Here’s Gameplay from a Lord of the Rings Demo, a Result of a Failed $1m Pitch
Travellers Tales Games or in short, TT Games are well known for their videogame based upon the Lego franchise. However, they could have been developing games of an entirely different nature, if it wasn’t for this failed pitch to make a videogame based upon The Hobbit movies.
Jon Burton, now retired co-founder of TT Games and his team created a demo that cost a whopping $1,000,000 to make, for a demo! The demo featured many iconic moments from The Lord of the Rings movie franchise, such as Frodo and Sam’s escape from the Ring Wraiths to Gandalf’s battle with Balrog and Saruman. Even though the pitch was for a Hobbit game, seeing as the Hobbit movies weren’t created at the time, this is the reason why TT Games used scenes from the already released Lord of the Rings movies.
Jon Burton even flew over to New Zealand to show the demo to Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro and by all accounts, they were impressed and were keen on this videogame tie-in. In total the demo featured four fully playable levels, cut-scenes and more. It was developed for the Xbox 360 (though I’m sure it would have been multiformat) and despite the footage showing its age, it seemed to have had promise for its time. But then I suppose it should, when you spend $1m on a demo!
Apparently despite Jackson and del Toro being impressed, it was Warner Bros. that weren’t keen, as they wanted a game to release at the around the same time as The Hobbit movie, but set in different world, which is probably why we saw Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, which released in 2014, five years after this pitch was made in 2009.
Jon Burton admits that the cost of the demo was way too much, admitting “We basically went way too far, and spent way too much money making the demo”, no shit Sherlock. But he wanted to show-off what they could do outside of making Lego games.
You can watch the lavish demo below and be sure to let us know what you think of this story across our social media channels.