In subsequent letters to his family and friends, Tolkien expressed both hesitance and excitement at the prospect of Hollywood adopting his Hobbits and magical rings for the silver screen. He passed away in 1973 — before the release of the now-famous Rankin/Bass Productions and Ralph Bakshi adaptations of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, respectively — and left his youngest son, Christopher Tolkien, to surmount the next big media mountain: making his father's works into interactive experiences.

"As far as I am concerned personally, I should welcome the idea of an animated motion picture, with all the risk of vulgarization," Tolkien wrote in a letter to a friend, taken from Humphrey Carpenter's collection The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, "though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility."

The trilogy, six books crammed into three lengthy volumes, told the story of a dark entity seeking to destroy and dominate the fantasy realm of Middle-earth, subjecting its inhabitants — Men, Elves, Dwarves, short humanoid creatures of Tolkien's invention called Hobbits and towering tree-like creatures called Ents — to his will. The books picked up after the events of Tolkien's previous novel, the whimsical The Hobbit, with a group of nine composed of all the world's races on a quest to destroy a magical ring that could turn the tide of the brewing war.

As the 21st century dawned, the team at Sierra On-Line subsidiary Inevitable Entertainment began working on another adventure game adaptation of The Hobbit. The team faced similar adaptation challenges as Interplay, only these came coupled with an even bigger problem: a heavy-handed direction from the Tolkien Estate.

In the end, Jacquay feels that the game — which received generally favorable reviews — was a good representation of Tolkien's works, and she is proud of what she was able to do within his world. The Lord of the Rings Vol. 1 was published in 1990. Two years later, Interplay launched Vol. 2: The Two Towers. A The Lord of the Rings Vol. 1 was published in 1994 for the SNES, but after a poor reception, a sequel was not picked up and the story was left unfinished.

"They fed me general ideas about what I could do with the product technically and I wrote a lot of material for them," she added. "I pulled things out of the air that made sense to me, but never really got any feedback."

"Things were a little looser back then," she said, "but still, there was a time when somebody came and told me that 'the game doesn't allow you do this; you're going to have design it a little differently,' that kind of thing.

Jaquays' approach to The Lord of the Rings was influenced by Iron Crown Enterprises' pen-and-paper role-playing games based on Tolkien's works. She modeled her own view of the fantasy world on the background material laid out in Iron Crown's Middle-earth Role-Playing adventure games and kept some details that many modern adaptations have left out — such as the enigmatic forest-dweller Tom Bombadil, who has made it into almost none of the modern adaptations. But while Jaquays had to stick to the more overarching details of Tolkien's world, she said that Interplay was less hands-on with the project than previous developers with licensed properties. Having spent time at Coleco and with the Dungeons and Dragons franchise, she was no stranger to a licensor's direction. However, because Middle-earth was still climbing its way into popularity at the time, she was awarded a certain degree of freedom for the game's framework.

"Everyone who knows the story of The Lord of the Rings knows what to expect and what encounters occur at what point," she explained, "so there's nothing fresh there. I thought it was okay to follow the story arc, but I [had players] cross back and forth across the map with mini-adventures and dungeons in between main events that supported the quest."

The entire game was scrapped and redone to fit Tolkien's world under the same license used for the Bakshi films, according to Jaquays. The Lord of the Rings Vol. 1 would retell the events of The Fellowship of the Ring through a series of map-based events, tasking players with quests based on the book's plot and adding side quests allowing them to further explore Middle-earth. It was "something like Lord of the Rings, but not quite," Jaquays said, as adapting the fantasy epic's myriad details — many of which are tiny, but important to the overall mythos — proved challenging.

"I had started documenting and designing and had been working on it for a couple of months already when one of the programmers I was working with said, 'By the way, we're not doing this anymore. We're doing a Lord of the Rings game," Jaquays told Polygon. "I had to translate all my ideas and overall design into The Lord of the Rings — they had an arrangement with the license holders."

Enthusiasm for Tolkien adaptations ramped up in the wake of the 1980 animated film The Return of the King, based on the final book in Tolkien's trilogy. Following Beam's text adventure, developer Interplay Productions turned over an in-production fantasy role-playing game, changing the theme to a Lord of the Rings adaptation. Writer Jennell Jaquays, now the owner of Dragongirl Studios , said she was hired by Interplay to write background and some "adventuring" for the RPG.

Back then, the original licensor — in this case the Tolkien Estate itself, or Tolkien Enterprises (now Middle-earth Enterprises ) — would allow licensees to sometimes resell the license. It appears that at this time the animated films shared a license with the first round of video games.

In 1982, Beam Software and publisher Melbourne House brought Tolkien's world to computers with a text adventure based on The Hobbit. (An emulator of the ZX Spectrum version is available to play online .)

The Lord of the Rings, according to Tolkien, is not a fairy story, and it's something that media based on the material has struggled with since the first BBC radio play, of which Tolkien was also not a fan. "I think poorly of the broadcast adaptations," Tolkien said of the 1955 production. "Except for a few details I think they are not well done, even granted the script and the legitimacy of the enterprise (which I do not grant)."

Tolkien's letters also share juicy tidbits of information on the development process and construction of Middle-earth, much of it found nowhere else in his published works. The author wrote at length to his friends with ideas for the world's mythology and the traits and tics of each race. Tolkien wrote lovingly of the characters he created, speaking of them as though they were real historical figures whose chronicles he dug up from some ancient tome. Among these letters are also those quoted in the body of this report, chronicling filmmakers' interest in bringing The Lord of the Rings to Hollywood.

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien covers nearly the entire span of the author's life, beginning with notes penned during his undergraduate studies at Oxford University in 1914 and continuing up until the four days preceding his death. In Tolkien's own voice, readers are offered a deeper insight into thoughts on his own career as a professor of the Anglo-Saxon language (or Old English) and his relationships with his wife Edith, his children and his friends.

Shortly after Tolkien's passing in 1973, English biographer Humphrey Carpenter began working on his biography. Published in 1977, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography drew heavily from Tolkien's seemingly bottomless stack of written correspondence. Of these materials, Carpenter selected more than 350 letters and released them in 1981 as a collection.

