Forget the New LOTR Game, This PS2 Movie Tie-In Was Peak

It’s a little annoying that tie-in games based on popular movies are actually pretty good now.

Ever since Alien: Isolation, we’ve had hit after hit based on popular IPs that have ended up being great.

Mad Max, Star Wars: Battlefront 2, Jurassic World Evolution, the list goes on. These are games that have actually ended up pretty good, releasing to critical acclaim and positive buzz.

I miss when movie tie-in games were famously bad. We’re talking about that brief time in the 2000s where every PS2 bargain bin would be littered with games called Austin Powers: Oh, Behave! and Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game Of The Movie.

Anyway, The Lord of the Rings is getting a new tabletop game in collaboration with D20 Culture, and I'm sure it'll be great. But I really just want them to bring back some of the classic movie tie-ins.

Who else remembers those Lord of the Rings games on the PS2? And more importantly, why were they so peak?

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King both had movie tie-ins published by Electronic Arts in 2002 and 2003 respectively.

Electronic Arts

They were essentially hack and slash games where you’d play through different set pieces from the movies, and you could play as an assortment of characters like Aragorn, Gandalf, and Samwise.

For example, there’d be one level where you’re fighting off ringwraiths at Weathertop as Aragorn, before skipping ahead and fighting the cave troll inside Moria.

I Don't Care If These Games Were Bad, They Were Too Good To Become Forgotten

I don’t care if they were bad. They probably were! If I were to replay them as an adult, I’d probably pick out so many faults and come to the realisation that they were not as good as we gave them credit for.

But still, I have fond memories of playing these games at my cousins’ house back in the early 2000s, where we’d play each level over and over again trying to get a new high score.

I think the use of live-action footage from the films in conjunction with high-quality animation (for its time) really set it apart from other games released in the 2000s. It really felt like I was reliving every moment from the Lord of the Rings movies.

All I’m saying is, I think we need to return to the era of the Bad Movie Tie-In Game. I want rushed out game adaptations of movies that are coming out this year (albeit, done in a way where developers are treated respectfully and don’t have to crunch just to get it out the door).

Where’s my Despicable Me 4 3D platformer? What about an open world GTA-like based on One Battle After Another? And why hasn’t Wicked: For Good got some kind of awkwardly-paced hack and slash game yet?