Developer Monolith Production’s Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor came out of nowhere when it was first released in 2014 and went on to be critically acclaimed by many fans and critics. But did you know that it was first a new Batman game before becoming the Middle Earth game we all love?
As revealed by journalist and video game historian Liam Robertson in the below video, Shadow of Mordor evolved from a cancelled Batman game Monolith Productions was working on. Of course, this might not surprise many fans who felt that the game played similarly to Batman: Arkham.
It all started when the developer wanted to try something new after releasing the F.E.A.R games. Of course, with Warner bros owning the Batman IP, Monolith decided to set its sights on a game featuring The Dark Knight, but not after initially trying their hands at developing another Lord of The Rings game that heavily focused on co-op. Obviously, The Lord of The Rings game never saw the light of day as the developer had some concerns about the game’s protagonists. Sticking with the Batman game, the concept was to develop an open-world game based on Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy of films.
One stumbling block was that they would need approval from Christopher Nolan, and, as you can probably guess, this never happened. Monolith was forced to start from the beginning, combining many of the concepts from their planned Batman game to create the game we now know as Shadow of Mordor. The rest, as they say, is history.
