One Hobbit Video Game Everyone Forgot About (& Why That’s Sad)

Releasing in 2003, Sierra Entertainment’s The Hobbit is a video game that most people have either completely forgotten about or didn’t know existed in the first place. It’s completely understandable, since the video game was a bit rushed and a bit too simple. Despite adhering closely to the plot of the book, it’s still an oddball outlier in a series of Lord of the Rings video games.

The development of The Hobbit was just as odd. Sierra Entertainment’s holding company, Vivendi Universal Games, owned the rights to any Lord of the Rings video games based off author J.R.R. Tolkien’s written works, and it wanted to cash-in on the popularity of the Peter Jackson movie adaptations. Only there was a catch — EA owned the rights to making LotR video games based on the movies, so Vivendi couldn’t make their own LotR game look anything like the movie trilogy. What resulted was The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring releasing in 2002, probably confusing a lot of movie fans who discovered the characters and locations looked nothing like the ones in the films. The same year, EA released The Two Towers video game, based on the new movie, and it heavily outsold Vivendi’s new game.

Since adapting LotR video games directly from Tolkien’s books didn’t work out, Vivendi decided to go a different direction. They tapped Sierra Entertainment to develop a game that didn’t have a movie adaptation currently in theaters but still had the Lord of the Rings brand recognition. Based on the shorter prelude novel to Lord of the Rings,The Hobbit video game released in 2003 on Xbox, PS2, GameCube, PC, and GameBoy Advance. It got mixed reviews and sold poorly, and coupled with the underwhelming sales of War of the Ring, Sierra’s other LotR video game that released the same year, it effectively ended the company’s foray into Middle-Earth.

The Hobbit Is An Odd Piece of Lord of the Rings Video Game History

The Hobbit tells the story of Bilbo Baggins and a company of dwarves who go on a journey to reclaim the dwarves’ homeland from a vicious dragon named Smaug. Although the video game was rushed to profit off the popularity of the Lord of the Rings movies, The Hobbit was praised for how well it stuck to Tolkien’s prelude novel and presented the story from start to finish. The combat and gameplay was a knock-off of Legend of Zelda games, and the puzzles were simple and easy to solve. Die-hard Lord of the Rings fans still seemed to enjoy it, even though the most patient players could get frustrated by the game’s repetitive missions. What really hurt The Hobbit‘s success, however, was that it released the same year as EA’s Return of the King, which is widely considered the best of the movie trilogy’s video game adaptations and one of the best LotR games of all time.

Because it was competing against a popular, award-winning movie franchise, The Hobbit was doomed to fail and soon forgotten. The game has since developed a slightly better reputation after The Hobbit movie trilogy faced so much criticism for adding in fluff and deviating from the source material. But with those movies came Lego The Hobbit video game, further damning Sierra’s own game into obscurity.

It’s a bit sad that The Hobbit has remained so underground after all these years. It wasn’t a bad game — just an easy one with somewhat clunky graphics — and there are certainly worse ways to spend an afternoon or weekend. Since sales were so poor, it’s doubtful a remastered version will ever appear on modern consoles. But for fans looking for it, The Hobbit is inexpensive and easy to obtain, and it remains one of the strangest LotR adaptations in existence.

About The Author

Austin King
(1233 Articles Published)

Austin King is a Game Features Editor at Screen Rant. He’s the author of several books and hosts the Dragon Quest FM and JRPGs & Me podcasts. You can find him on Twitter @DragonQuaustin.

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