning to next-generation consoles and higher game prices, Hall said he expects the two industries to find a way to make the process work.
"I don't know anybody who's going to pay $60 for a next-generation product that's not of good quality," he said. "The [game] industry is figuring out how to get ahead of a film so they can come out [the same time] as the film."
That's exactly what the producers of the "King Kong" game did, said Poix, who added that his team had been working on the game for more than six months before they ever saw a film script.
Of course, as a remake, "King Kong" gave the video game producers some obvious creative advantages.
"When we began the game, we had studied the 1933 movie," Poix said.
Meanwhile, Jackson's significant involvement in the creation of the "King Kong" game was surprisingly common for a director, said Hall.
He explained that the Wachowski brothers — makers of the Matrix films — went so far as to write story lines into Atari's "The Matrix: Path of Neo" that intentionally extended the larger Matrix story. That's something film and game audiences should expect more of.
"If you like a movie and you want more of that, video games are offering a real way to explore more of that fiction you liked so much," Hall said. "I think that's something to pay attention to, as we have growing audiences that span multiple mediums."
