From: Rory

I don’t know if you can use this information, but I checked the soundtrack wesite and saw that, in addition to Hoawrd Shore and Enya, Elizabeth Frasier was credited on the page. She is the vocalist for a group call Cocteau Twins, and has a very distinctive vocal style, so if any site readers are familiar with her work, they know that the sound she goes for is very ethereal.

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From: RVD

They had about a five minute blurb on CityTV’s Breakfast Television this morning @ about 7:20 AM. They had Dan Hennah who was introduced as the Supervising Arts Director? for the upcoming movie.

He and his wife? were there with some of the props. They had Glamdring, Sting, Gimli’s axe and Legolas’s bow as well as Gandalf’s hat and well as a rubber mask of one of the “background” orcs.

It was pretty cool except for the fact that the Host – Ann Rohmer acted as if she knew all about the
“Trilogy” as she kept referring to it but actually knew nothing at all. It was hard for Dan to get a word in edgewise.

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We’ve seen this card image before, but today is the first time it’s been featured at Decipher’s site.

Recap of the Excitement at Spiel in Essen, Germany

For the last couple of decades, Essen, Germany has played host to the largest gaming convention in the world: Spiel & Comic Action, an event that regularly draws up to 150,000 people.[More]

Matthew M. Colville Bio:

Matt was born in Nashua, New Hampshire, 31 years ago. After many fantastic adventures, he connected with the design team at Last Unicorn Games through their magnificent Dune CCG in 1997. Matt worked on some of the CCG design, as well as assisting in the writing and development of the Dune RPG.[More]

Kenneth Hite Bio:

Game designer Kenneth Hite has been a lifelong Chicago native ever since he moved there from Oklahoma City in 1988.[More]

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Thanks to a good spy, we have a sneak peak at the December edition of Focus Magazine’s (http://www.focusmag.co.uk) article “Special Effects of Middle-earth.” The article gives us a great look behind the scenes at WETA with a sneak peak of some orc masks, costuming, and a model of Minas Tirith! (Wow that image is cool…) To subscribe or order your copy today, click over to the official Focus Magazine website at http://www.focusmag.co.uk.

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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.

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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.

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!

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