Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and Witcher: How You Can (and Can't) Adapt Famous Fantasies To Games
As a 12-year-old Christian Cantamessa sat in bed and read The Lord of the Rings, he never imagined having the chance to one day create his own story set in Tolkien’s world with Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. Nor could Brad Kane, as he walked down the aisle on his wedding day to the Game of Thrones theme tune, picture himself writing a Westerosi tale of his own through the Telltale series. And the same goes for CD Projekt Red’s Marcin Blacha and Magdalena Zych, who as kids read Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books - Wiedźmin in the original Polish, where it’s practically required reading.
These writers have each created video game stories set in established and beloved fantasy epics, but despite the opportunities to do so being fantasies in themselves - genuine dreams come true - there are myriad challenges and pressures that come alongside.
Take The Lord of the Rings, for example. J.R.R. Tolkien created an entire plane of existence with its own history, myth, politics, and so on. He did so not only through the main series of novels but through countless smaller stories and unfinished tales, not to mention the immense amount of adaptations that have added layers upon layers of lore.
Monolith Productions’ Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor takes place amid this complex web and lead writer Christian Cantamessa worked with the Tolkien Estate (the legal body that controls the late author’s work) alongside a writer who worked on Peter Jackson’s film adaptations and a literal Lord of the Rings scholar in order to create a lore-accurate story. “It was helpful to be like, ‘hey, what you’re doing over here isn’t going to work because this either happens here or there’s this statement in the book that contradicts it’, and we never wanted
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