Classic Lord of the Rings PS2 games breathe new life with unofficial PC ports

The Lord of the Rings fans can now check out a brand new unofficial PC port that combines two excellent games from nearly 25 years ago.

Although we love games like Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Lego Lord of the Rings, some of the original movie tie-ins based on Peter Jackson’s trilogy are among some of our most treasured gaming memories from the PS2 era.

The official video games based on The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Return of the King were popular in their day, adapting the material of the trilogy in fun and engaging ways.

It doesn’t look like these games are ever going to get official remasters, so one fan has created a new recompiled port featuring both under one unified launcher, which is available now.

Titled Athelas, the launcher acts as a way to play your own copies of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Return of the King. You’ll need to provide your own copy of the game, of course, with the Xbox versions of both currently being supported, as well as the PC version of The Return of the King.

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Athelas has a load of new features to get classic Lord of the Rings games running on modern PCs

It’s not just a simple launcher though, as developer Shagg88 has also provided some updates to the games to help them run on modern systems, as well as some quality-of-life features and easter eggs for fans of the game to check out.

For starters, the games now run at resolutions up to 4K, including ultrawide monitors, with framerates up to 240 FPS supported too. The picture has been improved with sharper textures and better anti-aliasing.

Moving onto the more fun features, Athelas includes the ability to tweak the difficulty to make the experience easier or more difficult, changing how much damage you and enemies can take. You can also tick a box to unlock all levels and heroes.

There have also been a few changes to The Two Towers specifically to bring it in line with Return of the King, which was originally released a year later and featured some big quality of life improvements.

For example, new cheat codes were added to Return of the King, as well as refined controls and a change to how scoring is handled. Both games should now be a little more consistent, which is good if you’re playing both back-to-back.

Speaking of controls, full keyboard and mouse or controller support is included, and you even have the option to remap everything and use glyphs from a specific platform controller to use in-game.

Altogether, it seems like a decent way to re-experience a classic game in a new way. Some of the quality of life changes will suit you if you’re coming back to the game after 20 years, and it should run perfectly fine on modern hardware like the Steam Deck or Steam Machine.

If you’d like to check out Athelas, you can download it now from the launcher’s GitHub page.