'Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor' is considered one of the finest games of 2014 that translated well on PS4, Xbox One and PC. But did you know that game was almost a Batman property before becoming the one tied to the world created by JRR Tolkein? Liam Robertson, a video game researcher and archiver, in his latest video revealed that an unfinished project based on Christopher Nolan's Batman series was the basis for 'Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.' We are now in a universe where we do not have a 'The Dark Knight' based Batman game with Nemesis System.
Monolith Productions, game developers behind 'Shadow of Mordor,' rose to fame in the early 2000s when they released games like Tron 2.0, F.E.A.R and it's a sequel in 2009. Around the same time, Nolan had been developing the Batman trilogy. The director had already worked with Eurocom and Electronic Arts (EA) in 2005 for movie tie-in game 'Batman Begins.' Original cast members including Christian Bale, Michael Caine, and Liam Neeson had signed on to voiceover the video game characters. The reviews called the game mediocre and that allegedly might have had an effect on Nolan's opinion about the video games. Therefore the second instalment, ready to ride on the success of 'The Dark Knight' was pulled out before publishing. This reportedly hurt Monolith's chances of getting a 'go-ahead' from Nolan who was already busy with his other film projects.
Monolith's project had created an open-world experience in which Batman can make use of the taller structures to attack his enemies. They also had models of Batman's tumbler vehicle ready for the caped crusader to explore the open-world more freely. The story structure was linear with pockets to explore different missions. A few of the developers compared the early structure to what we later saw in Insomniac's 'Spider-Man' game for PS4.
After Nolan's disinterest, Monolith tried to base the game on comic books more than on Warner Bros' hottest property at the time. But that ran the risk of mimicking already famous 'Arkham' series. That shelved the project for good. On the other hand, one more team was working on a game show based on the adventures in Tolkein's Middle Earth. The idea was to put a dwarf and an elf as playable protagonists in co-op gameplay. Since the storyline was linear and that limited the scope of the game and the players, publishers scrapped this idea as well.
But according to Robertson, the team working on the 'Lord of the Rings' project incorporated a lot of the ideas from the Batman project. The open-world technology, combat techniques, unique random enemy generation system, and the early basis of the Nemesis System were included in the new game. Robertson also says that a few developers on the project said that Batman holding a sword was used as a stand-in for the new protagonist. This game eventually became 'Shadow of Mordor.'
So all thanks to Christopher Nolan, there exists a universe in which gamers got to play a Batman game with the brilliant Nemesis System. Sadly, that is not the universe you live in.
