GODZILLA VS KONG: THE GAMING POTENTIAL

I rewatched Godzilla vs Kong last night and got angry. Not at the movie, which is exactly the dumb spectacle it promised to be. I got angry because after the credits rolled I went to go buy a video game of it and there wasn't one. Not a real one. Not the one I wanted. Five years after the movie made half a billion dollars during a pandemic, the biggest monster rivalry in pop culture still doesn't have a proper game.

How is that possible? Legendary has a franchise that prints money, two monster designs that are instantly recognizable to anyone with eyes, and a rivalry that people have been arguing about since 1962. And the best we've gotten is DLC in a party game and some mobile tie-ins that feel like they were made by someone who watched the trailer once.

This is a crime. Let's talk about it.

What We Actually Got

The Godzilla vs Kong gaming history is embarrassingly thin. The original King Kong vs Godzilla movie came out in 1962. The first video game adaptation of either character showed up in 1983, and it was the notorious Atari 2600 Godzilla game, which was less a game and more a hostage situation involving a few sprites that vaguely resembled the Big G. That game was cursed in a way I can't fully describe unless you've seen it running. Imagine two squares having a disagreement.

Things got slightly better with the GameCube era. Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee came out in 2002 and its sequel Save the Earth followed in 2004. Both were genuinely fun kaiju brawlers with destructible environments and a decent roster. Kong wasn't in either of them because the rights were tangled up somewhere else, which is the story of every Kong game ever made. Universal had Kong, Toho had Godzilla, and the two properties only occasionally crossed paths.

The MonsterVerse started in 2014 with Gareth Edwards' Godzilla, and Legendary began building out the cinematic universe with Kong: Skull Island in 2017. By the time Godzilla vs Kong hit in 2021, Legendary had both characters under one roof. The obvious next step was a video game. What we got instead was a handful of mobile cash-ins, a PUBG crossover event, and a Call of Duty skin. These are not games about Godzilla and Kong. These are games with Godzilla and Kong wallpaper.

The closest thing to a real kaiju game featuring both was GigaBash, the indie kaiju party brawler that got a MonsterVerse DLC pack in 2023. It was great. Godzilla, Kong, Mechagodzilla, and Kiko were added as playable fighters with their movie designs, and suddenly you could do 1v1 matches between the two biggest monsters in the world. The game itself is fantastic and I've sunk way too many hours into it. But GigaBash is a Smash Bros style arena fighter made by a small studio. It's the sizzle without the steak. It proves the demand exists but it doesn't satisfy it.

The fact that a 20-person indie team in Malaysia made the best Godzilla vs Kong game ever released while Legendary sits on a billion dollar IP is the entire problem in one sentence.

What's Missing

Here's what doesn't exist. A big-budget asymmetric brawler with real scale. I want a game where you pick Godzilla or Kong, you drop into Hong Kong or Hollow Earth, and you actually feel the size difference. Kong is about 337 feet tall in the MonsterVerse. Godzilla is 394 feet. That's a twenty story height gap between two creatures that are already impossibly massive. A good game would make you feel that. Kong should play like a boxer, fast and agile and dangerous up close, climbing buildings, grabbing weapons, using the environment. Godzilla should play like a tank, slower but with overwhelming firepower, atomic breath that carves streets in half, tail swipes that flatten entire blocks.

The Rocket Racoon of this matchup is the mech. Mechagodzilla in the 2021 film is piloted, and I don't understand why there isn't a Titanfall-meets-Godzilla game where you play a human pilot climbing into a kaiju-scale mech to fight actual kaiju. That's the pitch. That's the whole thing. You start on foot, dodging debris and trying to reach your ride, and then you pilot a 300 foot war machine against something even bigger. The power fantasy writes itself. Respawn could make that game in their sleep. Instead we get another Apex Legends season.

Asymmetric multiplayer is another obvious angle that nobody has touched. One player is Godzilla. One player is Kong. Two to four players are humans trying to either help one monster, escape the fight, or call in mech support. Dead by Daylight proved asymmetric works when the power fantasy is strong enough. Evolve proved it can fail when the monster isn't scary enough. Godzilla and Kong solve that problem because both are terrifying and iconic in completely different ways.

And where is the single player narrative game? The MonsterVerse films have set up enough lore for a Naughty Dog style third-person adventure. You could play a Monarch scientist investigating Hollow Earth. You could play a Skull Island survivor from the Iwi tribe. You could play a Jia type character with the gravitas to carry a dialogue-heavy story while kaiju battle in the distance. The scaffolding for ten different games is already sitting there in the films. Nobody is building.

The Rivalry Needs Respect

The Godzilla and Kong rivalry goes back to 1962's King Kong vs Godzilla, the third Godzilla film and the one that established that these two would always be measured against each other. That movie is goofy beyond belief. Kong wins in the Japanese cut and it's ambiguous in the American cut, which started a debate that has never ended. Who would actually win in a fair fight?

The MonsterVerse finally gave us a modern take on that question. Godzilla vs Kong in 2021 answered it with "Godzilla wins the first round, Kong survives with the help of a buzzsaw axe, they team up to fight Mechagodzilla." The sequel, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire in 2024, leaned even harder into the team up angle, with the two becoming reluctant allies against Skar King. Now we're in the era where they're more frenemies than enemies, which is its own interesting dynamic.