"An abridgment by selection with some good picture-work would be pleasant, and perhaps worth a good deal in publicity," he wrote to the same friend after reading the first written treatment of Zimmerman's adaptation. "But the present script is rather a compression with resultant over-crowding and confusion, blurring of climaxes, and general degradation: a pull-back towards more conventional 'fairy stories.'"

Tolkien was picky about interpretations of his work — the issue of adaptation from book to film is almost always a question of length, and what's not left on the cutting room floor is most likely smushed together for time.

In 2006, EA obtained the rights to Tolkien's books, just in time for development on The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth 2 — which launched that same year — and an open-world RPG called The Lord of the Rings: The White Council. Sources told Polygon that this literary package included the rights to a piece of Tolkien lore that today is barred from use by anyone: The Silmarillion.

"For example, we really struggled with Saruman for the Isengard faction because he doesn't show many real abilities in the movies," Comes said. "We lucked out that in the director's cut version of The Return of the King, he fires a fireball from the top of his tower down at Gandalf and others. So we were able to give him a fireball ability simply because it showed up in the director's cut on the DVD."

Working with only the movie license limited the team to the point that it sabotaged the game's design. EA had contact with Warner Bros., the film rights holders, and no contact with the Tolkien Estate. Comes said there was tension between the developers and the licensors, and negotiations were tricky.

In The Battle for Middle-earth, players got to pick a faction and defend themselves in the War of the Ring. Because only movie characters could be used, each side had a set number of heroes, and their abilities could only mirror what was seen in the film. This proved an uphill climb, with developers scouring the films for the tiniest thing they could use as a credible character ability.

"We were working solely with the movie license, which was odd," designer John Comes said of his time working on the project. Comes was brought onto The Battle for Middle-earth with 10 months left on the clock. EA was also hoping to get that game on shelves before Christmas. "We had this instance where we had spiders in the game and had to remove them because in the movies, the only spider was Shelob. Which seemed odd, because hey, spiders. But they were sticklers to those kinds of rules."

At the same time as The Third Age, EA had another The Lord of the Rings game in the pipeline — real-time strategy game The Battle for Middle-earth.

"We were legally limited with what we could do," he said. "We only had the IP franchise licensing rights to the movies, not to the lore. We wanted to do all this crazy stuff with the lore. We just couldn't. We weren't allowed."

Other than the long crunch, Monif said the biggest problem plaguing The Third Age was the license requiring that EA's games be beholden to the movies.

It was around this time that the famous "EA spouse" letter was published online, an open note from the wife of an EA employee describing the stress of the company's work environment. Her husband was working on The Battle for Middle-earth and its sequel.

The pair have since divorced, and Hoffman went on to serve two years on the International Game Developers Association's board of directors as well as a year each at Zynga and Loot Drop as a designer. She is currently a lead at game design studio GlassLab's Institute of Play, a company focused on using games as tools to enhance personal, social and educational development.

Hoffman's letter spurred three class-action lawsuits against EA — which saw Hasty and fellow engineers awarded $14.9 million in overtime pay — and an industry-wide overturn in labor laws . Hoffman and Hasty also founded GameWatch, an organization dedicated to keeping communication fair and open between employees and their companies.

"Never should it be an option to punish one's workforce with ninety hour weeks," Hoffman wrote. "In any other industry the company in question would find itself sued out of business so fast its stock wouldn't even have time to tank."

Hoffman's letter detailed the crunch period on The Battle for Middle-earth, which rapidly escalated from eight-hour days six days a week to twelve-hour days with no end in sight. She wrote of production members falling ill and calling out "in droves," salaried employees not being compensated with overtime pay or leave and the team being pushed to exhaustion.

"I'm what you might call a disgruntled spouse," Hoffman wrote in a letter that would shake the video game industry to its core. "To any EA executive that happens to read this, I have a good challenge for you: how about safe and sane labor practices for the people on whose backs you walk for your millions?"

On Nov. 10, 2004, a woman named Erin Hoffman published an anonymous LiveJournal post under the name "ea_spouse," detailing poor working conditions her husband Leander Hasty was being subjected to at Electronic Arts. Hasty was an engineer working on The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth and its sequel.

"We went into super-crunch for six months, built and shipped the game in under eight months," he said. "We had all the assets in the engine from the previous The Lord of the Rings games, the world was mostly laid out, and it came down to saying, 'We need to just build the game and go.' That was one of the hardest crunches I've done in my life."

In 2004, The Third Age team was pressured into its final crunch time due to financial stress on EA. Monif said the company was looking to "ship a product, and ship it fast," and with nearly 200 people working on the game at its peak and bills for sourcing cinematics needing to be paid, EA was looking to push The Third Age out the door as quickly as possible. The game needed to ship before Christmas, or there would be layoffs.

EA wanted an action-packed game with lots of in-game cinematics; the more visuals of iconic places from the movie, the better. Developers had hours of motion-capture footage to work with, and the pacing of the game became long fight sequences sandwiched between cutscenes — just like the mid-series Final Fantasy titles.

"But we also didn't want gameplay getting in the way of the story," he added. "The Lord of the Rings is such a beautiful universe, we didn't want gameplay that made players frustrated. So we basically looked around and said, 'How about Final Fantasy 7 and up? This is a good base to look at in terms of inspiration for something we can do.'"

"We had to go back and think, 'Is this game going to have a mainstream genre, or is it more core-niche?' Ultimately we were told we needed to be inspired by mainstream mechanics that we know players will want and enjoy and instinctively respond to. A pure kind of tactics grid-based game was seen as risky."

"We had to be creative with what we had," Monif said. "The gameplay made some very dramatic pivots. When it was first conceived, it was very much like The Banner Saga, a tactics game on a grid. It was a bold departure from what we had done in the past. But part of the mechanics of working in a big studio are the politics — because so much money is put into making these productions, millions and millions of dollars. The decision-makers look at what is successful and proven gameplay.

The Third Age became an RPG with turn-based mechanics like those in the Final Fantasy series — the combat screen itself actually somewhat resembles that of Final Fantasy 10 — with a ragtag band of heroes assisting the main characters of The Lord of the Rings.

