The Making of King Kong: Myth of Terror Island Pinball

Stern Pinball·video·12m 31s·analyzed·Nov 7, 2025

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.029

TL;DR

Stern reveals Kong design process: unlicensed freedom, innovative mechs, Easter eggs, retro humor.

Summary

Stern Pinball released an official behind-the-scenes video documenting the design and production of King Kong: Myth of Terror Island, featuring insights from Keith Elwin (designer), engineering team, artists (Kevin O'Connor, Greg Ferris, Jeremy Packer, Zombie Yeti), and audio/voice talent. The video emphasizes creative freedom from the unlicensed IP, unique mechanical innovations (animatronic Kong, spider magnet, gong kickback, tall helical biplane ramp), digital animation pipeline, Easter eggs embedded in artwork, and a humorous 1930s retro tone with voice work by Rick Zee and Brian Quinn from Impractical Jokers.

Key Claims

King Kong is unlicensed, based on public domain material from the original book rather than any specific movie license
high confidence · Speaker explicitly states 'it was going to be based on the book because that's what everybody's stuff is based on' and 'Not having a license here gave us a lot of freedom to do what we want with the story, the art, the callouts.'
Kong mech was significantly scaled down from initial concept where only his left arm would reach through the back panel
high confidence · Keith Elwin: 'Kong actually started way way bigger uh than he ended up on the final game. Meaning the only thing that would have been on the playfield would have been his left arm reaching through the back panel.'
The biplane ramp is described as 'the tallest ramp we've ever done' at Stern and is fed from a side flipper
high confidence · Speaker states: 'I figured this is perfect. This is the tallest ramp we've ever done. And I wanted it to be fed from a side flipper.'
Spider magnet mechanism was prototyped using an Amazon Halloween tarantula toy mounted on spring steel above a magnet
high confidence · Engineer describes: 'I went on there, bought a Halloween tarantula, cut up some spring steel, drilled it on there, stuck it above a magnet.'
The back glass artwork contains 'probably got the most Easter eggs on an actual back glass that we've done in a while'
high confidence · Keith Elwin: 'The premium back glass is one of my favorite pieces of art done for this game. It's also probably got the most Easter eggs on an actual back glass that we've done in a while.'
Brian Quinn from Impractical Jokers provided voice work as Jimmy character but had audio/Zoom issues during recording
high confidence · Audio team member: 'Brian was he was pretty funny. Uh, he was doing all these gorilla sounds, but nothing was coming through the microphone. Like Zoom kept cutting out, so we couldn't hear half of what he was saying.'
The gong mechanism went through multiple design iterations before settling on a kickback mechanism version
high confidence · Engineer: 'Our original gong was kind of motorized and went up and down and it wasn't that fun. So, we tried iteration two, which was more of a kickback mechanism, and we thought this was way more fun.'

Notable Quotes

“Not having a license here gave us a lot of freedom to, you know, do what we want with the story, the art, the callouts.”
Keith Elwin or designer @ early video — Explains the creative advantage of unlicensed IP for game design flexibility
“That spider is probably the silliest thing I've worked on in my entire time at Stern.”
Mechanical engineer @ mid-video — Highlights the novelty and playful approach to the spider magnet mechanism
“So the biplane ramp is probably my new favorite ramp in pinball. It's very steep helical ramp that feeds the red in lane very quickly.”
Keith Elwin @ mid-video — Designer enthusiasm for signature mechanical feature and shot layout
“I've always wanted to work with Greg Ferris. Growing up, Frontier was my favorite game. And never in a million years did I think, you know, 40 years later I'd be working with this guy.”
Keith Elwin @ late video — Personal connection to classic pinball history and artist collaboration nostalgia
“It's supposed to be like you're watching film reels on a on a theater in the 30s and 40s and then sometimes it'll show you that and then it'll cut to like a full color version.”
Designer/animator @ mid-video — Describes the thematic visual approach to LCD animations reflecting 1930s-40s cinema
“I just designed games that I think are fun and if everyone else thinks they're fun, that's great. I'll have a job.”
Keith Elwin @ end video — Designer's philosophy on game design and professional stakes

