Building Middle-earth: ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Online

The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar hopes to balance Tolkien’s details with gamers’ needs.

By Ethan Gilsdorf
January 24, 2007

The New York Times

In 1955, shortly after "The Lord of the Rings" was published, J.R.R. Tolkien began to worry his creation had become a "vast game" for some readers. This was not good, he wrote, even "for me, who find that kind of thing only too fatally attractive."

Now, Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and the imaginary setting he painstakingly built, Middle-earth, has become that "vast game."

On Thursday in Las Vegas, Turbine Inc. of Westwood, Mass., is to announce an April 24 release date for "The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar," the year's most anticipated massively multiplayer online game, or MMO. A digital Middle-earth will open its gates to thousands of virtual characters embarking on quests, plumbing subterranean realms and slaughtering plenty of goblins and trolls.

"Expectations are fairly high for this game," said Michael Goodman, digital entertainment program manager for the consumer research division of the Yankee Group, a consulting firm. "This is literally a franchise with a brand that spans the globe. There aren't a lot of those around."

Some 200 million copies of "The Lord of the Rings" have been published in 39 languages. The 2001-03 Peter Jackson film trilogy amassed gross revenues of more than $3 billion worldwide.

Yet for the online "Rings" to succeed, Turbine cannot depend on existing gamers alone. It also needs to lure Tolkien devotees who don't play video games by making it "accessible to just about anyone," Andrew Park, senior editor at GameSpot, an online gaming news and review site, said in an e-mail interview.

"From what I gather, Turbine is targeting two different audiences for this game: hard-core online game players," Park said, "and more-casual or nongame-players who are fans of Tolkien's works."

But visualizing hobbit villages and evil armies for Tolkien's Middle-earth, an already meticulously detailed and plotted world, is complicated. Fans expect its parameters — the languages, geographies, histories, races, nomenclature, mythologies and what Tolkien called the legendarium — to be strictly obeyed.

"Basically, the main challenge of creating an authentic Tolkien experience is building something that won't make Tolkien's many fans angry by straying too far away from the original works," Park said. Sticklers for detail will be quick to point out any inconsistencies. Even a character's eye color, Park said, can't be off, not by a "nanometer."

A further challenge is that immersive MMO worlds must entertain for hours, days, even years of play. They have to be infinitely detailed and vast enough that tens of thousands of players can interact with one another at the same time.

Since September some 300,000 users have beta-tested the fates of elvish lore masters and hobbit burglars in a 50-million-square-meter Middle-earth still under construction (and giving the game great advance word of mouth). Most players expect "creative leaps" to adapt a reading experience into compelling play, said Larry Curtis of TheOneRing.net, a Tolkien fan site.

"You've got to have a good game," he added. "It's not an easy balance."

Many readers of the novels feared their dumbing-down when the films were first released, Curtis said. To head off such criticism of the game, Turbine hired "Rings" experts to ensure that any ideas or inventions were consistent with the rules of Middle-earth.

The consultants "would write back with notes on a script: 'an elf might not do that,' or, 'if you're looking for a more dwarven name, this might work as a family tree,"' recounted Jeffrey Anderson, Turbine's chief executive. His team also worked closely with Tolkien Enterprises, which manages "Ring" merchandising and film rights, seeking its approval for any major departure from the books.

Turbine created "Asheron's Call," its first online role-playing game, in 1999. Last year, the company released Dungeons & Dragons Online, based on the original pen-and-paper role-playing game. (Loosely based on Tolkien's milieu, D&D was credited with establishing the fantasy gaming genre.) And this isn't the first time "Rings" has gone digital: Tolkien-esque computer games — some authorized, some not — have been around since the early 1980s.

But Turbine's is the first Tolkien-based MMO. Like the immensely popular "World of Warcraft," it will allow anyone — anyone, that is, willing to pay about $50 for the software and a monthly subscription fee of up to $15 — to not only battle monsters, but also increase virtual skills, wealth and renown. The game makes provisions for the peaceful: Some gamers may be content with their characters weaving and talking (via voice-chat technology), jamming in bands at the local tavern (using an in-game music system) or raising crops and families.

A game this size is bound to invite some dissent among the dedicated. On the lotro.com forum, one observer, Draeconea, grumbled that character movements appeared "unnatural … They run as if having a sore back, and got several planks of wood underneath their clothes."

Until recently, the job of interpreting Tolkien has fallen to Tolkien experts, not film or video-game directors. While many scholars are tolerant of the blockbuster adaptations, a few would prefer that "Rings" remain a reading experience, not a virtual playground.

An online game "may indeed trivialize Tolkien's legacy," Wayne G. Hammond, co-author of the "J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide," said in an e-mail interview, "if one comes to view 'The Lord of the Rings' as popular culture more than as a work of literature, or feels that it cannot be a serious work of literature if it has outgrowths in popular culture."

The game may signal "democratization," he said, "but it isn't Tolkien."

So far, reviews on sites like mmorpg.com and GameSpot.com have been positive. Tolkien's U.S. publisher, Houghton Mifflin, also is enthusiastic. "Our hope for the new game is the same hope we held during the time of the films," said Webster Younce, senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, "that people who might not have read Tolkien will want to go directly to the source."