Every character in The Third Age is based on someone seen in the background of a movie shot. From there, developers built backgrounds for these characters, fleshing out their history, skills and individual reasons for joining the shadow fellowship. It was a stretch contextually speaking, Monif said, but they got the green light to plow ahead. Monif recalled a meeting where the team was discussing adding women to the roster, pulling a random Elf and Rohan peasant wearing outfits they liked out of group scenes. In the movies, Gimli mentions a relative in passing; this became the Dwarven member of the secret Fellowship.

"What if there was a secret fellowship on a quest guarding the real Fellowship, making sure all these things happen?" Monif said. "They make reference to the main characters. That's a great way to play into the movies, by using characters from background shots of the movies or obscure references in the script."

The team at EA Redwood Shores (now Visceral Games) got the idea of creating a "shadow fellowship" made up of characters plucked from the background of movie scenes. This "shadow fellowship" would always be a step or two behind the canon Fellowship of the Ring, assisting on the sidelines in battles and generally following the basic plot of the trilogy — just not as main characters. The team got clearance from the Tolkien Estate to do so.

According to Monif, the design team had one meeting with Jackson and executives on both sides, a very brief call to check in. Jackson was too busy with the films to give any collaborative input on the game.

"We could only show or derive our fiction from the Tolkien universe in the movies," said Ash Monif, then project manager on The Third Age and now CEO of independent studio Grimm Bros. "For example, when we were planning the game, we wanted to have all these Dwarves and Dwarf armies and all that kind of stuff — and we couldn't because in the movies at the time, you only see one Dwarf, Gimli. It was very limiting to us: We had to basically get permission from Warner Bros. for everything and could only work in these very narrow confines of stuff that was in the movies."

EA published two Tolkien property games in 2004: The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age and The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth. Both followed the same rule as Sierra's games, but reversed: Developers could only use what was shown in the movies and were unable to touch the books.

Also in 2003, the same year as The Hobbit, Sierra published the real-time strategy game The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Ring, a game that played like Warcraft 3 and allowed players to participate in either side of Lord of the Rings' main war campaign. After these two titles, Sierra ceased to make games based on Tolkien's properties — sources told Polygon that this is when the company's hold on the book license ran out.

EA had the movie license. They started with the second Lord of the Rings book, The Two Towers, because along with the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring came the launch of the Xbox and GameCube; this made a multiplatform release out of the question in terms of time. The Two Towers film tie-in game was received favorably, as was 2003's The Return of the King.

"We'd all grown up reading Tolkien and we all thought, 'Fuck yeah, we're gonna make a fantastic adaptation,'" Brown said of the development team. "There were lots of earnest attempts and love that went into making that game a true representation of Middle-earth."

"In Rivendell, I had wanted Frodo to be going around town and sneaking into places to find things. Instead they had Aragorn hacking and slashing his way through giant spiders to get a watermelon," Caminos said. "Given how powerful a character Aragorn is, it just seemed silly having him do these menial tasks that would have been better suited for the Hobbits."

In 2002, Vivendi published The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Caminos said he was "horrified" when he played the finished game.

With less than a year left on the project, the team went into a crunch period that Brown said wasn't necessary at all. Areas were frantically reworked, mechanics hastily polished. What had started out as a loving adaptation by hardcore Tolkien fans for Tolkien fans had become a cartoony children's game.

"There was one very distinct point I remember: Our final producer from Vivendi looked at a build — this was 20 months into the project — and said, 'This is pretty good, but I think you need to make it less Zelda and more Mario.'"

And like the One Ring gradually wearing down Frodo's will and strength, the two publishers stripped away Inevitable's original vision.

Brown said as each producer came through, the game was winnowed down to be more of a casual console title. The RPG elements and most combat systems were dropped, mechanics were simplified, stealth was confined to small segments of the game (like the three Trolls and Mirkwood escape sequences), more platforming was added and the entire project was reskinned to target children ages eight to 12.

The Hobbit, however, was continuously morphed by pressure from high up. The game had been originally designed as a hardcore Japanese-style RPG with "tone and pacing similar to Fable," Brown said, with a mixture of stealth elements gleaned from his time working on the Thief games. The presentation was mature, with a realistic yet stylized approach to characters' looks. Players would be able to switch between controlling Bilbo, the Dwarf Thorin and the wizard Gandalf. The Hobbit would have focused on exploration and world immersion, with only about 20 percent of gameplay dedicated to combat.

"The folks at Tolkien were very good at providing feedback, and we were able to work with them to incorporate any dialogue tweaks or changes to bring it more in line with the original material and the brand as a whole," he said. "Once I found my groove with the material and their expectations, the amount of edits we received from them diminished considerably."

All dialogue within the game, including "no-brainer" things like the inscription on the One Ring, couldn't borrow from the book without explicit written permission from the Tolkien Estate. Everything not directly quoted from the books had to be rewritten to match the tone. One thing the estate did bend on, Reed said, was small embellishments made to scenes in the book that didn't affect the overall plot. For example, in Moria the Fellowship rests while Gandalf ponders three possible paths. In the video game, players could explore these paths fully before choosing the right one.

"The art team had been designing Hobbiton, and we'd sent assets to the Tolkien folks to review," he explained. "We received detailed notes and comments, including a firm request to remove all tomatoes from Hobbiton due to movie pollution. Turns out tomatoes are a New World thing, and there aren't any of those in Middle-earth, contrary to what the film folks would have you believe. The art team was a little bristly over this and wanted to dig their heels in over the offending fruit — removing them would've taken more time, and they didn't think the impact on their schedule was worth something fairly trivial (to them, at least). We finally compromised with the Tolkien folks and turned tomatoes into large berries."

Designer Paul Reed told Polygon that accidental "movie pollution" — using an element from Jackson's films — became so bad that it necessitated massive asset overhauls. Both the Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring teams had to be incredibly careful not to encroach on EA's license, but also to not anger the Tolkien Estate — which could unfortunately be sparked by something as small as tomatoes, according to Reed.

