Lord of the Rings Game From 2011 May Be Getting Surprising Remaster

A Lord of the Rings game from 2011 may be getting a surprising re-release, presumably in the form of a remaster. The Lord of the Rings is one of the biggest IPs in entertainment, yet it’s not very well represented in video games. In the 2020s, the series has predominantly been sidelined to smaller, experimental games. To this end, there has not been a major Lord of the Rings game since 2017’s Middle-earth: Shadow of War. And it’s been even longer — since 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor — the series has had a Game of the Year challenger. Suffice to say, fans have been a little underwhelmed, but this is not actually new. The series has always underwhelmed in the video game format, mostly due to a lack of truly big and ambitious productions and licensing issues in the past.

The era before Shadow of Mordor was an equally strange and underwhelming era of Lord of the Rings video games, with scattered releases that were typically far from the biggest and best releases of any given year. For example, in 2011, The Lord of the Rings: War in the North was released by Snowblind Studios and WB Games. The former notably shut down a year later, which tells you everything you need to know about The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, an underwhelming release, as evidenced by its Metacritic range of 61 to 66. It was also a commercial failure, yet it looks like it may be returning.

Forgotten Lord of the Rings Game

While The Lord of the Rings: War in the North was both a critical and commercial failure, these were largely because of game-breaking bugs that plagued the game. Hypothetically, if you fix these bugs, there is a competent and enjoyable game there, which may be the reasoning behind a potential revival.

In the back end of Steam, the game has been getting tinkered with, and in the files, actually, its name has been changed to “Slinky,” which seems to be a codename. A codename for what, though?

It gets more interesting. In the installation path, now Aspyr is mentioned. For those who do not know, Aspyr specializes in re-releases and remasters, especially involving licensed IP.

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All of this said, there is clearly something going on with the game. Whether it will be a simple re-release or a remaster is the question, and right now, there is not enough information to say one way or another. In the meantime, remember to take everything here with a grain of salt, as nothing here is official information. So far, neither Aspyr nor WB Games, the two implicated parties, have been drawn out for comment.

As always, feel free to leave a comment or two letting us know what you think, or join the conversation over on the ComicBook Forum.

H/T, Reddit.