Lord of the Rings games are hit and miss, with the highs of Battle for Middle-earth being offset by the incredible lows of Conquest, where you play as Sauron taking over Middle-earth in an alternate universe where Frodo fails to destroy the Ring. That’s a cracking idea, sadly let down by the gameplay that Edge described as “ceaseless button-mashing” in its 2/10 review.
Somewhere in the middle sits the Shadow of Mordor series, which has fun gameplay, the revolutionary Nemesis System, and absolutely butchers Tolkien’s lore to force cameos from a Nazgulled Helm Hammerhand and sexy Shelob. You can’t have it all, I guess. But another Lord of the Rings game was nearly made, by none other than the creators of Fallout, and I can’t help but dream about what could have been.
Tim Cain, the man credited with creating the original Fallout games, revealed this news on his YouTube channel. You should check it out if you’re at all interested in ‘90s and ‘00s game development, as he’s full of tales and tidbits – not least this one about the demo for a Lord of the Rings game that never was.
The idea came about after Cain’s Troika Games had finished work on Arcanum, which has become a cult classic in its own right. After Troika’s proposal for a sequel was declined, Sierra Entertainment (then known as Sierra On-Line) approached them to make a demo for a Lord of the Rings game, as the company had just acquired the rights to the books.
Cain notes that he re-reads Tolkien’s trilogy often, so jumped at the opportunity despite the incredibly right turnaround for the demo. Troika put together a design document that Sierra liked and then set to work.
If you want an idea of how tight the deadline was, take a look at the demo that Troika put together. The developer used the Arcanum engine, but modified it so that it could use pre-rendered backgrounds for better detail. However, Cain notes that this “made the engine chug a little bit” and decimated the frame rate, especially when enemies were present. He shows off the demo in his video, which you can see below, and you can see that the main menu is pulled straight from Arcanum, as Cain notes the team didn’t have time to do any work on the UI.
As you can see, it’s pretty choppy and the shield animation is completely broken, so your poor little Hobbit can’t actually walk anywhere with it equipped. However, the little Hobbit hole is adorable, and the spider enemies (purely for the demo, because Troika knew it would use spiders later in the game). The ideas that the team had sound even better, though.
Fellow Fallout alum Jason D. Anderson came up with the idea of a shadow Fellowship who you would have played as in the game – this is a party of individuals who ventured out ahead of the Fellowship we know and love in order to clear a path for them to travel safely. Cain explains that they worked with an advisor from the Tolkien Estate, so this idea must have been okay-ed, and allowed Troika to develop its own characters and story based around the events of The Lord of the Rings, but with a significant twist.
For example, the Shadow Fellowship would have made it across the Pass of Caradhras, as Saruman would not have brought down the storms on the mountain, Cain explains. There were also serious items of power that had big impacts on gameplay. You could find a Dwarven ring of power (I’m not sure exactly where, considering the Shadow Fellowship would have skipped the route through Moria), and a Palantir to aid your quest. However, these items would raise your Corruption level with every use, a status that was impossible to remove.
The team was split on what would happen if your Corruption meter filled completely, but Cain wanted the character to become fully corrupted and turn into a Ringwraith, working with Sauron for the rest of the campaign. Each member of the party would have different stats and skill trees based on their race, including different resistances to magical artefacts. In classic Tolkien fashion, Hobbits are most resistant to Corruption and Humans most susceptible.
Cain also drops more hints about the game in the comments to the video, giving an example of one of Troika’s original characters who would appear in the Shadow Fellowship, Zermaine the Colorless. He’s “a far-travelled Wizard of few words and less history,” Cain explains. “Zermaine has walked the lands of Middle-Earth, keeping to himself and watching the affairs of Men, Elves and Dwarves.”
Sierra liked the demo, Cain says, but instead of asking Troika to make the full game based on the quick demo and in-depth design doc, pulled development internally. We can assume that this design became The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, released in 2002 by Sierra. WXP Games developed the Xbox game, which for a long time was planned as an exclusive for the console. Later in development, Pocket Studios created a version for Game Boy Advance, and in May 2002 Sierra announced that Surreal Studios was working on PC and PS2 versions of the game.
The game was critically panned on release, despite the inclusion of book-favourite characters like Tom Bombadil and Old Man Willow. It didn’t help that it was released near EA’s The Two Towers tie-in game, a much more action-packed affair (despite its Tiger Woods engine) with plenty of references, quotes, and cutscenes from the Peter Jackson movies.
I can’t help but imagine what Troika would have done with The Lord of the Rings. Cain says the idea was much less of an RPG than Arcanum, but imagine if the developer had returned to its Fallout roots and crafted a Middle-earth CRPG. It would have been lore-bending and less faithful than the game that WXP made, but Cain’s descriptions contain far fewer crimes against Tolkien than the Shadow games that are well-loved thanks to their innovative gameplay. It can’t have been any worse than the game that Sierra actually released, anyway.