The video game of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was developed using the engine of an unknown title by Tiger Woods, would you believe it? In a recent interview with Wired, Glen Schofield, the CEO of Striking Distance Studios (the same as The Callisto Protocol), answered some questions on this very topic.
In recounting his experience with Electronic Arts and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Schofield explained that in many cases it is not so much convenient to build an engine from scratch, as to exploit the characteristics that unite several video games so as to take advantage of them in the of development.
“When I first came to EA they had a lot of different game engines, and we were just starting to build one for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” Schofield explained, later recounting that the creative team started looking around, noting very many similitudes with engine previously used for a game about Tiger Woods. The gist of his reasoning is that an attitude like this can easily lead to the birth of a project that originated from two video games literally at the antipodes.
The great hype raised by this interview on the web also prompted the fellow developer Nick Ferguson to talk about the incident, adding further details with a Twitter post: "It's all true, with the code that then returned to Tiger Woods' game".
This is true, and then that code circled back into Tiger Woods. I remember the code for VFX in Tiger Woods PSP was from LOTR (had references to Gandalf, etc). All that for little wisps of smoke when hitting a golf ball! https://t.co/odmTylBVUC
— Nick F ☁️ @forensicgunk@mastodon.gamedev.place (@ForensicGunk) December 5, 2022
Were you aware of this particular trivia about The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King game? Did you know that this is by no means the first time in the industry that a developer has reported on a choice like this in development?
We remind you that The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was released in the course of 2003 su Microsoft Windows, Playstation 2, GameCube, Xbox, Game Boy Advance e MacOS.
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