It won’t be a surprise if you haven’t heard about it, as the ambitious pitch got nowhere. Jon Burton, founder of LEGO series stalwarts Traveller’s Tales, shared footage from a scrapped Lord of the Rings / Hobbit game attempt he and the studio made. Kotaku has more details:
Technically, it was a pitch for a Hobbit game, to be based on what was at the time a project still headed by Guillermo del Toro (Lord of the Rings director Jackson would only take over later). But in order to best capture the feel of Middle Earth without actually having seen any of the visual design that had been done for the Hobbit films, Traveller’s Tales decided to use iconic sequences from Lord of the Rings to illustrate their vision and tech.
Sadly, as Burton says, the pitch never got anywhere because rights holders Warner Bros. wanted a game that ran alongside the movie, not recreating its events. And it’s not like TT didn’t then get to make two LEGO games based on The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings a few years later anyway.
image via Kotaku