7 weirdos to rule them all: The strangest games based on The Lord Of The Rings

One thread running through almost every early gaming adaptation of Tolkien’s work is a sense of over-reaching ambition. After all: You’ve just gotten your hands on one of the most beloved properties of all time—the ur-text of modern fantasy. Aren’t you going to go for it?

Take, for instance, 1982's The Hobbit, developed by Beam Software. Not content with merely creating a text adventure version of a hobbit’s holiday—complete with some lovely graphics of Bilbo’s beloved hole—Beam set out to create a living version of Middle-earth, with characters and creatures moving around its large map independent of the players’ own actions. On the one hand, this system gives the impression of an impressive living world, one that won’t statically wait around for the player to come set things off. On the other, this dynamic world leads to things like, say, the note in the manual that admits the game might just go ahead and render itself completely unwinnable, since it’s totally possible for Gandalf to wander off somewhere ten minutes into the game and get himself eaten by a warg while Bilbo and Thorin are still trying to figure out how to get past those dang trolls.

The Hobbit also introduces a running theme in these games: the difficulty of adapting a book series where the most prominent heroes are the worst fighters, by far. Bilbo’s just not a warrior—although you can get in a lucky shot by typing “viciously attack Gandalf” as your first command of the game, thus creating a version of The Hobbit in which our beloved Baggins cracks the smoke-ring-blowing old bastard’s head open in the foyer of his house. Guile, instead, is the order of the day—and asking for help, which you’ll need a lot of if you want to make it all the way to the Lonely Mountain and back again.

Perhaps the most ambitious Tolkien adaptation ever programmed, Synergistic Software’s take on the trilogy attempts to give players a Galadriel-eye view of the entire War Of The Ring, from the individual movements of Frodo and his crew, all the way up to controlling the mighty armies of Gondor as they fend off the forces of Sauron across all of Middle-earth. No game, as far as we can tell, has ever attempted to so fully capture the full sweep of Lord Of The Rings, whether it’s ground-level encounters with Tom Goddamn Bombadil and Radagast The Brown, or the movement of massive battalions all across Mordor’s blasted surface.

It is, unsurprisingly, also a supremely messy package. Controls are deeply unintuitive, even as you’re asked to command a staggering number of elements from the Shire all the way to Minas Tirith, and the movement of your units is jerky and difficult to predict. In looking up some strategies to help us get a handle on the game’s basics, though, we did stumble onto some advice that throws the whole idea of a gaming adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings—seizing control of Tolkien’s narrative, and placing it in a players’ hands—into perfect focus. As “Typed by VULCAN,” one walkthrough for the game suggests a plan even more straightforward than “why don’t they just ride the eagles to Mount Doom?”: walking Frodo and his crew straight up to the nearest Nazgul, which will then promptly slaughter them, grab The Ring, and do all the hard work of transporting the accursed thing back to Barad-dûr, where your waiting forces can steal it back from them for a quick slam dunk into the nearby volcano. Why didn’t Elrond ever think of that?

The worst game on this list by a Shire mile, The Lord Of The Rings, Vol. I is notable for its sheer misguided nature: There was simply no way an uber-basic top-down action game on the Super Nintendo could ever hope to capture even a fraction of Middle-earth’s staggering scope—especially when you spend the majority of your time playing it roaming around in random caves, whacking ineffectually at wolves with a stick while trying to retrieve an old man’s glasses.

But we’re being unfair to Interplay’s J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings, Vol. I (deep breath), which also sends Frodo and his crew of colorfully cloaked friends into barrows, forests, and mines to gruffle around through the local lost and found. (The ineffectual whacking remains, regardless; we can’t remember the last time swinging a weapon in a video game felt this hollow.) This, really, is the game that every other Lord Of The Rings adaptation gets points for not being; a rote attempt to shove a barebones and boring skeleton of a video game into a beloved license and then declare the whole endeavor “good enough.” The music is lovely; the text is delightful; the visuals are even sort of okay, if you have a taste for caves. But playing JRRTTLOTRVI captures none of the dignity of Tolkien’s work, reducing an epic quest to just so much errand work. The best thing you can say about it is that it cuts out long before the The Fellowship Of The Ring would normally conclude, and did so poorly, sales-wise, that it guaranteed no sequel would ever darken the franchise’s door.

