Middle-earth in video games

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Middle-earth in video games began in 1982, with characters that moved and acted on their own, even when the player wasn't watching. That game, built by the British studio Melbourne House, was called The Hobbit. In the decades since, the license has passed between studios including Electronic Arts, Vivendi Games, and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. Other games arrived with no license at all, built by fans and hobbyists instead. What follows traces how that license kept changing hands, and what each new owner chose to build with it.

• 2. Text Adventures And First Steps

  ›

  Melbourne House built The Hobbit around a full-sentence parser called Inglish, letting players type complete commands instead of the usual two-word verb and noun. The studio followed it with three more licensed adventures: 1986's The Fellowship of the Ring, 1987's Shadows of Mordor, and 1989's The Crack of Doom. A separate text adventure appeared on the BBC Micro around the same time, sharing nothing with Melbourne House's games except its source material.

  In 1987, Melbourne House also released War in Middle Earth, a real-time strategy game set in Tolkien's world. Konami took its own approach with an action-strategy title, J. R. R. Tolkien's Riders of Rohan.

  In 1990, Interplay partnered with Electronic Arts to release Lord of the Rings Vol. I, a role-playing game covering the first book's events. A CD-ROM edition included cut-scenes taken from Ralph Bakshi's animated film adaptation. The following year brought Vol. II: The Two Towers, continuing the story into the second book. Interplay's games ran mainly on PC and Amiga, though a later Super Nintendo version told the story differently from its computer counterpart.

• 3. A License Split In Two

  ›

  Electronic Arts secured the rights to Peter Jackson's three Lord of the Rings films for New Line Cinema, while Vivendi Games obtained a separate licence to make games from Tolkien's books through Tolkien Enterprises. The split produced an unusual situation. EA made no game covering The Fellowship of the Ring, but built The Two Towers, spanning events from the first two films, and The Return of the King. Vivendi went the other direction, releasing only a Fellowship of the Ring game, drawn from the book rather than the film.

  Vivendi's book rights kept its designers from using anything out of the films, but let them include elements of the story the movies had left out. Electronic Arts faced the opposite limit: bound to material from the films alone, its games sometimes left out or altered pieces of the original story.

  In 2003, Vivendi released a Hobbit game built for a younger audience, alongside the real-time strategy title The Lord of the Rings: War of the Ring. Two more film spin-offs followed in 2004, The Battle for Middle-earth, a real-time strategy game, and The Third Age, a turn-based role-playing game. A PSP-exclusive title, Tactics, arrived in 2005.

  In 2005, Electronic Arts secured the rights to both the films and the books, and folded material from each into The Battle for Middle-earth II. The studio's run under this license ended with The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, built by Pandemic Studios on the same engine as Star Wars: Battlefront. It reached the PC and every seventh-generation console except the Wii and PSP in early 2009, drawing mixed reviews, with the Nintendo DS version reviewed slightly better. Electronic Arts had already had its license extended by several months to finish the game. Once it shipped, the rights passed, through Tolkien Enterprises, to Warner Bros.

• 4. A World From The Books

  ›

  Turbine, Inc. announced in May 2005 that it had won exclusive rights from Tolkien Enterprises to build a massively multiplayer online game from Tolkien's novel. The result, The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, launched on the 24th of April 2007. It opened with only the region of Eriador, stretching from the Grey Havens to the Misty Mountains.

  Turbine's license explicitly barred any story or design taken from the films, so the team leaned on the books instead. That restriction let designers add lesser-known corners of Middle-earth and references the movies had never shown. Later expansions more than doubled the size of the game world, adding Moria, Lothlorien, Mirkwood, Isengard, and Rohan.

  Mines of Moria arrived as the first expansion on the 18th of November 2008, followed by Siege of Mirkwood on the 1st of December 2009. Rise of Isengard went live on the 27th of September 2011, adding Dunland, the Gap of Rohan, and Isengard, home to the tower of Orthanc. Riders of Rohan followed on the 15th of October 2012, opening the Eaves of Fangorn and the eastern reaches of Rohan up to the East Wall. Helm's Deep launched in November 2013, filling in the rest of the Rohan landscape.

• 5. Two Sides Of Warner Bros

  ›

  The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn's Quest launched as Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment's first release under its new license, retelling Peter Jackson's trilogy from Aragorn's point of view. Wii and PlayStation 3 versions used motion controls to simulate sword, shield, and bow combat.

  The 2010s then brought three Middle-earth games dark and violent enough to earn a Mature rating from the ESRB. Snowblind Studios released the first, The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, an action role-playing game set in northern Middle-earth, on the 1st of November 2011. Monolith Productions followed with a two-game, non-canon series called Middle-earth: Shadow, set between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Its protagonist, a Ranger named Talion, bonds with the Elf spirit Celebrimbor and gains wraith-like powers to fight his enemies. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor came out in 2014, and its sequel, Shadow of War, followed in 2017.

