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We talk a lot about candidates for the Game of the Year award, but what about the worst experiences we've seen in 2023? The general consensus is The Lord of the Rings: Gollum deserves the title, and the recent details on the work environment at Daedalic Entertainment might shed some light on why the game ended up not what players expected, especially from a LotR title.
However, it looks like Gollum has gotten a rival. On October 17, the world met Skull Island: Rise of Kong, an action-adventure game developed by IguanaBee.
"Embark on a quest to avenge the death of your parents at the hands of the alpha predator: Gaw. Conquer waves of primal beasts and defeat the minions of your arch-nemesis."
Image credit: IguanaBee
It is hard to think of anything Skull Island isn't criticized for. It now has a 3.7 User Score on Metacritic, and its Steam reviews are Mostly Negative. Players complain about poor gameplay and graphics that could be okay on PlayStation 2 back in the day but are not acceptable now. But it all might have been fine – there is a niche for everything, after all – if not for the game's price: it costs $39.99.
Image credit: IguanaBee
So what went wrong? You can probably guess already.
The Verge contacted the developers to find out what happened and learned that the publisher GameMill Entertainment gave IguanaBee only a year to complete Rise of Kong.
“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, who wished to remain anonymous.
Image credit: IguanaBee
With talks of the game development cycle expanding to 5-6 years, this is an insanely short time for a good game, especially in a famous universe. IguanaBee has worked on projects for GameMill before, including Little League World Series Baseball 2022, which reportedly had the same one-year rule. In fact, The Verge says it might be GameMill's strategy to contract smaller developers to make games under short turnaround times.
“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 but other GameMill-published games. “Which was quite frustrating when working because we had to improvise with the limited information we had on hand.”
Image credit: IguanaBee
They added that there would not be enough funding sometimes to keep experienced employees in the project.
What made the Skull Island development even harder was the number of people working on it. According to sources, the game was made from scratch "with anywhere between two to 20 people working on it at a time." Naturally, with such a limited workforce one year is not enough.
“The crunch was really set in motion in February,” said one developer. “I was on automatic pilot by the end of February because all hope was lost.”
Image credit: IguanaBee
Despite the hardships and players' reactions, some of Skull Island’s developers are proud of their work, probably because of the difficult conditions in this one year.
“We did what we could and we had a great time developing it,” said a developer on X/Twitter. “Proud of our monkey.”
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