Middle-earth Online Memories, Part One

RPG Vault has published the first installment to a new interview series with members of the original Middle-earth Online team. Back then, The Lord of the Rings MMORPG was actually in development at Sierra/Yosemite Entertainment.

Q: First, please introduce yourself and what you’re doing now. And since we’re looking back at Middle-earth Online, what was the nature of your involvement in this project?

Craig Alexander: I’m Craig Alexander, former GM of Sierra, VP/EP at Electronic Arts, and GM at Activision. Unfortunately, I’m not ready to announce my next set of projects despite my excitement about the opportunity.

As General Manager for Sierra’s original development group located in the small mountain town of Oakhurst, near Yosemite National Park, I was responsible for negotiating and signing the original Lord of the Rings book license with Tolkien Enterprises (the licensor), and starting pre-production on the Middle-Earth project – among other titles at the studio which I managed. The year was 1997, and we were looking to further grow the MMORPG space, which was still in its infancy with only two major titles on the market, Meridian 59 and The Realm, Sierra’s first Internet-based MMORPG that we shipped in late 1996. At the time, the Lord of the Rings film was still in the hands of Miramax and had not been picked up by New Line Cinema, although buzz was already building about the film and many of us understood the potential popularity given its 100 million-plus unit book sales and extreme passion from gamers and the game development community.

The promise of MMOs had yet to be fulfilled, and Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Asheron’s Call had not been released; however, the game community was already talking about MMORPGs as the future of our industry. Sierra, in particular, had invested millions in the Sierra (later Imagination) Network in the hope of connecting players together to offer a superior gaming experience.

The idea was simple and still relevant today; develop a detailed fictional world based on a beloved franchise. Middle-earth seemed like the perfect choice and vehicle to convince the company that a compelling IP could grow the market above the paltry early adopters that numbered less than 100,000. The pitch worked. In 1998, we secured the Lord of the Rings book rights across all genres and platforms, announced the game at the Game Developers Conference, and began pre-production and prototype work. Unfortunately, the team moved to the Seattle area less than a year later, and my involvement ended.