Jon Burton TT Games $1 million pitch The Hobbit video game The Lord of the Rings Traveller's Tales

There's a oblong list of game demos that never became full games, but most of them didn't cost $1 million in order to ne'er Be made. Jon Burton, the co-founder of Traveller's Tales, which would subsequently become part of TDT Games and develop copious Lego video games, free a video now detailing how his studio fagged just that amount of money to create a present in 2008 for Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro on the happen that they would be selected to make the formalised brave for The Hobbit.

The telecasting features a nearly fully realized adjust of game demos that went far above and beyond what a developer would unremarkably do, but Burton was incredibly invested in fashioning the game and on the dot capturing movie moments. TT Games complete functioning not just underdeveloped four "fully playable and polished" proofread-of-concept levels based murder Lord of the Rings, including some ring temptation mini-brave for Frodo, but also five tech demos. The idea appeared to be to have different styles of gameplay for different characters: stealth for the hobbits, fighting for Aragorn, and some magic for Gandalf.

So what happened? Del Toro reacted very positively to the demo, but the entire deal vicious done A Warner Bros., in what one could argue was a surprisingly prescient move, definite it desirable to release a game not tied right away to the film narrative of The Hobbit atomic number 3 Burson's would take over. However, no console table video game for The Hobbit ever ultimately materialized. Patc The Hobbit (the film) released in 2012, IT was famously delayed afterward a host of yield issues and a decisiveness to stretch the serial into three films instead of cardinal. IT leave never be familiar how Burson's The Hobbit would have been acceptable.

This whole level English hawthorn seem a bit odd coming from a company that now nearly exclusively makes Lego games, though many of those are film tie-ins themselves. Simply aside from the Lego gravy train, TT Games has kicked out a host of movie tie-ins with Pixar and Disney, including the halt versions of The Chronicles of Narnia films and even a family-chummy Overlord of the Rings Nintendo DS game called Almighty of the Rings: Aragorn's Quest, which Burson really didn't reference in his video. He did happily observe that they got to make Lego set The Lord of the Rings and Lego The Hobbit though.