Caminos said it felt as though there were "too many stakeholders" involved in The Fellowship of the Ring's production, and after completing design documents for the game — also heavily dictated by the Tolkien Estate — Caminos was let go. He said that at the time of his departure, the game looked like "a mish-mash of lots of ideas" and he feared that producers would push developers into going the Dynasty Warriors route.

"It's an extraordinarily repetitive game of running through hordes of enemies and button mashing to perform lots of exciting attack animations to dispatch your enemies; This may sound like a good fit for The Lord of the Rings universe, until you apply to a group of Hobbits, which is exactly what the producer was suggesting," he explained. "The one good thing to come out of it was that was it made us very sure that we needed to focus the game more on exploration and RPG-like elements than pure action."

"During our first visit with a producer from [publisher] Universal Interactive, he had brought over a game that he said really captured what he thought would be an excellent fit for a Fellowship of the Ring game," Caminos said. "It was the very first Dynasty Warriors game.

But as with Inevitable's The Hobbit project, the producers had popularity in mind more than faithfulness to Tolkien's world, according to The Fellowship of the Ring designer Rob Caminos.

In another branch of Sierra in January 2001, the Fellowship of the Ring game — also using only the book — got underway with developer The Whole Experience. Like the Hobbit game, designers couldn't touch any other literary property and couldn't make the game look like the films. The developers started building an exploration-focused game and poured hours into crafting what they felt were warm, real renditions of locations like the Baggins' home of Bag End and the town of Bree. Gameplay would center around the Hobbits, since in The Lord of the Rings all four branch off to have their own adventures.

While Inevitable worked on The Hobbit, Sierra was still in mid-transition with Vivendi. Each time a new producer was assigned to the project — the first two were from Sierra, the last three Vivendi — the tone of the game skewed younger and younger, until the project was almost unrecognizable from the original pitch.

"Approvals were amazingly complicated," Brown explained. "We'd push to do something with Rivendell, for example, and create a building as a large tree-castle thing that looked very organic. We'd hear nothing back for months. Then what would come down on high out of nowhere was, 'No, that's absolutely not going to work and you need to rebuild it from scratch.' Conversations with [the Tolkien Estate] were very stop-and-start, very staccato. It took us literally a year to work out an approvals process on a project that we only had two and a half years for. We lost a lot of work."

Christopher Tolkien had posthumously published much of his father's undiscovered work through the estate, but beyond collecting and editing what J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, his influence over the property extended to a sort of consulting role — one that was mandatory to follow to the letter.

Work on The Hobbit began prior to the 2001 theatrical launch of The Fellowship of the Ring. (Check out a gallery of early concept art from the game. ) Brown described the attitude of Tolkien's estate as antagonistic towards their game, with estate head Christopher Tolkien — the youngest son of J.R.R. Tolkien — seemingly skeptical that a video game could add anything to his father's legacy. Christopher Tolkien was already vocal about his objections to Jackson's films, having released a statement that called his father's literary works "unsuitable for transformation into visual dramatic form."

"At first it was very blue-sky: 'Do something in conjunction with the books and sell us on it,'" he said. "Because we didn't have the same constraints of the movie license, we could cherry-pick content. But we didn't realize there was a whole network between Tolkien Enterprises, the Tolkien Estate, Sierra and Vivendi, Sierra's then-parent company. We didn't realize how many layers of approval and complication there would end up being."

Between 2000 and 2003, five producers came and went on the project "like a revolving door, shifting it in small and big ways each time," Brown said. This left the project in a constant state of rebooting for most of its development time.

When contacted for this report, both Middle-earth Enterprises and the Tolkien Estate declined to comment on the license split. Brown believes that EA went straight for the movie licenses because there was more opportunity for action-oriented games there, and "that's what EA does." Sierra was determined to avoid competition with EA but still create something interesting — and hopefully, profitable — within the space.

This would become a symptom of video games based on Tolkien's works moving forward: the problem of dual licenses. While EA had already begun adapting Jackson's films, Sierra was heads-down pulling directly from the literary license, awarded to them by Tolkien's estate and Tolkien Enterprises. With the movies gaining traction and public attention, this meant there were two valuable commodities on the market — two commodities of the same property that couldn't cross-pollinate or resemble each other.

"We had only gotten the literary license; we couldn't use anything in conjunction with the movies — no likenesses in any way, shape or form," Rafael Brown, who was a senior designer at Inevitable Entertainment on the The Hobbit, told Polygon. "We couldn't use anything that came out of the books that was specifically a representation of what Jackson or those actors were doing. I don't know exactly why the licenses were split off that way."

By 2000, director Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy was already deep in production. Sierra Entertainment landed the book rights to The Hobbit and set out building a game that same year. There was just one catch: It couldn't look, sound or feel like Jackson's films, because Electronic Arts had already locked down the movie license.

"The Elder Scrolls meets The Lord of the Rings"

With both the movie and book licenses, EA's restrictions were lifted. Almost immediately, development began on The Lord of the Rings: The White Council, a role-playing game that would transform Middle-earth into a massive open world for players to explore. Developer EA Redwood Shores announced the title in summer 2006 and promised a world filled with characters controlled by powerful simulation AI previously used for The Sims 2 and a seemingly endless number of things to do with a story-based quest structure. Players would play as either a Man, Dwarf or Elf and move through Middle-earth as an ally of the White Council, the collection of powers fighting against Sauron's encroaching darkness.

The White Council was almost too ambitious. Monif said that during pre-production, much of the talk focused on what developers could do with the game for the next console generation — that is, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 — lighting and particle effects, the world generation, how characters would look.

Players would be able to ride the Eagles. They would come into contact with an entire race of Dragons.

"It was going to be The Elder Scrolls [4]: Oblivion meets The Lord of the Rings," Monif said. "The book rights landed, so we were able to do all sorts of cool shit, that was the mandate. We got them and just went, 'Go go go!'"

Monif described massive hand-drawn maps that were scanned and placed into the game, which would give players detailed directions to consult as they ran through large areas. Monsters wouldn't randomly spawn; instead, there would be roving bands of creatures covering the map, with players having the option to engage or use stealth. And the story would dig into Tolkien lore found outside of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy — namely, The Silmarillion and, briefly, Unfinished Tales.

The Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales J.R.R. Tolkien's publisher George Allen and Unwin, after The Hobbit's success, requested the author pen a sequel. Before The Lord of the Rings was a twinkle in Tolkien's eye, however, he had already made significant progress on other stories dedicated to building the universe housing Middle-earth. These stories described the world's creation by the supreme deity Eru Ilúvatar and his chorus of godlike beings that sang the earth, Arda, into existence and created all life. In its early stages, one of these deities — Melkor, later called Morgoth — broke away from his noble purpose and began terrorizing the world, bent on spreading darkness and destruction. Throughout the early mythologies of Middle-earth, Tolkien described the attempts of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord and the ultimate evil, to bring all to ruin. The gods, their angelic servants and the races of Middle-earth did all they could to hold him at bay. Morgoth was eventually beaten down and cast into the endless Void surrounding the universe, but his legacy lived on in his chief servant — Sauron. Tolkien's stories include mythological tales that feel as though they were pulled straight out of some ancient text. He wrote of Elves crafting magical jewels that drove all who set eyes on them mad with greed; giant spider queens that consumed light' Elven maidens giving up immortality for love of mortal men; curses tearing families apart through several generations; and feuds between races that led to bloody battles and countless losses. These tales, collected together, became The Silmarillion. The collection's name came from the Silmaril jewels, gems forged in the world's first light that inspired greed and hatred in nearly all who touched them. But Allen and Unwin rejected the first draft of The Silmarillion, prompting Tolkien to begin "a new story about Hobbits," which eventually became the epic The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion was pushed to the sidelines, with Tolkien adding bits of new materials and revising older stories throughout his lifetime. In 1977, four years after his death, his son Christopher Tolkien edited and published The Silmarillion. His father having passed away before he could finish many of the stories, Christopher drew from his father's notes to fill the gaps left behind. In 1980, Christopher Tolkien brought more of his father's unpublished mythologies into the spotlight with the Unfinished Tales, a compilation of short stories and essays augmenting The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. This small collection fleshes out Middle-earth in ways Tolkien's other works don't have room to do. Among the pieces is a short story written in the first-person perspective of Frodo Baggins, retelling a story shared with him by Gandalf. The short story "Aldarion and Erendis" chronicles the lifetime of a king of Númenor — an island reminiscent of the mythical Atlantis within Tolkien's universe — and his slow, gradual abandonment of his wife for his love of shipbuilding and sailing to Middle-earth. Another short piece describes the five wizards sent to Middle-earth to save it from Sauron's influence: Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast and two unknown ones simply referred to as the Blue Wizards. The Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales, though not required reading, breathe life into the corners of Middle-earth previously untapped by the plot of Tolkien's Rings stories. For Tolkien, Middle-earth was not just a country of Men, Hobbits and magical jewelry, but an entire universe with its own cosmology, touched in meaningful ways by even the smallest of individuals.

In Tolkien's legendarium, there are five wizards in all: Gandalf the Grey, Saruman the White, Radagast the Brown and two Blue Wizards called the Istari. The latter two disappeared into Eastern territories after all five landed on the shores of Middle-earth, having traveled there from the land of the Valar, the world's godlike caretakers. All five wizards would be in the game, plus some Ring users like the Dwarven Kings and Elven rulers. These would be the members of the White Council, the company dedicated to protecting Middle-earth and preventing Sauron's evil from swallowing it whole.

Prototyping was nearly complete and The White Council had been officially announced. But in February 2007, EA announced during an investor call that project had been put on hold indefinitely, and shortly afterward a large round of layoffs hit the company.

Sources told Polygon that around this time, EA executives came to look at the project and asked how much time the developers needed to complete the game. According to Monif, Redwood Shores asked for three more years. EA killed the project and let the company's limited hold on the literary license run out. Remaining resources were transferred to developer Pandemic Studios to work with Weta Digital on action game The Lord of the Rings: Conquest.

The rights to The Silmarillion, like most of the Rings of Power, were lost to time.

Many Meetings In 2007, Turbine tried something new with the Lord of the Rings property — a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Initially called Middle-earth Online, The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar was in production for five years before it went to market. It began as a common online space for players to explore Tolkien's world together. The game's main conflict centered around that of the main The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Executive producer Aaron Campbell said that while the team was eager to jump right into the world of Middle-earth, they had to release parts of the game as "manageable chunks" to ensure the game wouldn't just be one massive content dump. The decision to focus on Angmar first — the hideout of the leader of the Ringwraiths, the Witch-king — was so that Turbine could, very delicately and without crossing Tolkien Enterprises' licensing boundaries, explore areas of Tolkien's world not shown in the movies. So many Lord of the Rings games had failed to capture audiences the way Jackson's films had, and Turbine's game went through several iterations before the studio settled on a massively multiplayer online role-playing game — story-based experiences, tactical puzzles with conquest missions, an open-world sandbox. Ultimately the team wanted players to read between the lines of Tolkien's books, and decided on a narrative-driven game that welcomed the idea of players joining together.

The Lord of the Rings Online "From a game design perspective, there are a lot of difficult choices to make when you're making a game [like LOTR Online] with magic being as limited as it is in the books," LOTR Online senior content designer Chris Pierson told Polygon. "And so many areas he describes as just being barren and empty of people and things, with monsters roaming. The biggest challenge is to try and see how far we can push certain aspects of the world and still keep it Tolkien." Tolkien's works feature magic in very limited quantities and treat it more like miracles, granting otherworldly powers only to beings like Gandalf, Sauron and Saruman and to some extent the higher Elves, like Galadriel. LOTR Online didn't launch with an obvious magic-based class, as most MMOs do, but instead created the light spell-casting Rune-keeper class. Powerful abilities are the meat and potatoes of MMO character development, and in order to preserve this idea in the face of the rules of Tolkien's world, Turbine created "powers" that draw from inner strength, like rallying cries. There are no health points, just morale. There is no clerical healing, no "whizzy-bangy magic," as Pierson put it. "LOTR Online being an MMO offers players more opportunities to do things other [Tolkien] games don't let them," he said. "We get to be more literal than anyone else." "The goal is to ultimately be authentic and respectful to the material," Campbell added. "You want players to respond and connect to the world. It's a challenge to figure out how to have variety as well as continuity to [Tolkien's] story. You're not going to be Frodo or Aragorn, but if you can have that kind of impact on the world and see it, then you're a part of it and it's exciting. You're the hero." Like those licensing the book content before them, the developers at Turbine couldn't touch anything from Jackson's films. This meant redesigning places like Orthanc and Lothlorien from scratch so they wouldn't look like Jackson's versions — even though the team at Turbine felt he "pretty much nailed them visually." Pierson said that while Turbine never had any contact with Christopher Tolkien at the Tolkien Estate, they've had a good relationship with their licensors and are very cognizant of the boundaries they are working with. Ultimately, Turbine wants LOTR Online — which is today on its fifth expansion — to continue to be a place where Lord of the Rings fans can explore and influence Tolkien's world.

