Amazon's Lord Of The Rings: The Rings of Power is great, but the games need to reach PS2-era brilliance again

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It’s been over 20 years since we first set off from The Shire with Frodo and Sam on their quest to destroy the Ring of Power, and despite a series of lacklustre Hobbit films doing their best to extinguish it, the passion still burns hot as the fires of Mount Doom for that quintessential trilogy of fantasy epics. In the times before and since those releases, with the exception of Tolkien’s other literary works, fans have relied heavily on video game interpretations to continue their direct relationship with the characters, settings, and stories of Middle-earth and the One Ring.

But, after a series of spin-offs and non-canon additions slowly boiling the purity of the IP down to directionless mediocrity, it’s critical that future iterations endeavour to recapture the familiarity and emotion that comes with being part of something that you believe in before it’s even begun. That’s right — I’m talking about movie tie-ins. Look, you might scoff, and I wouldn’t blame you for doing so considering tie-in history, but Electronic Arts mastered this in the early noughties with their direct film-to-game releases of The Two Towers and The Return of the King, and it’s about time that we reached for the same dizzying heights of success.

A lot of the complication revolves around licensing, and we don’t want to get too bogged down in that. But to summarise, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and the rest of Tolkien’s works fall under an extremely complex network of rights that gives even Goldeneye a run for its money. But the fundamentals can be worked out when it comes to game development. The Tolkien Estate, at one time, held all the rights to all of Tolkien’s works. Over time, these rights have changed hands and have been split into different sections, ultimately resulting in Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit falling under one banner, whilst the rest of his works (such as The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales) fall under another.

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