Long before The Lord of the Rings Online, there was Middle-Earth Online. Except there wasn’t, because it was cancelled.
Intended for release way back in 1999, a conflict of scope between the developers, publishers, and possibly even the Tolkien estate resulted in the game being postponed for 8 years, eventually appearing as The Lord of the Rings Online in 2007. Set during Middle-Earth’s Third Age, the game was routinely promoted in the gaming press years after its initial release had passed. Here’s a snippet from IGN:
Middle-Earth Online drops you smack-dab in the middle of the Third Age. Timeline wise, The Fellowship has just escaped Moria and is continuing their journey toward Mordor. Though players will never come face-to-face with any members of The Fellowship, rumors of the heroes’ actions will filter into the game world through stories relayed by famous NPCs. For instance, exploring The Shire would never turn up a personal meeting with Frodo, Sam, Merry or Pippin, but Farmer Maggot might relay a story of chasing a certain group of mischievous hobbits off his land. Similarly, though you could explore Rivendell for days and never find Legolas Greenleaf, Elrond might speak with you if you could gain an audience with him.
In the new video from Computer Gaming Yesterday (above), games journalist Matt Smith explores everything that is known about why Middle-Earth Online failed to happen. Initially conceived to be different to fantasy hack-and-slash game, it’s arguable that many of the game’s concepts (such as desensitizing “your character to violent actions against others perhaps by mutilating dead animals”) were a little extreme for the time.
It’s certainly the sort of thing that saw the game pushed back again and again until the development team was eventually replaced.
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Christian Cawley is a writer and editor who covers consumer electronics, IT, and entertainment media. He has written for publications such as Computer Weekly, Linux Format, MakeUseOf.com, and Tech Radar.
He also produces podcasts, has a cigar box guitar, and of course, loves retro gaming.