Recently, video game designer Jon Burton pulled the curtain back on his highly ambitious attempt to develop a Lord Of The Rings/The Hobbit video game that would have tied in with the release of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. Sadly, the game never released, even though a cool million was spent on the final pitch. So what went wrong?
To start, you have to look at Jon Burton’s development company, Traveller’s Tales, who are best known for their various LEGO games over the years: LEGO Batman, LEGO Harry Potter, LEGO Avengers, etc. A game set in Middle-earth would have been one of the company’s few big-budget forays outside the world of LEGO games, which they started to focus on in earnest a few years before The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey hit theaters.
Before that, Traveller’s Tales had some experiencing working in licensed fantasy worlds. Back in 2005, they released an adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia, and then developed a sequel game for Prince Caspian.
While Narnia might have worked out, The Hobbit most definitely did not. Burton explains the ins and outs of his failed pitch on YouTube channel, GameHut. Check it out below:
He explains that the video game was to be pitched in New Zealand in front of Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro, who at that time was going to direct The Hobbit movies. However, despite the game being planned to adapt The Hobbit, Burton thought it would be best to use Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies as a template for the pitch, which is why you see test footage of Gandalf, Frodo and the rest in the video.
“It all got a little out of hand,” Burton explains. It does seem a little over-the-top to spend $1,000,000 to create four fully playable, highly detailed levels for a pitch. On top of that, these levels wouldn’t even be available in the final product.
Believe it or not, the pitch was actually successful and the game was initially given the green light. Burton says Guillermo del Toro was very excited in particular. As it turns out, it was Warner Bros. that was skeptical of the game. They would have preferred a game that told its own story and ran alongside the movie, rather than simply recreating what we saw onscreen. “Warner Bros. didn’t want a game that was based directly on the movie in the same world at the same time,” Burton recalled. That’s the approach they would later take with games like Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, to pretty big success.
Still, it’s a shame we lost what looked like it could have been a very cool game. And Traveller’s Tales did eventually make a couple of games set in Middle-earth, just with the LEGO license.
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