Bizarre Weekend
Weird Weekend is our common Saturday column the place we have a good time PC gaming oddities: peculiar video games, unusual bits of trivia, forgotten historical past. Pop again each weekend to search out out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have change into obsessive about this time, whether or not it is the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that point somebody within the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
In the event you’ve solely ever seen the Peter Jackson movies, there’s an entire lot of untamed Tolkien lore you most likely do not learn about. Do you know Sam Gamgee’s true Westron identify was Banazîr Galpsi? Do you know Sauron was as soon as only a lieutenant to the setting’s true darkish lord, referred to as Melkor or Morgoth (the latter identify given to him by Fëanor, the best and most prideful of the elves)?
I confess, even I didn’t know that last one, but such are the crucial plot revelations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I, a 1990 CRPG from Interaction. I have been mucking about with the sport through DOSBox-X—a part of an ongoing Tolkien kick that is additionally someway turned me into a man that is learn The Silmarillion—and you understand what? It is cool. It is not good. However it’s cool. There are concepts in right here that, fairly genuinely, I’d have liked to see catch on a bit more durable within the RPGs that adopted it.
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J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I, or JRRTTLOTRVI because it’s identified locally (most likely), begins out as you’d anticipate: a wizard tells Frodo to promote his home and throw his inheritance right into a volcano and, being a pliable kind, off he goes to do it.
Within the CD model of the sport, this preamble is communicated within the type of snippets of the 1978 Ralph Bakshi model of Lord of the Rings, rendered in scintillating 200p. As soon as they’ve concluded, and a moderately extra Hollywood-looking model of Gandalf than Ian McKellen’s portrayal has given you your job, off you go—Frodo, Samwise, and Pippin Took linger outdoors Bag Finish, ready so that you can march them off to their virtually sure dying.
I’ve played a lot of CRPGs in my time, and I’m truly impressed by some of the forward-thinking mechanics Interplay crammed into this creaky Commodore 64 product. The first thing you will notice—because your 2026 CPU is making the game run at approximately 40,000x its intended speed—is a bonafide day/night cycle. It’s not just an aesthetic gloss! Interplay was doing things with NPC schedules before I was born, where even my beloved Morrowind failed to actually, you know, do anything meaningful with its shift from day to night to day.
Make no mistake, we’re not talking a Dwarf-Fortress level of NPC complexity, but approach foes at night and you might find them asleep, meaning a sufficiently sneaky Hobbit (by which I mean Peregrin Took, literally the only one of my Fellowship with a sneak skill) might be able to softshoe around them without alerting them. Likewise, the fell folk of Mordor get powerful at night. Which is largely immaterial early on; if three Hobbits encounter a Nazgûl at any time of day there’s really only one way it can go.
There’s also something to be said, from the perspective of an LOTR-liker, for a pre-Peter-Jackson vision of Tolkien’s world. The LOTR movies have rightly earned their place in cinema history, but they’ve also smothered pretty much any other possible interpretation of the original books. Where once Tove Jansson had the room to draw Gollum as an 8-foot-tall weirdo, now it is principally not possible to think about him as something apart from a Serkis-voiced little freak. Aragorn? That is Viggo Mortensen. Gandalf? Actually simply Ian McKellen. Frodo? A dew-eyed younger lad.
Interaction’s LOTR says to hell with that. Or, nicely, it truly simply got here out lengthy earlier than any of these movies attained cultural hegemony. In JRRTTLOTRVI, Frodo is as Eru Iluvatar meant him: a ruddy-faced 50-something—a marvellous apple of a person, accompanied by his favoured pub regulars.
“Hollywood” Gandalf Greyhame, meanwhile, looks like he is slick with beard oils, and Aragorn looks like a man with a pick-up truck. This is wonderful. This is a world whose visual identity was still up for grabs, and while I do like the identity we all eventually settled on (and gave Oscars to), it’s charming and thought-provoking to see it in this inchoate form.
But my favourite part of Interplay’s LOTR—the one idea I really wish more CRPG makers had stolen—is that, like I said up top, anyone can bite it, Fire-Emblem style. This includes Frodo. Or Aragorn. Or Gandalf, for whom I guess that isn’t actually all that remarkable, considering.
If Frodo falls, someone else can just, you know, pick up the ring and soldier on, like Sam did after the encounter with Shelob. So when Frodo woke up one of those sleeping millers I mentioned earlier and promptly got annihilated, brave Pippin just… kept going, ring in hand. He didn’t even complain.
It’s less a realised system and more an empty space waiting for a system to fill it in, but the notion of taking a story like LOTR’s and allowing players to essentially fashion their own versions of it by their own bad choices holds a lot of appeal, like a game of Crusader Kings where you try to follow history but end up hamstrung when William the Conqueror goes gay.
Alas, no one really bought Interplay’s LOTR, nor its Two-Towers-based sequel, and its moisturised Gandalf and dead Frodo slipped into the dustbin of history. The good news is: you can find it on the Internet Archive. Inform ’em Barliman Butterbur despatched you.
