14 DAY TRIAL // Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment has announced the first game that it would create using the Lord of the Rings franchise, recently picked up from Electronic Arts. Now, the company is saying that there is a long term plan for the intellectual property, which is focused on creating videogames suited for a wide array of gamers, from the more casual players to the hardcore fans of the series.
Warner Bros. has entered into a partnership with The Saul Zaents Company and New Line Productions so that it can draw on both the books themselves and the movies to create its videogames. The projects are set to bring something new related to the Lord of the Rings games released by Electronic Arts, like Conquest and Battle for Middle Earth.
The first project should be Aragorn's Quest, a game that is being developed Headstrong Games, which has also worked on House of the Dead: Overkill, and should arrive on the Nintendo Wii, the DS, the PlayStation 2 and the PlayStation Portable sometime during fall. Warner Bros. is describing the title as having “accessible gameplay set in a friendly, colorful rendition of Middle-Earth. Players assume the role of Strider and embark on his greatest quests from The Lord of the Rings trilogy.”
It sounds like the title will be testing the waters to see how gamers respond to a lighter approach to the series, which focuses on accessibility rather than on fidelity to the movies.
Martin Tremblay, who is the president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, stated that “The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest is the first of many different types of games we will be developing with the film and literary rights. It is also the first game allowing kids and their families to interact in their favourite locations and stories from The Lord of the Rings with accessible gameplay.”