Entities

Keith Elwinperson King Kong: Myth of Terror IslandgameStern PinballcompanyGreg Ferrisperson Kevin O'Connorperson Zombie Yetiperson Jeremy Packerperson

Signals

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community_signal: Officially produced behind-the-scenes video providing detailed design documentation; transparency on process, challenges, iterations, and collaborative approach typical of modern Stern marketing
high · Format and content of entire video: structured narrative of design decisions, technical challenges, artist collaborations, voice talent selection
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design_philosophy: Kong mech originally designed at much larger scale (only left arm visible through back panel) before being scaled to animatronic size; suggests design iteration/compromise driven by playfield space constraints
high · Keith: 'Kong actually started way way bigger...the only thing that would have been on the playfield would have been his left arm reaching through the back panel. You don't really see King Kong. Um, so we settled on a more animatronic like mechanism.'
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design_philosophy: Easter egg strategy embedded across artwork (playfield glyphs with prior game references), back glass (claimed most ever), and callouts; intentional nods to pinball history and team member tributes (Gary Stern references, shark fin throwback)
high · Greg Ferris: 'we love putting Easter eggs in the artwork...Greg Ferris put some of his prior games in the glyphs. We have Gary in there in a couple places.'
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design_philosophy: Keith Elwin deliberately mixed up design approach on Kong, incorporating humor, Easter eggs, and unique shot variety; humorous approach to monster mechanics (Kong eating characters) echoes classic pinball design philosophy
high · Keith: 'I tried to put in as many unique shots in it as I could. I did a lot of things differently than what I would normally do.' Also: 'In just about every Keith game, there's going to be some amount of humor.'

Topics

Mechanical design and innovation (Kong mech, spider magnet, gong, biplane ramp)primaryUnlicensed IP advantages and creative freedomprimaryDigital animation pipeline and 3D-to-physical mech integrationprimaryArtwork and Easter eggs (playfield, back glass, character designs)primaryVoice work and audio design (Rick Zee, Brian Quinn, sound effects, orchestral approach)secondary1930s-40s retro theme execution and aesthetic visionsecondaryShot layout and gameplay flow philosophysecondaryCollaboration with legendary artists (Ferris, O'Connor, Zombie Yeti)secondary

Sentiment

positive(0.85)— Video is an official promotional production expressing enthusiasm from designers, engineers, and artists about Kong's features, innovations, and collaborative process. Tone is celebratory with pride in technical achievements, creative freedom, and artistic contributions. Minor negative note about audio recording issues with Brian Quinn but presented humorously. No critical commentary or community complaints included.