The Lord of the Rings Online

The Breaking of the Fellowship In 1958, J.R.R. Tolkien expressed his unhappiness at Zimmerman's first detailed outline for his Lord of the Rings animated film in a letter to a friend, berating the director for the "extreme silliness and incompetence" with which he treated the source material. "... This document, as it stands, is sufficient to give me grave anxiety about the actual dialogue that (I supposed) will be used," Tolkien wrote after examining the proposed storyline. "I should say, Zimmerman, the constructor of this [storyline] is quite incapable of excerpting or adapting the 'spoken words' of the book. He is hasty, insensitive, and impertinent." Perhaps, considering his deep aversion to steeping his content in "extreme silliness," it is a good thing Tolkien never worked directly with a game studio. Professor Corey Olsen, instructor at Signum University's Mythgard Institute for fantasy literature studies, is a renowned Tolkien scholar who teaches weekly online classes on Tolkien's works. He believes that what most games get wrong lies in this "extreme silliness," this desire to manipulate and own the IP — the need to create a cool game — that overwhelms and dilutes the source material. The Tolkien Professor When he isn't teaching Arthurian legend and Greco-Roman mythology, Professor Corey Olsen loves to talk Tolkien. Under the moniker of the Tolkien Professor, Olsen hosts online seminars and webchats with eager fantasy fanatics to discuss Tolkien's tales and adaptations — including the recent The Hobbit films — as well as other fantasy literature, including the Harry Potter series and the works of C.S. Lewis. In 2011, Olsen helped found the Mythgard Institute, an online educational program dedicated to the support and facilitation of research into J.R.R. Tolkien's works and other fantasy literature. The Institute is partnered with New Hampshire's Signum University to offer participants degree credits and access to a full master's program. Olsen left his position teaching English at Washington College in 2013 to focus on Mythgard and Signum full-time. Tolkien fans can follow Professor Olsen on Twitter, check out his recorded seminars and read up on how to join the Mythgard Institute. Those interested in delving deeper into Tolkien's works can also listen to his Tolkien Professor Podcast. "I think it's a really neat opportunity that games present," Olsen said. "It's an interesting, imaginative opportunity for readers and consumers. Not only is the work itself an imaginative and intellectual engagement in what Tolkien is doing, but by bringing to life Tolkien's world and characters, it enables the gamer to really engage in the world — like with the films and books, but in a bigger way. "I think the medium of gaming provides for a deeper kind of imaginative engagement on the part of the gamer," he added. "There's a lot of positive potential in [making video games]. And one of the things that has always set Tolkien's works aside from other authors and made it special is the way in which he engages his readers within his world. It's not just in his characters, not just in his stories, but in his world. "The way people invest in Middle-earth as a place is so interesting. You don't really see people wishing to live in Westeros [from A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones]; even with George R.R. Martin, I think it lacks the quality of compulsion you get with Tolkien. People want to learn the [Middle-earth] languages and discover more of the history. You get some of that with Martin, but not as much. So games like The Lord of the Rings Online provide the opportunity for an imaginative venue for readers to explore that world."

Concept art for The Lord of the Rings: The War in the North

Flotsam and Jetsam The book and video game licenses moved on to Warner Bros., and under publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment the company began turning out its own suite of Lord of the Rings-based games. After purchasing Seattle-based Snowblind Studios in 2009 — along with Monolith Productions and Surreal Software — Warner Bros. was keen on getting the ball rolling using its newly acquired Tolkien IP. The first was The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn's Quest in 2010, made by Headstrong Games. It was a stylized game aimed at children that retold the events of the trilogy through a segmented quest structure. Players alternated between controlling Aragorn during the War of the Ring and Frodo Gamgee, Sam Gamgee's son, in the Shire years after the trilogy's ending. Over at Snowblind, developers had a more mainstream Lord of the Rings game in mind. Jackson's The Hobbit films were still in production, and with no theatrical release wave to ride, developers had to drum up excitement for the IP with a solo game. Jason Booth was brought into Snowblind as a senior technical designer to work on gameplay for an in-development title that had been flipped to accommodate the Tolkien IP. Booth said Warner Bros. wanted to leverage some of the world Snowblind had already put into this game and build hype for the IP from a gaming perspective.

Aragorn's Quest The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, published in 2011, was the first mainstream AAA endeavor under Warner Bros. to get the Tolkien ball rolling. Booth said all names and places within the game — locations, enemies, NPC names — had to be vetted through an in-house Tolkien expert to preserve the feel and aesthetic of the Middle-earth mythos. Snowblind went with gameplay mechanics similar to Diablo and the company's own Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance to give players something familiar to latch onto; the studio didn't want to scare away potential players who weren't into Tolkien's lore. Professor Olsen, the Tolkien Professor, believes that War in the North is one of the better video games based on The Lord of the Rings. "The whole concept is to tell some of the untold stories," Olsen told Polygon. "To me, it stands as a pretty interesting example of one real imaginative and creative possibility of games. There are so many frontiers in Middle-earth, so many parts of Tolkien's world, so many aspects of it that are untold. There are things Tolkien refers to and alludes to but doesn't really flesh out — it's one of the things that makes Middle-earth so rich. "So if you're willing to accept the possibility of adaptation at all, if you are OK with someone else getting creative with Tolkien's world, then that's OK. In the War in the North, you play as Rangers post-Frodo's departure from the Shire, you work with Elrond's sons — there was stuff going on!" he added. "There are lots of references to other stories happening while [the] primary quest of the Ring was going on, and we never really learn anything about them [in the book]. It's a less intrusive adaptation, less than what Peter Jackson is doing. He's retelling the main story, but instead in this game you are filling in the edges." Professor Olsen also considers The Lord of the Rings Online another respectful game adaptation of Tolkien's world. "Everything I've seen about it really leads me to respect it," he said. "For me, the basis of respect is how thoughtful people are being about the source material. Is there really thoughtful engagement with Tolkien's books, ideas and world?"

