Awesome Footage and Details Revealed For a $1 Million Video Game Pitch For THE HOBBIT
Back in 2008, TT Games started developing a pitch for a video game based on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit. TT Games is best known for the LEGO games that they developed, but as huge Lord of the Rings fans, they were excited to create a pitch for The Hobbit.
Warner Bros. gave the creative team six months to create their pitch and in that time, the game developer spent $1 million to make their demo! That’s a lot of money for a game pitch. The demo they created was made to be played on the Xbox 360 and until now, the footage from that demo has never been made public.
There were four different levels created for the demo which were fully playable, as well as five tech demos. Their plan for the game was to follow the film’s story as closely as possible, but since the movie was still in production and they didn’t know how the story would play out, the team ended up creating areas based on The Lord of the Rings films, to show Peter Jackson what the team was capable of.
What they ended up creating is pretty damn awesome! The footage shown looks great, especially for a pitch demo on the Xbox 360. What TT Games ended up delivering is impressive, especially when you look at the attention to detail. The team certainly proved they had talent, but WB ended up passing.
While Jackson and Guillermo del Toro, who was set to direct the film at the time, both loved what they had done, Warner Bros. wanted to go in a different direction. Instead of a direct adaptation, the studio wanted to develop a game that existed in the same world but told a different story.
Even though TT Games never got to make this game for The Hobbit, they still had the opportunity to adapt The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit for their LEGO video game brand.
Check out the video below, to see what could have been. The video was released by GameHut, which is the personal YouTube channel of TT Games founder Jon Burton.