What do Batman and Sauron, the Lord of the Rings, have in common? In addition to a penchant for black armor and masks with spiky decorations, both are part of Warner Bros.' current legacy in film and video games. What's more, there was a time when their destinies were unified and in the hands of Monolith Productions. The name of the initiative: Project Apollo.
The story told in short is that Monolith began developing an open-world game with the aesthetic and costume of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight film saga. There was an exploration system, a detective mode and combats like Rocksteady's Arkham City, and we could even drive the Tumbler, that brand new Batmobile, years before the release of Batman: Arkham Knight. Something you can see in this version in development.
With that in mind, it should be noted that technically the Project Apollo It was not a video game adaptation of Nolan's trilogy. In fact, there were already other adaptations attached to the original material such as Batman Begins. And we don't forget the canceled Pandemic project. However, there were already elements that made it stand out both as a video game based on a movie and for fans of the superhero in comics and Rocksteady games. Which does not mean that they did not contribute their own ideas.
It was in this project that Monolith experimented and integrated his popularized Nemesis system, in which the weight of the enemies we face and the feeling of revenge takes on special nuances. Something that will survive Project Apollo and we would later see in 2014 with Shadow of Mordor. And that opens up the key question: how do we get from Gotham to Middle-earth?
Via an X/Twitter thread started by @Dageekydude several of the complications related to the Project Apollo that address everything from having to depend on Nolan's own concessions or approval in regards to the artistic section to the big problem that Warner saw then: that there was two Batman video game sagas launching at the same time and similar to each other.
So it was decided to make the leap to another major license of the house, in this case The Lord of the rings, and start from scratch taking advantage of the lessons learned and various ideas. The rest is history.
We are left without a promising game of Dark Knight (although not without being able to play as him with a controller or mouse) but we won one of the best video games ever made based on the Lord of the Rings, offering a custom-created story, with lots of references to the well-known films and that delves into many elements that Tolkien left unclosed within his legendarium. And we are not going to deny it, as an action and RPG game, Shadow of Mordor is amazing.
So sensational, that ten years after that time, we still don't know how Warner is going to be able to raise the bar compared to Rocksteady's Batman trilogy or the two installments of its Middle-earth role-playing saga. And it won't be for lack of trying, mind you.
In VidaExtra | Where do I start reading Batman? We recommend five absolutely essential Dark Knight comics