Transcript

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I had a lot of fun making King Kong. I tried to put it as many unique shots in it as I could. I did a lot of things differently than what I would normally do in one of my games. Just, you know, mixing it up. Look at that. It's Kong. King Kong is, you know, the iconic franchise that everyone knows and has been around for nearly a hundred years. Everybody's familiar with King Kong. What happens? So, we're not trying to totally retell the story. We're just trying to give you, hey, here are the highlights. Here's stuff that's going on. That's kind of the approach we took to this. I liked Keith's approach with this game, which was like taking a more humorous approach. It injects a little bit more energy into the game. When you play King Kong Myth of Terror Island, you get to climb a building. You get to fly a biplane around, have King Kong knock the subway train over. You got a giant spider attacking you. What else do you need? It was interesting when they said we're going to do Kong. I'm like, can we do anything with Kong? was like, you know, it's going to be based on the book because that's what everybody's stuff is based on. Not having a license here gave us a lot of freedom to, you know, do what we want with the story, the art, the the call outs. Hoist those sales, Gary. It also comes with difficulty. It's like, okay, we have no style guide. We have no assets. We have to create everything. And then the other thing after that was there's been 27 Kong movies. How do you make a Kong that doesn't look like all those other Kongs? We had a digital sculptor come up with options and stuff. So, we kind of settled on the look what we got now, which is more of a like um cartoony, but not cartoony kind of thing. Like, if you saw the toy, you'd buy the toy. Going into this knowing that we could sort of choose whatever um look we wanted. We were able to come up with a style that's super unique and it hasn't been done on Kong before and it's fantastic. We came up with something awesome. Whenever I start a game, I have to think of both is it going to be fun to shoot, but also I need, you know, some cool mechs. So, I'll generally kind of bookmark a place where mechs go and then make a rudimentary layout. Once I'm satisfied with the rudimentary layout, then I'll focus on the mechs with my engineer and then we'll, you know, tweak the layout as needed to make the mechs work. So, when you think King Kong, you think giant gorilla. Kong actually started way way bigger uh than he ended up on the final game. meaning the only thing that would have been on the playfield would have been his left arm reaching through the back panel. You don't really see King Kong. Um, so we settled on a more animatronic like mechanism for this game. Our system programmer Mitch created a tool that allows us to animate a 3D mech on the screen and then we can export that data into the Kong Mac. Every animation for King Kong starts with a a fully digital creation of the animation. So whatever animation the programmer or Keith or an animator decides might tie in well to LCD or playfield rules, they can ideulate and create digitally um using our customuilt pipeline. One of the exciting moments on Kong was when the actual Kong mech was plugged in on the playfield and we're seeing him almost hit the glass and actually stop the ball. When that got plugged in, we had three of those mechs in a row and they were almost doing YMCA. I wanted Kong to interact with the ball in some way. So, the whole sequence of events for uh Kong to knock the train over is you light lock by hitting down the drop targets, you lock a couple balls, Kong lets him go. The third ball, you know, Kong will stop. He's looking for Anne. When he finds out it's not Anne, he he just lets go and then gets angry and flips the train and mayhem ensues. Balls fly everywhere. the the magnet area had always been themed the spider pit and there was some highlevel ideas of you know animating or motorizing the spider but nothing that had ever actually made it to a prototype. Um and one morning I walk into you know Keith's office and he's like hey check this out and there was a spider on a spring. I've always thought there was something more we can do with a magnet since you're you know pulling down a ball with magnetism. Why can't we put something above that to also pull down? The whole spider mag was born off of Amazon. So, I went on there, bought a Halloween tarantula, cut up some spring steel, drilled it on there, stuck it above a magnet. And I I showed Rick say like, "Look, when you pulse the magnet, it causes the spider to actually crash down on the playfield." It's like, "Well, we don't want that cuz we don't actually want to bash the spider." So, you know, we kind of toned it back a bit just to animate him a little bit, but when we do want to bring him down to catch the ball, he can do that. That spider is probably the silliest thing I've worked on in my entire time at Stern. Keith's requirements for the gong mechanism presented a really interesting challenge for a gameplay device. Our original gong was kind of motorized and went up and down and it wasn't that fun. So, we tried iteration two, which was more of a kickback mechanism, and we thought this was way more fun. We needed something that can transition between a traditional bash target, but also as a flyaway target that let the ball pass through. It will basically push back on a spring any ball hits that come in it. So you're basically blocking the shot. Once the gong has been hit enough that it's qualified, we remove that spring force that stops them from swinging backwards that lets the ball travel through the gong. So the biplane ramp is probably my new favorite ramp in pinball. It's very steep helical ramp that feeds the red in lane very quickly. Knowing it was themed as a biplane, you immediately think of all the swooping and diving and attacking of King Kong. So, we wanted to build a ramp that made the player feel like the ball was doing that. I figured this is perfect. This is the tallest ramp we've ever done. And I