THE MONSTERVERSE GAMES WE DESERVE

I just watched Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire for the third time last weekend and got hit with the same dumb question I always get hit with after a MonsterVerse movie. Where is the game? Not a mobile match-three with Godzilla's face slapped on the splash screen. Not a six-month live service skin pack inside some other franchise. An actual, made-with-care, console-and-PC release where I can stomp through Hong Kong as the King of the Monsters and feel every footstep shake my subwoofer.

It does not exist. Twelve years into Legendary's MonsterVerse, with a billion-dollar movie franchise that includes Godzilla, Kong, Mothra, Ghidorah, Skar King, Shimo, the Hollow Earth ecosystem, Apex Cybernetic, Monarch, and a planet's worth of lore, the official tie-in gaming output is essentially a few mobile cash grabs and some guest DLC drops in other developers' games. That is genuinely insane to me. So I want to talk about the godzilla games we should have right now and why Legendary cannot seem to figure this part out.

The open-world Godzilla game we keep almost getting

Start with the obvious one. The big swing. Open-world Godzilla.

Picture it. You boot up the game and you are standing on a beach in the South Pacific. You are 120 meters tall. The camera pulls back and you see a city on the horizon. There is a Monarch helicopter circling above you. The game tells you nothing else. You walk toward the city. The water displaces around your legs, the wake spreading out in real waves. Civilian boats scatter. A military destroyer opens fire and the rounds spark off your dorsal plates. You roar and the audio engine actually models the sound bouncing off the buildings ahead of you.

You make landfall. You decide whether to go through the city or around it. Buildings have voxel-level destruction. Skyscrapers come down in pieces, not in pre-baked animations. The military escalates. F-35s, then attack choppers, then a Mechagodzilla unit deployed by Apex. You fight it on the rooftops of a downtown that is collapsing under your weight. The camera holds you at scale, and the camera understands that scale is the entire point. Nothing about the framing makes you feel small. You are the apex predator and the game knows it.

That is the pitch. We have had pieces of this game before. PS4's Godzilla game from Bandai Namco in 2015 had the scale right and almost nothing else right. The destruction was shallow, the controls were sluggish on purpose to convey weight but ended up feeling bad, and the missions were repetitive. Atari's Godzilla games on PS2 had the combat figured out but were arena brawlers. Godzilla Unleashed had a roster but the cities were tiny.

Nobody has combined scale, destruction tech, combat depth, and open-world structure into a single product. The tech to do it has existed for years. Look at what Teardown does with voxel destruction. Look at what Battlefield does with building collapse. Look at what Spider-Man 2 does with seamless traversal across a dense city. Combine those three, scale them up by an order of magnitude, and put a 120-meter lizard at the center. That is the only game I want.

A co-op kaiju brawler with the full roster

Second pitch. Co-op, four-player, drop-in drop-out, MonsterVerse roster. Think Left 4 Dead's session structure but every player is a giant monster, and the campaign is something like Operation: Hollow Earth where you fight your way through the underground biome together.

Roster on day one would be Godzilla, Kong, Mothra, and Behemoth. DLC would add Rodan, Ghidorah's three heads as separate playable characters with synergy bonuses when teamed up, Scylla, Methuselah, the Skar King, Shimo, and Doug. Each one plays mechanically distinct. Mothra is a glass cannon flier with crowd control. Behemoth is a tank that can dig and ambush. Kong is the agile melee bruiser. Godzilla is the heavy artillery option with atomic breath as a build-up resource you spend at peak moments.

The campaign would not just be combat. You would have traversal puzzles only certain monsters can solve. Mothra has to fly your team across a chasm that Godzilla cannot cross. Kong has to climb a wall and break a structure to open a path. Behemoth has to dig through to a hidden chamber. The whole thing scales encounters based on team composition and player count, like Deep Rock Galactic does with hazard levels.

