Gameplay From Canceled Lord of the Rings Game
The founder of Traveller's Tales showed fragments of gameplay from an abandoned project set in the universe of The Lord of the Rings. The creators spent over a million dollars on demos, but the publisher was not interested in the game.
Traveller's Tales studio is known mainly for creating LEGO games, including LEGO The Lord of the Rings and LEGO The Hobbit. It turns out that the developer also wanted to create a more serious work set in Tolkien's Middle-earth, but nothing came out of it. Moreover, this failure proved to be quite expensive for the developer.
This information was revealed by the founder of the studio, Jon Burton, on his YouTube channel GameHut. In 2008, Traveller's Tales wanted to create a game under license of The Hobbit. The team received six months to prepare a demo to convince the publisher to greenlight the project.
At that time, the cinema project was in its infancy and Traveller's Tales had nothing to base its demos on. Therefore, it was decided to follow the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. The developers went all out and spent a total of over a million dollars to create four refined playable levels and five tech demos. They showed stealth mechanics, boss battles, open-world exploration, mechancs associated with the One Ring and the engine's ability to generate large-scale battles.
These efforts were appreciated by Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro (he was originally supposed to direct The Hobbit), but ultimately the project was not accepted by Warner Bros. The company wanted a game that would tell a different story from the film, and Traveller's Tales demos, faithfully reproducing sequences from the silver screen, did not convince the publisher that the studio would be able to handle the challenge. Thus, the developer had to accept the loss of many months of work and over a million dollars.
Jon Burton admits that his studio overdid it when making the demos. He doesn't regret it, however, because it was an invaluable experience for the studio, which eventually created two LEGO games set in the world of Lord of the Rings later on.