Guardians of Middle-earth Booth's second go-round with Warner's Tolkien IP was Monolith's 2012 multiplayer online battle arena title, Guardians of Middle-earth. The game is like League of Legends or Dota, but in a Lord of the Rings skin, with players participating as various characters pulled from Tolkien's works. Booth said a lot of focus went into making sure the game's playable champions were evocative of the books, with abilities drawn from scenarios in the literature. This proved a more difficult task than initially expected, as there was still something a little strange about having these random Tolkien characters battling together in a "totally ridiculous setting." "It really boiled down to how much face time, so to speak, that the character gets in the books," Booth explained. "The more face time a character from the book had, the easier that process [of champion creation] was, because, you know, as a reader, you have a stronger impression of the character." The biggest challenge, other than creating gaming experiences that live up to the hype surrounding the imminent release of the Hobbit films, was adapting Tolkien's seemingly endless universe into smaller, more compartmentalized things like MOBA champion abilities and health regeneration items. Developer Traveller's Tales didn't run into much difficulty wrapping the Lord of the Rings IP within its Lego franchise. Lego The Lord of the Rings in 2012 and Lego The Hobbit earlier this year were well-received additions to the company's long-running series of Lego video games. Both titles followed the plot of the respective films, spiced up with the studio's particular silly brand of Lego humor. Executive producer Nick Ricks told Polygon that Traveller's Tales aimed to retell in the movies in a way that children could more easily identify with and appreciate. "It's a very human story, if you'll pardon the pun." "The most important thing is to try to understand what is the kernel of the story," Ricks said, "what it's really about. For us, it was the emotional and physical journey that Frodo and Sam embark on to destroy the One Ring. For The Hobbit, it's about the camaraderie among the Dwarves, who have been ostracized and taken away from their home — it's a very human story, if you'll pardon the pun, of redemption and a collective sense of moving toward a common goal. Traveller's Tales has always provided large casts of characters for players to choose from, with Lego The Hobbit giving them the chance to explore different ways to make characters team up. The game actively encourages co-op multiplayer, with challenges requiring two or more Dwarves to complete puzzles. Ricks said the studio saw this as an opportunity to extend Jackson's films, which depict Thorin and company as a close-knit bunch. And in terms of licenses, they were given a wide creative berth to play with characteristics and situational puzzles. "We really have incredible privileges, so for us the challenge was to say, how do we take this one, how do we convey the characters in animations, in their dialogue, in their in-game abilities?" he said.

Lego The Hobbit Meanwhile, over at Kabam, the mobile games company was digging into another iteration of Tolkien's works: social games. The studio partnered with Warner Bros. to use the IP, building games they hoped would engage players for short play sessions over a long period of time using Middle-earth as their home base. "Because of the loyal fan base to the literature and to the Middle-earth universe, our creative direction must meet the high expectation of the passionate fans," Kabam executive producer Weiwei Geng told Polygon. "Tolkien's fiction is a great source to be adapted into a video game, especially for our type of strategy games. It has all the important aspects of a strategy title: war/combat, building up a city, characters, different types of troops, distinctive factions, teamwork, etc." The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth launched for Android and iOS in 2012, using the basic plot of The Hobbit to guide players' progression without a straightforward retelling of the story. The studio stuck with the strategy genre, as developers felt this kind of war planning and tactical maneuvering perfectly fit the idea of a company of Dwarves sneaking around trying to reclaim their homeland. Kabam also hoped to draw non-Tolkien fans into its game by offering social elements allowing players to team up against powerful Middle-earth foes — just like Tolkien's heroes. "We believe the relationship between the characters and different factions in the book resonates with the overall premise of our game," Geng said. "By setting up that foundation, players can also enjoy the experience, whether or not they've read Tolkien's original work." With the Hobbit movies in the middle of their release cycle and mainstream interest in Tolkien's work coming to a boiling point, there had to be another AAA Lord of the Rings game around the corner. Tolkien's legendarium is seemingly endless — there had to be something, some piece of the timeline or area of Middle-earth that had yet to be explored. "[Tolkien] suggests all sorts of things in the books that he never pursues," Booth said of these myriad adaptations, "and unfortunately with respect to that and other IP, I think a lot of people fall into the fallacy of, 'I will do something in this IP and [players will] be the main characters,' and it's like, 'I already know their story.' So you're playing the game but you already know what's going to happen. I think it's much, much better from a gameplay perspective to look at these spaces where things [that] were mentioned in the book or film [weren't] elaborated on. That's a great opportunity to make a game so people are aware of it, but it's an area that's all there for you to fill. You can make up any story and new characters. The act of playing the game itself can expand the universe." Enter Talion, Ranger of the Black Gate — the lead of Monolith's second foray with the Tolkien IP. The response to the announcement of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor in fall 2013 proved that fans were still hungry for more Tolkien.

