8 Video Game Trilogies That Went From Bad To GREAT

The moment that it became clear Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was going to be a mammoth hit, of course we were going to get an avalanche of video games based on the entire trilogy.

This began with WXP's The Fellowship of the Ring game, which was actually developed as an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's novel rather than the film, because EA held the rights to games directly based on the movies at the time.

All the same, publisher Black Label Games clearly knew what they were doing, conceiving their game to piggyback off the success of the first film and releasing it shortly before the release of Jackson's second film, The Two Towers.

The Fellowship of the Ring game was widely criticised for its basic hack-and-slash gameplay, poor camera and controls, and general failure to live up to either Tolkien's source material or the recent film.

EA then thankfully woke up and took the reins moving forward, releasing a game based on The Two Towers mere weeks after WXP's game came out, and which served as an adaptation of the first two Rings movies to great success.

As licensed video games go, this had all the polish and meat-and-potatoes fun that the Fellowship game didn't, and EA pulled it off again with their Return of the King adaptation released the next year.