wanted to be, you know, fed from a side flipper. I just loved the combo flow of, you know, shooting an orbit and then shooting that thing and it just comes flying through there so fast. We were accompanied by three iconic pinball artists to develop this art package. It's Kevin Oconor, Greg Ferrris, and Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti). I've always wanted to work with Greg Freres. Growing up, Frontier was my favorite game. And never in a million years did I think, you know, 40 years later I'd be working with this guy. Yeah, we love putting Easter eggs in the artwork. And since there was no licenser on this one, we had an empty slate to do whatever we want. So, Greg Freres put some of his prior games in the glyphs. We have Gary in there in a couple places. is we have a shark fin, you know, just throwbacks to titles that other people worked on who also worked on this project. So, yeah, it was a lot of fun having the the free reign to do that. I think the art uh for the playfield is awesome. It's really cool how they got to use the data east lower bottom part of the playfield from Kevin Oconor. And then Zombie Yeti with the back glasses, he just knocked it out of the park on those. The premium back glass is, you know, one of my favorite pieces of art done for this game. It's also probably got the most Easter eggs on an actual backlass that we've done in a while. So, I'll leave that to the uh the player to find. The artists really came through. We have a mixture of like 2D, 3D. So, it's like everybody had to bust out every skill to to make it look the way it did. It's supposed to be like you're watching film reels on a on a theater in the 30s and 40s and then sometimes it'll show you that and then it'll cut to like a full color version. So, it's like what you would see in real environment. We storyboarded everything out first. Then we do an animatic stage where we cut those storyboards up and animate them into like what I call short attention span theater, right? Like the 3-se secondond award. Like something happens, something happens, blam, score. Throughout the game as King Kong, you're climbing up the building, shooting the climb arrows with the ultimate goal of getting to the top. In just about every Keith game, there's going to be some amount of humor. As Kong is climbing the building, he can occasionally punch through the window. he has to like look in windows or smash windows and look and see if that's the person he wants to get, you know, if that's an or not. So, after about doing about three or four of those, I'm like, I don't know, he should probably eat a guy. Every once in a while, he'll pull a guy out and just like eat him. He's like, okay. Like, it's kind of a throwback to the old pinball games where they were trying hard to add some humor in the game. There are animated bananas in this game. The animatics are what gives the audio guy like a blueprint. I get those and then I get to make fun sounds for all these crazy monsters on Terror Island. You have T-Rex, you have an octopus insect, you got a giant spider, obviously a lot of jungle drums and things like that. Jerry is known for his metallic sounds, so we we have to rein him in often, but here's a perfect game, Jerry. There's a gong. You get to do your dream metallic sound. I apparently like the metallic sounds. Keith brought that up on Godzilla. I I didn't want anything modern sounding because it's a kind of a retro theme. So, it's a mixture of of Island and New York City, but all in the same orchestral family. Of course, it's fun to make a monster game because what do they do? They just break stuff and they scream and they roar. The hard part is they don't talk. We have a great voice cast. Keith and I have loved working with Rick Ze on almost every game. Well, shiver me timbers. Rick is the boat captain and uh kind of tells you what to do in the game. Watch your stern. And then we got Rick's daughter. She's making her pinball debut as Ando. I knew I shouldn't have brought a backpack full of bananas to this island. Brian "Q" Quinn from Impractical Jokers is Jimmy. Man, I wish someone would invent video games. Oh, that's a fun one. That's funny. Jimmy is a is a younger guy who's just eager to be on this expedition. Uh, no. I'm not scared. Since it was a a retro theme, his script is more like you would have heard in the old movies. Is it like that 1930s thing where he's like, "Hello, boys." Like that sort of thing. Some fellas my age are stuck sweeping floors. I'm out here seeing the world. Yeah. Brian was he was pretty funny. Uh, he was doing all these gorilla sounds, but nothing was coming through the microphone. Like Zoom kept cutting out, so we couldn't hear half of what he was saying. That looked great. Um, we we couldn't hear any of it, but it looks like it's going to sound awesome. So, we're kind of going for a classic '90s vibe with the voice work. No, Mr. Kong, I expect you to die. You're playing and you hear this joke call out or a call out you don't hear very often as a reference to another game that just, you know, cracks a smile. Hey, that looks like Nublar. If we're taking him on board, we're going to need a bigger boat. Heat. Heat. So, if you like destruction and monsters rampaging throughout, you know, major metropolitan areas, this is the game for you. It's got a really deep rule set. It's getting deeper every day, and the shots are great. I remember the first time playing it and how smooth it was, how everything flows. You can hit just about any shot from any flipper. There's lots of flowing shots. There's lots of stop and go shots. There's a variety of shots that do different things to the ball and they all feel fun. There's going to be so much action. It's so fast. You're just going to be shooting combos, doing whatever modes. I just designed games that I think are fun and if everyone else thinks they're fun, that's great. I'll have a job. Uh the day everyone stops thinking they're fun, then uh I don't know. I'll go back to something else. Keith's got a future uh in pinball, I think. Um a lot of people don't and uh that's too bad, but hopefully I win.