The owners of the Lord of the Rings IP have announced that five games based on the franchise will be released by April 2024, suggesting unannounced projects might be closer than we expected.
In an investor statement released this morning, Embracer Group confirmed that its recent acquisition of the rights to the franchise "has generated a lot of interest among both internal and external partners for the Lord of the Rings IP. There are currently five games in production by external partners, to be released in financial year 2023/24."
That date means that we should expect all of those games by April 2024, and that suggests that some of the more mysterious Lord of the Rings titles out there might be closer than we thought. We already knew about The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, pushed back from a September release date to some time in 2023, and Return to Moria, a dwarf-driven survival game, also coming later this year.
Beyond that, there's the game from Weta Workshop, the company's digital branch that helped make several iconic 'bigatures' for the Lord of the Rings films. That's almost a total mystery, but we know that a vague release window points to early 2024. Beyond that, a new Lord of the Rings mobile game is coming from EA, in what sounds like a gacha RPG.
For those of you keeping count, that amounts to four games, all now theoretically locked in to release some time in the next 14 months (accounting, however, for the notoriously delay-prone nature of the industry). But Embracer Group has said that five games will release by next April, meaning that somewhere out there is a fifth, as-yet-unannounced Lord of the Rings game that, for now at least, we know nothing about. It's set to be a big year for Tolkein fans, but there are still plenty of secrets to uncover.
A few new contenders are on the horizon, but here's our list of the best Lord of the Rings games of all time.
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