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

The Black Gate Opens In the summer of 1958, after he finished reading — and dismissing — Zimmerman's script for the Lord of the Rings animated movie, Tolkien wrote to a friend describing his dissatisfaction with the final product. The tone was wrong, the dialogue was wrong and above all, he felt that Zimmerman had barely read his works in putting the script together. In previous letters, Tolkien wrote that he believed Zimmerman had not even read The Lord of the Rings, and that his use of names and places proved that he had only skimmed it at best. Zimmerman made the wizard Radagast an eagle, misspelled "Boromir" in every instance. "The Lord of the Rings cannot be garbled like that," Tolkien wrote at the end of a lengthy letter detailing each small way in which Zimmerman had warped his story. Tolkien's criticisms included everything from the treatment of major characters and races to the use of smaller items like the lembas waybread and fireworks. Zimmerman had clearly taken great liberties with the characters and plot of The Lord of the Rings, altering elements in ways that agitated Tolkien to the core. But this need for addition, this "garbling," became a symptom of the IP's course through video games. In November 2013, 56 years later, Monolith announced the third-person action title Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, a game that leans on the very story alteration that Tolkien was anxious about. "It's all so grounded in myth and history — the same stories, the same characters, the same archetypes do repeat themselves." Shadow of Mordor tells a new story crafted by Monolith set between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The game begins the night Sauron's spirit enters Mordor to build his stronghold. Protagonist Talion, a slain Ranger unable to die, is given the ability to mind-control his enemies by a mysterious Wraith, bending the will of Mordor's orcs to his own designs and setting out on a personal revenge quest against Sauron. Monolith's title ups the stakes in a few ways the previous Lord of the Rings games haven't. Shadow of Mordor features prominent figures from Tolkien's lore left mostly unexplored in modern media: namely the young Sauron and Celebrimbor, one of the most powerful Elven warriors. But both of these figures are mentioned only briefly within the text of The Lord of the Rings themselves. Celebrimbor is mentioned briefly during the Council of Elrond and Gandalf reads his name on the Doors of Moria (Celebrimbor drew the designs on the door), while the details of Sauron's past are mostly left untouched. However, in The Silmarillion, Tolkien expands at length on the relationship between the two and the slippery slope to Sauron's relapse into evil and the creation of the Rings. Read this: Why Shadow of Mordor's undead Elven hero and sexy Sauron are such a big deal Celebrimbor is a major player in Tolkien's works, but he has never been a major player in the best-known books nor the movies or games. He appears in The Lord of the Rings' appendices and is named once by Elrond in the story. He is mentioned only in passing in other video games based on Tolkien's properties — players can collect items called "Symbols of Celebrimbor" in The Lord of the Rings Online and he makes a brief appearance in the prologue of Lego The Lord of the Rings. Shadow of Mordor's use of Celebrimbor as a major player makes sense. Celebrimbor and Sauron's tangled history makes him the ideal candidate to come back from the dead seeking revenge, and his cunning — forging Rings in secret was the equivalent of anonymous Tumblr messages — is enough that I wouldn't put it past him to possess another guy to get the job done. Read more... This may seem like a hill impossible to surmount in terms of character development, but according to Shadow of Mordor design director Michael de Plater, it was simply a question of staying true to Tolkien's themes. "One thing is: it's going back to Sauron and his motivation in working with the Elves as well, and the fact that Celebrimbor was the guy who decided to work with Sauron," de Plater said "That obviously reflects something of his personality. And the other one is, it happens a lot within The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion because it's all so grounded in myth and history — the same stories, the same characters, the same archetypes do repeat themselves." Celebrimbor is also the grandson of Feanor, a powerful Elven craftsman whose family was cursed as a result of his overwhelming pride. De Plater said that the idea of having an Elf that isn't purely good and consumed with pride — similar to Thranduil, the reclusive Elven King of Mirkwood shown in The Hobbit — was an archetype the team wanted to explore. Tolkien's Elves are typically thought of as ethereal, benevolent beings, but they have their fiercer moments. Like the Elf Elrond leading his army against Sauron's forces, Celebrimbor led his people to war against the same menace almost two thousand years earlier. Depicting Celebrimbor as a proud, skillful warrior was not a stretch. De Plater also described Celebrimbor as the "anti-Galadriel," a mirror to the Elven Queen who refuses to take the Ring, knowing she would succumb to its corrupting influence. Rather than rebuff the power, Celebrimbor embraces it. De Plater said that all these elements blend together to make Celebrimbor an avatar for some of the franchise's larger themes, like pride, power and revenge. As for the power Celebrimbor bestows to Talion — the ability to control minds — it has been a divisive element for Tolkien fans. Celebrimbor's power stems back to the Rings themselves. The wearer of the One Ring can see into the minds of and control those wearing the other nineteen Rings. In The Lord of the Rings, the One Ring is offered to the story's more benevolent forces — including Gandalf and the powerful Elven queen Galadriel — who all turn it down, stating they would try to use it for good but would ultimately be corrupted by its evil. "I would use this ring from a desire to do good," Ian McKellen's Gandalf tells Frodo in Peter Jackson's 2001 film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring. "But through me, it would wield a power too great and terrible to imagine." And this is what Talion is doing in Shadow of Mordor. Olsen told Polygon the political and brute-force manipulation on Talion's part is not what a true Tolkien hero would do. Talion's story explores the "what if." In Tolkien's world, you can't use the weapon of the enemy against the enemy, because it makes you just as bad as he is. There is a track record for this kind of behavior. Isildur, the young king who destroys Sauron and takes the One Ring at the end of the Second Age, is obsessed with the Ring. Boromir pressures Frodo to bring the Ring to Gondor, where he hopes to find a way to use it against Sauron. Both men die tragically in Ring-related skirmishes. "What the protagonist of that game is doing is precisely the thing that Tolkien's books warn against," Tolkien Professor Corey Olsen said. "For you as a gamer to be playing the role of a supposedly good guy in Tolkien's world who is dominating the wills of other creatures ... it is the opposite of what Tolkien described. I honestly think it's ignorance." But de Plater said this is exactly what the game is going for, exploring the idea of someone actually using the enemy's power to try and subvert the enemy. "At the very starting point, the first thing [we thought of] was Boromir," de Plater said of protagonist Talion's inspiration — Boromir, had he gotten hold of the Ring and used its power. "The what-if? We explore that in the story." This power, baked into the Rings themselves, was born from the work done by Sauron and Celebrimbor. If anyone can challenge Sauron, it is the Elven craftsman. And in this way, Talion becomes the bad guy behind the bad guy — the Gravewalker. The shadow of Mordor.

The Lord of the Rings: The War in the North.