'Lord Of The Rings' MMO Video Game Coming From Amazon

Amazon is busy at the forge with its Lord of the Rings projects. On top of the highly anticipated The Lord of the Rings prequel series being produced for Amazon Prime Video, the company's game division is developing a massively multiplayer Lord of the Rings video game that will be free-to-play for both PC and consoles.

Exploring Middle-earth will be more than just a fantasy thanks to a new Lord of the Rings MMO being developed by Amazon Game Studios and Leyou, according to the Verge. Amazon announced the new free-to-play console title is being developed in partnership with the Leyou-owned Athlon Games, which revealed last year that it was working on a "Middle-earth enterprise" with an unnamed "partner developer." That partner developer turns out to be Amazon Game Studios, which is developing the video game separately from Amazon Prime Video's upcoming Lord of the Rings TV series.

The new MMO is set "at a time long before the events of The Lord of the Rings, exploring lands, people and creatures never seen before by fans of the Tolkien universe," according to Athlon's fall announcement. While that sounds eerily similar to the premise of Amazon's upcoming Lord of the Rings series, which is set to take place in Middle-earth during the Second Age — centuries before the events of Fellowship of the Ring — Amazon says that the show and the game are unrelated projects.

This wouldn't be the first time that a video game was developed based on the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, nor indeed the first MMO. The Lord of the Rings Online has been around since 2007, allowing players to go on adventures alongside the events of the War of the Ring in Lord of the Rings trilogy, and has frequently been updated — the most recent being released in October 2018. But I'm sure many of us have fond memories of slew of games that came out following the release of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, or even the many that came out before. I personally spent hours on a Hobbit video game for Game Boy Advance. The rich setting provides the perfect template for a standard fantasy RPG, whether you're personally following the storyline of the books or not.

There are no details yet on when Amazon expects to release the MMO or on which consoles it will be available. Expect more soon.