First, about Stormfront Studios:
Stormfront Studios is developing LOTR games for Electronic Arts. Here’s what info I have so far on their first LOTR game, most likely titled: Fellowship of the Ring. It’s an Action game for PS2 and likely also for the Xbox. One interesting thing, they just started putting together a Dev team, I don’t know how long it takes to make an Xbox or PS2 game nowadays, but I doubt they’ll have it done in a little over a month in order to coincide with the first movie’s release. That’s pretty much all the info I have on the game right now, hopefully EA will supply some more info soon.
I supplied some info to IGN Insider for their Remember Rivendell article, here’s my part about the Sierra mess, and what’s happening now (minus a bit about MM3D, which you can find on the Havens):
Sierra (under Havas) had the license to make games based on the Lord of the Rings books. After a while, Tolkien Enterprises sued to get the license back, due to Sierra’s not having done anything worthwhile with it. There was some negotiating, and after a while Sierra (or more specifically, Vivendi-Universal) got the license back.
Their first announced game was the Fellowship of the Ring, being developed by WXP, they showed off a demo behind closed doors at E3.
Then, fairly recently, there was the announcement that the LOTR game management had been moved from Sierra to Universal. From Sierra PR guy Adam Kahn: “Hey Gerry – all management for Lord of the Rings products has moved to Universal Interactive (our sister company)…” So I tried getting a hold of Universal, twenty e-mails later: “Your inquiry has successfully made its way to the right people! While we are unfortunately unable to share any information at this time, we will be happy to keep you informed in the future on developments related to the Lord of the Rings games.” Not a whole lot of info there.
So, Universal now has management of the LOTR games, but, Sierra isn’t totally out of it, later on in that same e-mail: “For information regarding The Hobbit game, please contact Sierra.” OK, back to Sierra, where Adam Kahn says: “It was decided that we would manage the Hobbit franchise while our sister studio, Universal Studios, took over the Lord of the Rings franchise. I don’t know why specifically that decision was made, but we’re very excited about the possibilities of doing games based on The Hobbit. We’ll probably begin talking about those titles next year around E3 2002.”
So there you have it, Universal now has management of the LOTR games, Sierra is doing the Hobbit, WXP is developing the games based on the trilogy, MM3D was doing Tolkien/Lord of the Rings/Middle-Earth Online, but they sued Sierra so who knows who’s going to develop the MMORPG now.
And that’s about it as far as updates go for the moment, look for more info from EA and MM3D on the Gaming Havens soon.
Posted in:
Share:
South African Ringer Mike sent us an email today with a scan from the Satellite TV Guide Magazine. In it, you can find a rather cool Lord of the Rings promo featuring an image of Gandalf. [More]
Posted in:
Share:
South African Ringer Mike sent us an email today with a scan from the Satellite TV Guide Magazine. In it, you can find a rather cool Lord of the Rings promo featuring an image of Gandalf.
Mike writes:
“It’s weird, when I sent you guys an e-mail a few days ago saying that I was
unsure when the real marketing for ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of
the Ring’ was going to start in South Africa, it starts.
Here is an advert that was placed in the Satellite TV Guide Magazine for the
month of November which goes to…oh…just about EVERYONE in the country!
Also, today in the newspaper there was an article about ‘Harry Potter and
the Philosopher’s Stone’ and ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ being the two big
films coming out this year, quite a ‘Lord of the Rings’ day so far…“
Thanks for the scan Mike!
Posted in:
Share:
Thanks to Gaming Guru DarthCaeser for the news on IGN!
Poll: How do you think the first Lord of the Rings movie will turn out!
Current Results: 52.0% Awesome, five stars
20.8% Good, four stars
16.6% I don’t know
4.1% Average, three stars
4.1% Worst movie ever! One star
2.0% Poor, two stars
Quiz: Who is Sauron’s master?
Answer: Morgoth (obviosly)
Remeber Rivendell: A weekly IGN Insider article about the Lord of the Rings, written by Jason Bates.
“So when it came time to think up another column for IGN, writing about Middle-Earth seemed like a very natural thing to do. In this column, I’ll try to talk about all the different things that make Middle-Earth special, as we count down the days until the film debuts in late December. ”
And a couple of TORN mentions (I sent in a bunch of Gaming info for them):
“Next, we’ll sort out some of the licensing issues with the current crop of Lord of the Rings games, or at least start to. Gerry Morrow, games editor over at the TheOneRing.net was good enough to send in a letter breaking down some of the chain of events that have led to the current confusion in the Tolkien game space. As you may or may not know, Sierra’s frequent changes of ownership and an ongoing court battle have created a situation where there aren’t as many LOTR games on the market as you might think there should be.”
And:
“Great letter, and the kind of sharing of information that is what this column is supposed to be all about. To be honest, I did not know all that about what’s going on with the LOTR gaming license, and nobody here at IGN I asked seemed to know anything either. I’ll definitely use this information going forward, thanks again Gerry.
And for the rest of you, if you haven’t already, definitely check out The One Ring.net too, for daily Lord of the Rings content, as well as Gerry’s section of it, the Gaming Havens, for more LOTR gaming news.”
I’ll be posting a similer update some time tonight. [More]
Posted in:
Share:
From Ringer Oleanara!
… It’s really easy and the grand prize is a trip to NZ for 2 and (there are) thousands of free tickets!… [More]
Posted in:
Share:
From Ringer Oleanara
“Hi. I’m a Rings fan from Malaysia and I wanted to tell you about a contest we’re having right now. It’s called the Hotlink Quest organised by Hotlink prepaid from Maxis Mobile. There are four rounds (in) which you’re supposed to unscrambled a LOTR-related word from clues that came from Tolkien’s books. It’s really easy and the grand prize is a trip to NZ for 2 and thousands of free tickets! However it’s only for Maxis subscribers (012) and the clues are available in Malaysian newspapers and various locations in Malaysia. So that (probably) makes it a Malaysian-only affair, I suppose… you can check out the reaction of LOTR fans in Malaysia ’cause we really just can’t wait! [More]
Posted in:
Share:
