It all started when I tried to rent Space Marine 2 from Boomerang, returning every game I owed to give myself a chance. I failed to make the cut for a day 1 release and no new-ish games of note were listed as Short Wait, so I just decided to go for broke and I picked the worst games I could see. One of those games was Skull Island: Rise of Kong.
It didn’t take long for me to pause Rise of Kong and tell my 2 year old (no one else was home when I first played the game) “This is the worst game I’ve ever played.” Oddly, I usually like bad games. Even the ones I dislike, I get some sort of value out of, because you can learn a lot from the things they do wrong. I have a real fascination with the subject and yet Rise of Kong left me reeling. I needed to make something productive out of this mess, so I decided to turn it into an episode. The other two games I rented that day would also inspire episodes, one rental turned into my second Halloween episode, and the other will be the subject of an episode down the line.
I love monster movies, it’s one of my favourite genres. When it’s done right, there’s nothing as viscerally thrilling or terrifying – and when it’s done wrong, it’s just plain funny. Getting the chance to do my own “monster movie” as an audio adventure was just too tempting.
I assumed this would be a tough edit because the logistics of creating a soundscape of pure destruction seemed like a big undertaking. If building the ambience of a medieval town or a rural fun fair was a big job, then this should’ve been just as daunting. And yet it really wasn’t. The bridge sequence took a while to edit, purely because I had to pause halfway through to attend a wedding of a beloved friend (Bash from the 1UP Pod gang) and getting back into the swing of things after a weekend break was awkward. The sequence where cars fall from the sky and I have to run into a convenience store looked like it would be the toughest sequence to edit on paper, and yet I put it together in about half an hour. Nothing was really hard to do, some things were just time consuming, such as the final round. I was very happy with how this episode turned out.