The PlayStation 2/GameCube/original Xbox era of gaming hasn’t aged especially well, as an aesthetic—and Sierra’s turn-of-the-century Hobbit game is a prime example of its polygonal horrors. Created at least in part because Sierra’s parent company, Vivendi, had the rights to make games based off of Tolkien’s books—but not based on the Peter Jackson films that had already started to dominate the culture by this point—The Hobbit might charitably be described as “Bilbo-Kazooie,” an attempt to make a gaming version of Tolkien’s beloved children’s book that kids might actually play.

The actual craft on display here is completely competent, once you can adjust yourself to the dead-eyed horror in digital Bilbo and his various dwarven allies’ eyes. (There’s even an interesting, and rare, focus on Bilbo’s burglary talents, with lots of little minigames used every time he cracks open a chest full of gems.) But there’s something undeniably strange about seeing Middle-earth—so majestic, so stately—reflected in the aesthetics of a simple “grab all the diamonds” puzzle platformer from this era. Certainly, it’s the only version of The Hobbit we’ve ever seen in which The Battle Of Five Armies ends because a hobbit set off a Rube-Goldberg machine that catapulted a building onto a tap-dancing goblin wizard’s head.

The first direct, if blocky, spin on the Jackson films to make our list, the two Lego Tolkien games are here mostly because of their tonal strangeness. It’s not like the Jackson films, or Tolkien’s books, are humorless. (After all, who can forget the knee-slapping, side-splitting hilarity of “Nobody tosses a dwarf.”) but that doesn’t mean it’s not profoundly odd to see, say, Isildur’s failure to relinquish The One Ring, damning all of Middle-earth to centuries of looming, nigh-apocalyptic doom, rendered as though a spirited rendition of “Everything Is Awesome” might suddenly break out.

That’s to say nothing of Sauron, who, in the opening battle of Lego The Lord Of The Rings, towers over the battlefield—before engaging in one of the series’ typically simplistic boss battles, the kind where you whale on a boss after he manages to get his big mean stick buried in the ground for several minutes. Maybe the perfect example of the games’ strange blend of serious and silly, though, is the Ring itself, which is rendered with a certain degree of non-Lego photorealism, the better to emphasize its power—except Lego minifigs don’t have fingers, so it ends up getting worn as a bracelet instead.

(Also, this is as good a place as any to note that this is, somehow, the nicest version of The Shire we’ve ever gotten in video games, complete with that beautiful Howard Shore score. Say what you like about the Lego games, but when they adapt, they really adapt.)

You’d think, what with the rights to any games based on Jackson’s movies tied up firmly in the hands of Electronic Arts—home to gaming’s greatest hotbed of “It worked last year, it’ll work this year, it’ll work forever” thinking—that the era of weird Lord Of The Rings games might have dried up in the mid-2000s. Take as your counter-example, then, The Lord Of The Rings: The Third Age, a perfectly normal turn-based role-playing game that is also some of the strangest fan-fiction to ever insert itself into the annals of the Tolkien legendarium.

Play-wise, The Third Age is relatively straightforward, blatantly copying the combat system of the then-recent Final Fantasy X, to some pretty sharp effect. Where things get wild, though, is in the game’s story, which somehow posits that, for almost the entirety of the Fellowship’s journey, they had a sort of shadow party—heroic Gondorian, spiritual elf, hardy dwarf, etc.—trailing like a mile behind them, keeping other threats off their back, and always just a few inches out of frame. What, you didn’t notice a small crew of heroes helping Gandalf while he was battling the Balrog on the bridge? Look again: The Third Age assures you that Boromi Berethor and his team were absolutely right there.

And, really, why not? Part of the fun of Tolkien-based games is in watching writers and programmers play around in lore they’ve been soaking in since they were teenagers; nothing here is necessarily any sillier than the stuff Monolith would trot out a decade later for its massively successful Middle-earth: Shadow Of ___ games. (Pretty human Shelob, anyone?) Sure, these kinds of inventions are rarely as blatant as “Okay, so then my guys show up at Helm’s Deep to save everybody, and then they fight at Pelennor Fields, and then Gandalf tells them how great they are, and then …” but that’s also kind of the point: Middle-earth is a shared sandbox, no matter who has the rights to any particular gaming license at any particular point in time. It’s a world that lives in millions of nerds’ heads, in a million different forms. It’s a place we all get to play—and there’s no wrong way to do that.