Middle-earth in video games

In 1982, Melbourne House began a series of licensed Lord of the Rings graphical interactive fiction (text adventure) games with The Hobbit, based on the book with the same name. The game was considered quite advanced at the time, with interactive characters that moved between locations independent of the player, and Melbourne House's 'Inglish' text parser which accepted full-sentence commands where the norm was simple two-word verb/noun commands. They went on to release 1986's The Fellowship of the Ring, 1987's Shadows of Mordor, and 1989's The Crack of Doom. A BBC Micro text adventure released around the same time was unrelated to Melbourne's titles except for the literary origin. In 1987, Melbourne House released War in Middle Earth, a real-time strategy game. Konami also released an action-strategy game titled J. R. R. Tolkien's Riders of Rohan.

The Lord of Rings: Journey to Rivendell was announced in 1983 by Parker Brothers for the Atari 2600, but was never released. The prototype ROM can be found at AtariAge.[3][4]

In 1990, Interplay, in collaboration with Electronic Arts (who would later obtain the licenses to the film trilogy), released Lord of the Rings Vol. I (a special CD-ROM version of which featured cut-scenes from Ralph Bakshi's animated adaptation) and the following year's Lord of the Rings Vol. II: The Two Towers, a series of role-playing video games based on the events of the first two books. A third installment was planned, but never released. Interplay's games mostly appeared on the PC and Amiga, but later they did a Lord of the Rings game for the SNES, which was different from the PC Version.

Thereafter, no official The Lord of the Rings titles were released until the making of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy for New Line Cinema in 2001–2003, when mass-market awareness of the story appeared. Electronic Arts obtained the licenses for the three films, while Vivendi Games obtained the licence to produce games based on the books from Tolkien Enterprises - this gave rise to an unusual situation: Electronic Arts produced no adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, but produced adaptations named The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (which covered events of both the first two films) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, whereas Vivendi only produced a game covering the first volume of Tolkien's work, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. While Vivendi's access to the book rights prevented them from using material from the film, it permitted them to include elements of The Lord of the Rings which were not in the films. EA, on the other hand, were not permitted to do this, as they were only licensed to develop games based on the films, which left out elements of the original story or deviated in places.

In 2003, Vivendi produced an adaptation of The Hobbit, aimed at a younger audience: The Hobbit, as well as a real-time strategy game The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring, both based on Tolkien's literature.

Further spin-offs from the film trilogy were produced: A real time strategy game The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth, and turn based role-playing game The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age were released in 2004, and a PSP-exclusive title, The Lord of the Rings: Tactics in 2005.

In 2005, EA secured the rights to both the films and the books, thus The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II incorporated elements of the film adaptions, and the original Tolkienesque lore. EA also began work on an open world role-playing video game called The Lord of the Rings: The White Council, but development of the game was cancelled in 2007.

In May 2005 Turbine, Inc. announced that they had acquired exclusive rights to create massively multiplayer online role-playing games based on the novel by Tolkien Enterprises,[5] and launched The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar on 24 April 2007. Initially, the game covered the region of Eriador, from the Grey Havens to the Misty Mountains, and about as far north and south, but subsequent updates and expansion packs have more than doubled the game world, including areas such as Moria, Lothlórien, Mirkwood, Isengard and Rohan. The game is based on the books and Turbine's licence explicitly prohibits them from including any story or design elements unique to the movie adaptations. On the other hand, this allowed game designers to include lesser-known areas and references to the events, which are absent from the movies. The first expansion to The Lord of the Rings Online was released on 18 November 2008, entitled Mines of Moria.[6] The next expansion, Siege of Mirkwood, was released on 1 December 2009.[7] The third expansion titled Rise of Isengard went live on 27 September 2011 and included the areas of Dunland, the Gap of Rohan and Isengard where the tower of Orthanc is located.[8] The fourth expansion, Riders of Rohan, was released on 15 October 2012, featuring The Eaves of Fangorn and eastern part of Rohan up to the East Wall.[9] The fifth expansion, Helm's Deep, launched in November 2013 and added the remaining of Rohan landscape.

The Lord of the Rings: Conquest produced by Pandemic Studios using the same engine used in Star Wars: Battlefront was released in early 2009 on the PC and all seventh-generation video game systems except the Wii and PSP. All versions received mixed reviews, with the Nintendo DS version garnering slightly better reviews.[10] The game also marked the end of Electronic Arts licence, which had already been extended some months so that the game could be completed. Subsequently, the licence, obtained via Tolkien Enterprises, passed to Warner Bros.[11]

After Warner Bros. gained the licence to publish Middle-earth video games, the first game to be published under this new licence holder would be The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn's Quest, an action-adventure retelling of the Peter Jackson film trilogy from Aragorn's perspective, on the PlayStation 2 and all seventh-generation systems except the Xbox 360, with the Wii and PlayStation 3 versions taking advantage of motion controls to simulate sword, shield and bow combat.

The 2010s saw the release of three darker and more violent Middle-Earth video games that were rated Mature by the ESRB. The first of such games was Lord of the Rings: War in the North, an action role-playing game that takes place in Northern Middle-earth. It was developed by Snowblind Studios and released on 1 November 2011. Then Monolith Productions developed a two-game, non-canon Middle-Earth: Shadow spin-off series, set between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The main protagonist of these two action RPGs is a Ranger named Talion who bonds with the Elf spirit Celebrimbor, gaining wraith-like powers to deal with adversaries. The first game, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was released in 2014, with its sequel, Middle-earth: Shadow of War, released in 2017.

In that same decade, Warner Bros. also released Lego The Lord of the Rings and Lego The Hobbit, two family-friendly Lego video game adaptations of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, The Hobbit and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

• Early efforts:

• Modern games:

• Console and PC games:

• Browser and flash games:

• Mobile games:

• The Boggit
• Bored of the Rings (1985), partially inspired by the parody adaptation of the same name (1969).