Who in God’s name wanted a Gollum video game?

From GeekTyrant: “The Lord of the Rings: Gollum has been delayed. Daedalic Entertainment and NACON recently made the announcement regarding the upcoming prequel video game and thanked fans for their patience and support.” If someone who does reads this, feel free to explain why in the comments section. I don’t understand the appeal. — And I don’t mean that in a dismissive way. I like unusual games myself. I’m just not getting the appeal of this one.

6 thoughts on “Who in God’s name wanted a Gollum video game?”

  2. Well, you might be looking at this from the wrong angle. The game wasn’t created because of demand for a Gollum game from fans. This is a Cargo Cult thing. If we code it, they will come. Because it says “Lord of the Rings”. And Gollum is recognizable.

    Now, some speculation –
    But then, somebody actually played the game, which is just Gollum wandering around the countryside, suffering. There’s no fighting-Gollum just puts the ring on and avoids everybody, and there’s this bar on the top that fills up with red every time he puts it on, and he gets more and more disfigured, and eventually, he slinks into that cavern under the Misty Mountains, and the game is over.

    And then, the company decided to delay release.

    1. I mostly agree with the assessment of the motivation, but not the product.

      After Bilbo took the ring, Gollum went on quite the extended adventure* before meeting up with Frodo. There’s totally room for a good stealth game of orc-strangling. (Bleak as hell, with black and black morality. You’d need a third person omniscient narrator expressing pity for the poor creature to make it palatable. But it’s doable.)

      *Horrible, nasty things.

  3. Man… Bojack Horseman is a thing. Wildbow has significant numbers of fans. It is clear that somehow or other there is a market for “I want to spend my entertainment time and money budget on drinking stark misery.” I don’t understand it, and I try to stay away from it personally, but it’s a *thing*.

  4. Of all the characters and all the time in Middle Earth, Golem between losing the ring and being bound by Samwise Gamgee is pretty close to the bottom of the list of things I want to play. Below it are, of course, things like “Golem living in a cave eating fish and occasional goblins for 500 years” (albeit that would be an interesting exercise in resource management: you know how many fish are in the lake and how angry/worried the goblin king is about goblins going missing in the lower levels and you have to survive indefinitely). There is a story to tell, but mostly one of being pathetic and pitiable.
    .
    No, if you want to give me a LotR game, give me Aragorn’s adventure through Rohan and Gondor when he was young and Elrond had just told him to stop trying to woo Arwen. We would get appropriate levels of combat, the occasional back stab, and at the end we would walk off into the sunrise like a proper video-game protagonist.

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