For those who have followed my work over the past 15 years, you know of my hatred for DRM in video games. You also know of my adoration for Tolkien’s work. So imagine my ire when these two things are combined. When it comes to DRM in video games, one of the most interesting and aggravating examples of it involved a game titled J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Vol. 1 which was released back in 1990 for MS-DOS PCs and Amiga (it was then released for the Super NES in 1994).
What this game did was it removed portions of conversations with NPCs and put them in the game manual. So when you would play the game, you would have to look up the conversation’s identifying number so you could read the rest of the conversation.
Imagine that!
In order to fully enjoy the game, you needed the manual. And, since the internet was still young and nowhere near what it is today, there wouldn’t be a copy of it available online.
So you would be out-of-luck if you lost the manual or your mother decided to throw it out whether through carelessness or religious zealotry that made her believe that all things not of God are evil.
Thankfully, I still have the original manuals for Vol 1 and Vol 2. So if I wanted to play the game again, I could. Though, I still have yet to locate the discs which are in storage somewhere.
It was a fun game to play and I enjoyed it a lot as a kid. Especially as a fan of Tolkien who had read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy at a very young age. And, even though at that age, I didn’t know what DRM was, my opinion of this mechanic was that this made the experience annoying and inefficient.
I would say that this specific experience was a driving force for my outspoken stance on DRM as it has gotten worse and more egregious over the decades when it comes to PC gaming. To the point where PC gamers no longer own the games they buy.
I plan to write an editorial about J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Vol. 1, which was developed by Interplay, and compare the developer’s approach to Tolkien’s world with Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’s approach. Which, as readers will know, I am not a fan of the show. Not by a long shot for its bad writing and disregard and disrespect for Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the lore, and the author’s world views.
Since 1990 there have been other Lord of the Rings games which have been released. But this one holds a special place for being one of the first but also for being respectful of the work even though Interplay made the stupid decision to include this exasperating DRM.
What would your reaction be if you had to read the game manual to finish ingame conversations?
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