A good game could tell any of these stories. Or it could tell a new one. You could set it between the films. You could set it in Hollow Earth. You could set it during the Titan war that Kong's ancestors fought against Godzilla's ancestors, which is literally mentioned in The New Empire as backstory and screams "give me a game about this." It's a prequel wrapped in a DLC pack wrapped in a sequel hook. Legendary, I am begging you.

The films have done the hard work of giving these characters modern personalities. MonsterVerse Godzilla is aloof, territorial, and generally just trying to be left alone. MonsterVerse Kong is empathetic, curious, lonely, and capable of genuine rage when provoked. Those are characters. Those are characters you can write a game around. It's not just two monsters smashing. It's two protagonists with distinct motivations who happen to be very large and very angry.

For anyone who wants to go deeper on the kaiju lore, I wrote a kaiju size comparison piece that breaks down exactly how big these things are relative to each other and why scale matters so much in these stories. Spoiler: Godzilla is smaller than you probably think and Kong is bigger.

Why Legendary Needs to Hire an Actual Games Studio

This is where I get loud. Legendary Pictures has been licensing the MonsterVerse to whoever will write a check, and the result is a graveyard of forgettable tie-ins. That's how you get Godzilla skins in Call of Duty and Kong fighting Fortnite zombies. It's marketing. It's not games. It's also leaving so much money on the table that I don't understand how the meeting has not happened.

Here's what a real deal looks like. Legendary partners with a studio that has a track record. Not a tie-in shop. Not a mobile farm. An actual developer. FromSoftware doing a kaiju soulslike where you're a human pilot in a mech. Insomniac doing an open world traversal game set in Hong Kong where you play Kong. Remedy doing a weird narrative thriller set inside Monarch. Arrowhead doing a Helldivers style game where humans defend cities from Titans. Each of these would be a system seller.

The budget for a real kaiju game would be enormous. Destruction tech is expensive. Scale is expensive. The kind of environmental fidelity that makes a Godzilla game feel right, where buildings crumble realistically and beams carve through terrain, isn't something you can half-ass. You need a studio that can do it. You need money. You need time. These things cost more than a licensing fee from a mobile publisher.

But the ceiling is so high. Look at what Insomniac did with Spider-Man. They took a character everyone thought they understood and made the definitive interactive version of him. There is no definitive interactive Godzilla. There is no definitive interactive Kong. The door is wide open. Whoever walks through it first gets to define what these characters feel like in a video game for the next twenty years.

That's the opportunity. That's the thing Legendary should be sprinting toward. Instead we're getting a Kong skin in Multiversus.

What I'd Actually Build

If I were given the keys tomorrow, here's the game. Third person, single player with co-op support. You switch between Godzilla and Kong throughout the campaign, starting as enemies and ending as uneasy allies, with a human pilot character sequence in the middle where you drive a prototype mech. Set it during the Titan war referenced in The New Empire, so you can have the ancestral Alpha Titan as your final antagonist. Include a versus mode that's basically Destroy All Monsters Melee updated with modern destruction tech. Add a horde mode where you fight waves of smaller Titans. Add a photo mode because people will post screenshots of this game forever.

Lean into the weight. Lean into the scale. Make Kong feel like an animal and Godzilla feel like a force of nature. Give both of them distinct movesets that reward different playstyles, with the human mech sequences functioning as a palate cleanser between kaiju rampages. End each level with a set piece fight between two Titans while the city burns. That's the whole game. I'd play six hundred hours of it.

Is any of this hard? Yes. Is any of this impossible? No. Armored Core 6 exists. Returnal exists. Control exists. The technology to make a kaiju game that actually feels like a kaiju movie has been here for years. We're just waiting for someone with the rights and the budget to make the call.

The Tragedy Of The Thing

The worst part is that the window is closing. MonsterVerse fatigue is coming. The Godzilla Minus One crowd and the MonsterVerse crowd are already arguing about which franchise is doing it right. Legendary has two more MonsterVerse films in development and a TV show on Apple. If they don't get a real video game out before that cycle peaks, they'll miss the moment.

Kaiju as a genre is having its biggest decade in half a century. Pacific Rim is still culturally relevant. Godzilla Minus One won an Oscar. Kong is a legitimate box office draw again. Attack on Titan introduced a whole generation to the "what if the scary thing was huge" idea. Kaiju No. 8 is one of the biggest manga in the world. People are hungry for this. The audience has never been bigger.

And the gaming industry is finally catching up. GigaBash, Dawn of the Monsters, and even indie projects like Kaiju Princess prove that the genre works in interactive form. The tools are there. The audience is there. The IP is there. Someone just needs to write the check.

Legendary, if you're reading this: hire someone. Hire a real studio. Give them three years and three hundred million dollars. Let them make the Godzilla vs Kong game that people have been daydreaming about since 1962. You will make that money back opening weekend.

Until then I'll be over here playing GigaBash for the ninth hundred hour, wondering what a real version of this fight would feel like with the budget it deserves.