This game writes itself. The market is starving for a quality co-op title where everyone plays a distinct giant creature. GigaBash gets close but it is competitive arena combat, not a co-op campaign. I want both. The GigaBash multiplayer experience and a Helldivers-style co-op campaign with kaiju.

If you have not played it, GigaBash is honestly the closest thing we have right now to what a MonsterVerse brawler should feel like, which is both a compliment to its Malaysian developer and a damning indictment of every major publisher with the budget to do this properly.

The Pacific Rim style mech game with MonsterVerse kaiju

Third pitch. Cross the streams. You play as a Monarch-funded mech pilot operating one of the new HEAV-class units, and your job is to defend evacuation zones from Titan-class threats. Two-player co-op cockpit, one pilot handles movement and one handles weapons, just like the Drift system in Pacific Rim.

I have wanted this game for a decade. The Pacific Rim tie-in game we got was more spreadsheet than spectacle. The MonsterVerse already has Mechagodzilla, the HEAV vehicles, the Monarch outposts, and the entire infrastructure for a mech-vs-kaiju story. Apex Cybernetic literally exists as a faction in the films. Make me a Jaeger pilot in the MonsterVerse continuity.

The gameplay loop would be slow and weighty. You get briefed on the incoming Titan. You and your co-pilot select loadout. Plasma cutters for armored kaiju like Shimo, sonic disruptors for flying threats like Rodan, harpoon-and-cable rigs for grappling something Kong-sized. The encounters are long, brutal set-pieces where one wrong move means your mech is in two pieces and a mountain crushes your evacuation site.

For solo players, you would have an AI co-pilot with relationship mechanics, like Monster Hunter's palico system. The co-pilot has personality, gets stressed during combat, reacts to encounter outcomes. There is real potential for a story-driven mech game inside this universe and nobody is making it.

For the visual reference on what this would look and feel like at scale, the Pacific Rim kaiju designs are still some of the best ever put on screen, and a game that combined that aesthetic with the MonsterVerse roster would be unstoppable.

An Apex Cybernetic narrative game

Fourth pitch. This one is weird and I love it.

You play a mid-level operations manager at Apex Cybernetic in 2024, in the months leading up to and during the events of Godzilla vs Kong. Walter Simmons is your boss. You are not a hero. You are a corporate climber inside a doomsday tech company. The game is structured like a narrative thriller in the vein of Citizen Sleeper or Disco Elysium or Pentiment. It is mostly dialog, choices, and email management.

Your decisions shape the timeline. Do you flag the Mechagodzilla project as ethically compromised and risk your career? Do you embed a hidden backdoor in the neural link that might save the world but will get you killed? Each playthrough is six to eight hours and the consequences ripple out into how Godzilla vs Kong unfolds from a perspective the films never showed.

I want to play the morally compromised Apex employee. I want to make terrible decisions in service of stock price. I want to read internal memos about how to spin a Titan attack as a public relations win. There is a great character study buried in this universe and the films have not had time to surface it. Give me the punching movie and the corporate dread game.

This pitch is the cheapest one to make on the list. No open-world tech investment, no four-player netcode, no destruction physics. Just writing, voice acting, and atmospheric environments. A small studio could make it on a modest budget if Legendary licensed it out. They do not, apparently.

A Skull Island survival sim

Fifth pitch. You are stranded on Skull Island. The year is 1973, just after the events of Kong: Skull Island. The military extraction mission left without you. You have a rifle, a knife, three days of rations, and a working radio that mostly receives static.

Survival sim mechanics. Food, water, shelter, temperature. You build a base. You forage. You hunt smaller predators and avoid the megafauna. Skullcrawlers patrol certain regions and you learn their territories. The first time you see Kong from across a valley should make you stop playing and just watch. He is the size of a building. He is uninterested in you. He is also the only thing keeping the Skullcrawler population from completely overrunning the island, so you actually root for him in a way the films do not really sell.