  Alongside those Mature-rated titles, Warner Bros. also released Lego The Lord of the Rings and Lego The Hobbit, family-friendly adaptations covering the film trilogy plus The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug. In 2019, The Lord of the Rings: Adventure Card Game brought the physical card game to digital form, becoming the first Middle-earth video game on the Nintendo Switch.

• 6. Changing Hands Again

  ›

  Warner Bros. Games lost its Middle-earth publishing rights in 2022, after Embracer Group, the parent company of THQ Nordic, purchased Middle-earth Enterprises. Several different companies then began developing or publishing their own Middle-earth games under license from MEE.

  Daedalic Entertainment announced The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, an action-adventure centered on the title character, in March 2019. Originally due in 2021 and later pushed to 2022, the game finally reached Microsoft Windows and most non-Nintendo consoles through publisher Nacon on the 25th of May 2023. It was met with generally negative reviews.

  Electronic Arts returned to Middle-earth on the 10th of May 2023, its first release in the setting since 2009's Conquest, with the mobile game The Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-earth. Built by EA Capital Games as a turn-based role-playing game, it played much like the studio's earlier Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. Electronic Arts shut the game down on the 24th of May 2024, less than a year after launch, amid the video game industry's 2023-2024 layoffs, which hit the company's own development projects.

  Free Range Games built The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria, a survival-crafting multiplayer game published by North Beach Games for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and Windows on the 24th of October 2023. Set during the Fourth Age, it follows a company of dwarves trying to reclaim their lost home and rebuild the kingdom of Khazad-dum. In 2024, Weta Workshop announced Tales of the Shire: A Lord of the Rings Game, a non-violent title about the peaceful daily life of Hobbits. Private Division released it on the 29th of July 2025, on the same platforms as Return to Moria plus the Nintendo Switch.

• 7. Built Without A License

  ›

  Postern released Shadowfax in 1982, a side-scrolling action game for the Spectrum, Commodore 64, and VIC-20, in which Gandalf rides his horse Shadowfax while cutting down an endless line of Nazgul. Moria followed in 1983, a roguelike loosely inspired by The Fellowship of the Ring, unconnected to an earlier 1975 game of the same name with only a thin Tolkien link.

  Moria's popularity spawned its own descendants. Angband arrived in 1990, drawing loosely on The Silmarillion, and the Tolkien-themed MUSH Elendor launched in 1991. Two Lord of the Rings MUDs followed, MUME, short for Multi-Users in Middle-earth, in 1992, and The Two Towers in 1994.

  Programmer Adam Thornton built his own homebrew Atari 2600 text adventure based on The Fellowship of the Ring and self-published it in 2002, unconnected to any commercial attempt at the same platform. Tolkien-themed mods and custom maps later spread across games including Heroes of Might and Magic, Warcraft III, Neverwinter Nights, Rome: Total War, Medieval 2: Total War, Warlords 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Mount and Blade, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, and Age of Wonders.

  Minecraft became a favored tool for recreating Middle-earth, most notably through the servers MCME and ArdaCraft, along with the large-scale mod The Lord of the Rings Mod: Bringing Middle-earth to Minecraft. The Middle-Earth DEM Project went further still, compiling a playable dataset for Outerra's engine that models the terrain of the whole of Middle-earth, complete with notable landmarks rendered as 3D models. Delta 4 took the comedic route, releasing two parody games: Bored of the Rings in 1985, not directly based on the Harvard Lampoon novel that shared its name, and The Boggit in 1986.

• 8. Games That Never Arrived

  ›

  Parker Brothers announced The Lord of the Rings: Journey to Rivendell for the Atari 2600 in 1983, but the game never reached shelves. A prototype ROM of it survives today, held at AtariAge. Interplay planned a third role-playing installment after its first two Lord of the Rings games, but it never came out, and a separate Lord of the Rings game Electronic Arts planned for the Sega Genesis met the same fate.

  Sierra On-Line contracted Troika Games in 2000 to build a Lord of the Rings game based on the novel. Sierra chose to develop the project internally the following year, then cancelled it altogether in 2002 when it shut down its development studio.

  Electronic Arts began work on an open-world role-playing game called The Lord of the Rings: The White Council, but put it on indefinite hold in early 2007, with no further word on its development or release status ever surfacing. More than a decade later, a similar fate met the Nintendo Switch version of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which was planned but has yet to appear, even though the game shipped elsewhere in 2023.