A Fallout co-creator has been revealing heater after heater of never-before-seen RPG history on YouTube, including an early Lord of the Rings RPG demo

pcgamer.com:

Fallout and The Outer Worlds co-creator Tim Cain has started a YouTube channel covering stories from throughout his over 30-year career in the games industry. One of the most surprising tidbits he's shared in the week since coming online is that the company he co-founded with fellow ex-Interplay Fallout luminaries, Troika, almost made a Lord of the Rings RPG(opens in new tab).

Cain still has footage of the demo he mocked up back in 2000. It's on the Arcanum engine, and even boots up with that game's main menu and shares many of its UI elements. Interestingly, it has this really gorgeous pre-rendered background art like Baldur's Gate instead of the admittedly drab (but still charming) Fallout-style modular tiles of Arcanum. If I didn't know better, I'd have guessed this was a prototype of Troika's later Temple of Elemental Evil (the most D&D of all D&D games(opens in new tab)).

To hear Cain tell it, Troika was contracted to make the demo by now-defunct publisher Sierra after it acquired the rights to the LotR books (but not the movies! A very familiar-sounding situation(opens in new tab)). «Sierra liked what they saw,» Cain said in the video, «then decided to pull all the development internally. So we didn't get to make the game.» Sierra went bust in '02, and the LotR CRPG went the way of the Dodo or the Jess Mariano spinoff of Gilmore Girls(opens in new tab).

Cain says the game would have followed a sort of «shadow Fellowship» clearing the way for Frodo and the gang, which to me sounds a lot like EA Redwood's PS2 Lord of the Rings JRPG, The Third Age(opens in new tab). Honestly this one doesn't bum me out too much to have lost in this timeline, though it does rule to gawk at a never-before-seen, prototype Troika RPG on