A strange and antclimactic denouement has emerged in the story of notorious flop The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.
While Tolkien fans were hopeful to get an interesting, if not perfect, game from this unexpected spinoff, the final result did not meet even the lowest of expectations from fans. As we had reported, the terrible reception the game received led to Daedalic actually issuing an apology.
As reported by Tech4Gamers, we now know about one more page in the company’s chapter. As it turned out, Daedalic had nothing to do with writing the apology that they had supposedly sent out. It was the game’s publisher, Nacon, that sent the apology out. To make things worse, Nacon didn’t even get someone in their office, or hire an outsider, to write the apology. Instead, they used ChatGPT to send out that apology.
As you may remember, the fallout of all this led to Daedalic shutting down that internal studio. The company remains in existence, solely as a publisher moving forward. That translated to the company firing 25 of their 90 employees, close to a third of their overall staff.
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum’s developer Daedalic Entertainment was primarily known as a publisher, but they had a fair reputation for their internal studio. In particular, the game studio under Daedalic was known for producing some well received point-and-click adventure games. Their most high profile project until that point was a surprise adaptation of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth.
Prior to this, Daedalic was known for producing the Deponia series of adventure games. While the Deponia series was not particularly critically acclaimed, they had a loyal fanbase and enough financial success to push the company forward with their more famous licensed games.
While Daedalic deserved all the criticism it received for the poor release of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, it was clear that they had been treated unfairly to some degree over things they had no control over. This revelation came from a new German language documentary. The documentary also claimed that Daedalic was given a stringy budget of $ 16 million to make the game by Nacon, definitely not enough to realize what we now know as a game design failure.
If there could have been a better conceived and financially successful version of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, we live in the universe where that game never saw the light of day.
