Reliable Leaker Claims Eidos-Montreal Canceled A Lord Of The Rings Game That Fans Have Been Dreaming About
Quinton is a Staff Writer from the United States. In his youth, Quinton was ridiculed for making video game ranking lists instead of paying attention in math class. In adulthood, people sometimes pay him for it. Life’s a trip.
Taking his first steps into the industry in 2020, Quinton has written for several digital publications, but his permanent literary home is right here at TheGamer.
Before striking up a conversation with Quinton, consider the risks: he’ll find a way to transform almost any topic into an analysis of either world history, Star Trek, or – at least this one’s relevant to his career – all his favorite role-playing games.
Eidos Montreal could be in deeper trouble after Grounded 2 and Fable are released, as more layoffs are supposedly in the works thereafter. Two rounds of layoffs have occurred this year alone, with 75 employees let go in March, and several more this past week. As it’s the unenviable task of laid-off personnel to take a terrifying gamble in search for new work, resumés have now popped up, and we’ve learned of a sci-fi game in the stealth genre, and a turn-based point-and-click adventure. The former could well have been another Deus Ex.
Grounded 2, of course, is already out. Except not really – it is in early access, after all. That gives Eidos Montreal more time to dig down with further results. But if a reliable insider is to be believed, and we’ll always leave room for doubt but Tom Henderson’s track record is hardly dire, the gaming world also missed out something potentially quite special from Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
The UK isn’t Nintendo’s biggest market by any stretch, but I’d still label this an overperformance on Sony’s part.
That’s the latest little revelation from Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming fame. A Lord of the Rings card game, with Telltale-style story elements, sounds pretty rad. Of course, everything can sound good on paper. Henderson claims this was canceled early in development, and it likely would have been linked to Embracer Group, which is… you know, never great to hear these days.
“The cancelations were related to that particular project,” Henderson says, before also tossing in that the studio was also working on Hideo Kojima’s upcoming project, OD. “I believe it was 2023, just after – or just before, I should say – when they announced it at The Game Awards […] Around that time, Eidos Montreal was working on OD; they had around 20 developers working on it at Eidos Montreal, and it was canceled because – I guess it is kind of weird – you don’t really hear this a lot, but Kojima Productions wanted those developers to go on and live in Japan.” To cut ties from Eidos Montreal, even. Kind of wild.
But back to The Lord of the Rings. The franchise (unsurprisingly) already has a physical card game; perhaps a bit more seriously, it even has a digital version. But Asmodee Digital’s venture hardly includes Telltale’s narrative flourish. Not that this would literally have been the case here, to be clear; even so, there’s nothing wrong with seeking such a pedigree for stylistic inspiration.
Alas, we’ll never see it. Bit of a bummer, and part of the wider and far more devastating overarching bummer: layoffs keep hitting the video game industry with no end in sight.
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