5 Reasons It’s Impossible To Make A Great Tolkien Video Game

1. Because You Are Not Enough, You Are Going To Need A Miracle

Think of when Gandalf shows up at just the right moment with reinforcements to win the Battle of Helm’s Deep or how Rohan rocks up to Minas Tirith at just the right moment to save Gandalf, or how Aragorn arrives at the same place at just the right moment to bail everyone out again, or how the Goblin army appears at just the right moment in The Hobbit to get the Elves and Dwarves to unite instead of killing each other.

These are all events that, though they wouldn’t be possible without our human (or human-like) protagonists, also cannot be entirely attributed to their own labour and skill. Aragorn didn’t choose the moment he showed up to Minas Tirith and the good guys could not possibly have planned for the goblin army to show up and inadvertently save the day.

Tolkien cited the concept of eucatastrophe as being central to his stories, which is basically the opposite of a catastrophe. And it determines that the heroes receive some undeserved grace that enables them to avoid a terrible, probable doom. They happen all the time in Middle Earth stories - the central conflict of the story in The Lord of the Rings is resolved not because Frodo is able to destroy The Ring, but because Gollum happens to come at (again) just the right moment to bite his finger off and then fall into Mount Doom. And this is just somewhat at odds with how and why we usually play video games.

Without eucatastrophe, without that underserved grace that comes at just the right moment, the protagonists lose. And that’s just hard to do in a satisfying way in a game. In fact, many of the underserved graces we receive in games (for example, the last bit of health in Assassin’s Creed games lasting significantly longer than the rest of the health bar), are made to be invisible, to reinforce the power fantasy that we can accomplish our objective if we try hard enough.

In Tolkien’s works and in the films, the dependence of a happy ending on eucatastrophe isn’t hidden though. It is front and centre in these stories and I’m honestly not sure what it would look like for a game to try to do the same. It would be really interesting to see an adaptation try to work this into its gameplay in a meaningful and fulfilling way. In any case, there are going to be no shortage of Tolkien video games going forward, so we may just get to see someone try.