Why Are People Saying 'Skull Island: Rise Of Kong' Is The Worst Game Of 2023 And What Is Shovelware?

A few months ago the gaming community almost unanimously crowned The Lord of the Rings: Gollum the worst game of the year, but it appears that a new contender for this unglamorous title has risen. Skull Island: Rise of Kong, a recently released game based on King Kong of Skull Island is apparently so bad that Gollum is now off the hook, as players are "enjoying" such features as terrible models and animation, obsolete gameplay straight from the early 2000s shovelware, and even still images replacing animations in cutscenes.

Learn what else is wrong with Rise of Kong and what the shorter games with worse graphics meme has to do with it in our brief explainer.

What Is Skull Island: Rise of Kong?

Skull Island: Rise of Kong is an action-adventure video game released in October 2023. The game was developed by IguanaBee and published by GameMill Entertainment, a company known for publishing games based on existing IPs.

The game is an action-adventure with platformer elements where players guide the titular character King Kong through Skull Island on a journey of vengeance.

Why Are People Saying Rise of Kong Is Terrible?

Now the game would probably go largely unnoticed was it not for two users on X / Twitter who posted clips demonstrating just how bad the quality of the game was, and not just by 2023 standards. Firstly, on October 16th, a user posted a clip of a boss fight from the game, comparing GameMill to LJN, a now-defunct toy company known for producing low-quality toys and video games based on licensed properties. And later another user posted a clip of a cutscene, which showed not only how poor animations and models in the game are, but also that Rise of Kong developers didn't even bother to animate one part of the cutscene, literally replacing it with a still image.

The abysmal quality of the game reminded people of another release that was heavily panned by critics and players, the notorious The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which people used to refer to as the worst game of 2023.

What Is Shovelware?

The gameplay clips from Rise of Kong led to users to dub the game "shovelware," a term that first gained popularity in the 1990s but hasn't been used all that much recently as the expected quality of releases generally improved. The term was first used in the early 1990s to refer to CD-ROMs containing large amounts of shareware demo programs and mediocre games, a phenomenon that occurred due to CD-ROMs, a new technology at the time, offering capacity hundreds of times larger than the floppy disk and therefore able to fit hundreds of programs.

The term later changed its meaning as it was used to refer to low-budget, poor-quality video game releases targeted at unsophisticated and unsuspecting customers. Now the poor quality of Rise of Kong has reminded people of the times when games like this were a common occurrence.

What Is The 'Shorter Games With Worse Graphics' Meme?

Some users on X used the release as an opportunity to dunk on the ""I want shorter games with worse graphics:https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-want-shorter-games-with-worse-graphics-and-im-not-kidding"" meme, a trend calling for the video game industry to move away from its focus on AAA releases and crunch culture.

However, not everyone shared the opinion, as exploitative game releases like Rise of Kong actually go against the sentiment of the meme, which promotes quality and downscaling ambitions over quantity.

For the full history of Skull Island: Rise of Kong, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.