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There Are Games Afoot! - Page 3

© Michael Martinez

Tolkien fans and gamers alike were disappointed when Sierra Online announced the (apparently permanent) postponement of its Middle-earth Online game. The game, as conceived by the original development team, was to be a real-time simulation of Middle-earth (well, the northwest of the old continent) in the Fourth Age. Up to 10,000 players would have been accommodated on each server (each server running its own game). People would have played Hobbits, Elves, Men, or Dwarves. There was even talk of people getting to play Orcs. MEO wasn't going to concern itself with reliving the adventures of Frodo and company. It was going to be set in the Fourth Age, and allow the player communities to deal with new situations in familiar environments. Of course, there were going to be limitations to the pseudo-realism. With 10,000 adventurers running around the map, you would soon run out of Orcs and Trolls for everyone to kill. The designers were going to have to allow for old dungeons to respawn evil creatures (basically, just create them out of nothing) for new encounters. Game time still would have been compressed. I think one proposal was for a day to pass in about 30 minutes of real time. Depending on your connection and the power of your PC, 30 minutes would be a lot of time to accomplish things. But unlike pencil-and-paper role-playing games, the MEO servers would not shut down when it came time for people to go home (and actually do some work). MEO was also going to be confined to the map published with The Lord of the Rings. Legally, no one, not even Iron Crown Enterprises (which no longer exists, and which lost its MERP license a year before they went out of business), can use the maps published in The Shaping of Middle-earth or even The Silmarillion for devising a game. Karen Fonstad and other cartographers can make new works based on the published maps, but they cannot create games based on the books without getting permission. And there is the rub. To do a Tolkien game right you have to have permission from the Tolkien Estate, and they don't seem to be inclined to let anyone try. All the games which have been published have gotten permission from Tolkien Enterprises, which is a wholly separate entity from the Tolkien Estate. The Estate manages the rights to all of J.R.R. Tolkien's works, except for the film and merchandising rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. JRRT himself sold these rights to United Artists in 1966 or thereabouts. Eventually, Saul Zaentz acquired the rights from United Artists, and he formed Tolkien Enterprises, a division of The Saul Zaentz Company.

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