The endgame is figuring out how to signal for rescue. Build a transmitter, a fire beacon, a flare system, whatever fits the era. The catch is that the things that get the rescue team's attention also get every predator's attention. The final 20 minutes of any successful run is a defense scenario, holding off Skullcrawlers in your base, hoping the helicopter arrives before your ammo runs out, with Kong potentially showing up to help or destroy your beacon depending on how you have managed him through the game.

The Long Dark proved survival sims can have narrative weight without constant scripted events. Subnautica proved environmental storytelling beats expository dialog when the world is alien enough. A Skull Island survival game combining those design philosophies would be incredible. Set it in 1973, give it the Vietnam-era aesthetic the film nailed, and lean into the loneliness. This is the game I would buy at full price on day one with zero hesitation.

So why does Legendary keep fumbling this

Here is the question that bothers me. Legendary has had the MonsterVerse since 2014. They have had time. They have had a successful film franchise that is over a billion dollars in cumulative box office. The IP is hot. The audience is there. So why do we keep getting nothing?

I think it is a few things stacked on top of each other.

First, the licensing situation with Toho is complicated. Legendary has the film rights to certain Toho characters under specific terms, but the gaming rights are murky and get negotiated separately for each project. Toho also licenses Godzilla to other game makers concurrently, which is why you see Godzilla as DLC in Call of Duty, Dead by Daylight, and PUBG without a standalone MonsterVerse title. The DLC route is easier to clear and pays faster.

Second, big-budget licensed games are a graveyard. Publishers got burned in the 2000s and 2010s on movie tie-ins, and the conventional wisdom is you do not greenlight an $80 million licensed game for a film franchise without a guarantee of huge returns. The Marvel Spider-Man games broke that pattern, but they were Sony first-party productions made by Insomniac with massive trust and budget. There is no equivalent first-party home for MonsterVerse. Legendary does not own a major game studio.

Third, and this is the speculative part, I think Legendary just does not know what to do with games. The MonsterVerse production team is great at films and television. They are not gaming people. The studios they license to keep treating Godzilla as a guest character or live-service event rather than a tentpole.

Past Godzilla games have shown what works. Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee on the GameCube nailed the brawler format and proved the IP can carry a console game. Godzilla: Save the Earth and Unleashed expanded the roster but never quite hit the same combat highs. The Bandai Namco PS4 game looked the part but played terribly. There is a line you can draw from the best of these to a modern AAA Godzilla title and nobody has connected the dots. A full breakdown of the godzilla games worth playing and why most disappoint makes this gap really obvious when you see them listed out.

What we have and what is coming

So what do MonsterVerse fans have right now? Mods. The PC modding community has done more for the cause than Legendary has. There are MonsterVerse mods for Garry's Mod, for Ark Survival Evolved that add Kong and Godzilla as rideable creatures, for Beam.NG that lets you drive cars at scale near AI Godzilla. The community is filling the vacuum themselves.

On the official side, GigaBash has its DLC pipeline that has added several Toho monsters with constant rumor of more on the way. Whether those crossover packs will lean specifically into MonsterVerse versions versus classic Toho designs is unclear. A true MonsterVerse Godzilla skin with the spike layout and atomic breath effects from the films would be a system-seller for the GigaBash community.

There are also persistent rumors about a Microsoft-published MonsterVerse game in early development at one of their second-party studios, floating around for two years without confirmation. I am refusing to get my hopes up until I see gameplay footage. We have been burned too many times.

The quietest hope is that someone at Legendary finally hires a games division head who understands the medium and uses the next two years of MonsterVerse film output as the marketing engine for a coordinated game launch. The fourth film is already in pre-production. The window for a tie-in with proper development time is right now.

It shows how much MonsterVerse owns the cultural moment without doing the gaming work to capitalize on it.

I am going to keep waiting. I have been waiting since 2014 and I will probably still be waiting in 2030. But every time I walk out of a MonsterVerse film with that big stupid grin still on my face, I think about how good the game could be. I hope, against all evidence, that somebody at Legendary is thinking the same thing.