The greatest Lord of the Rings strategy game still isn’t legally available

techradar.com:

I’ve got a hankering for The Lord of the Rings but can’t seem to satisfy it. Ever since the Rings of Power made words like Númenor, Harfoots, and Morgoth part of my everyday vernacular, I’ve been hunting for a video game to supply the same cinematic Tolkien action. I had one specifically in mind: EA’s excellent 2004 real-time strategy game Battle for Middle-earth.

I originally had the game on disc, but that’s been gathering dust somewhere in my parents’ house for the past several years. Even if I could find the box, my PC’s long since lost the optical drive needed to run it. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll turn to Steam for my strategic Tolkien fix” – only to be shown a disappointingly blank search page. Valve’s storefront carries plenty of Lord of the Rings games, but Battle for Middle-earth isn’t among them.

“Why should it be?” I asked myself. “A game as ripe as this is much better placed on GOG.” My confidence was misplaced. It turned out that even a platform with a name as prematurely promising as Good Old Games didn’t stock the one venerable good game I was after. Neither, as it so happens, does any other storefront on the internet. Search as high or low as you like, you’ll find nary a pixelated oliphaunt to purchase from the retail battlefield.

Not that this is anything new. Battle for Middle-earth and its 2006 sequel have never been available to purchase digitally. Released after the advent of Steam but several years before the practice of downloading games took off, the series arrived precisely when Gandalf says a wizard shouldn’t – a little too early.

Other RTS games of that era have enjoyed better digital preservation. Warcraft 3 was available on Blizzard’s Battle.Net client for years (until eventually being