Nothing gives me a headache more than a potential time paradox and wacko-conservatives. Thanks, Ron.

You spelled his last name wrong. Tolkien. Interesting idea though.  From what I recall, Dungeons and Dragons sparked many of the fantasy genre type games in both pen and paper roleplaying and computer gaming and it's ideas were mainly borrowed from Tolkien as well as world mythology. If Tolkien and Gygax had not existed or were killed as children, would everything be based around a different fantasy world, such as Xanth (Piers Anthony) or Ringworld (Larry Niven) or maybe Elric (Moorcock) or maybe even McCaffrey's Pern or Eddings' fantasy world?

Or did all of their ideas originate with or derive from Tolkien?

Just to point out - Niven's Ringworl, and McCaffrey's Pern are sci-fi books covered up in a fantasy disguise. And though they are popular books I don't think they would have had the same affect as did LOtR.

i vow never to watch those god awful films, tolkien wrote the books first and without his consent they made a film out of it.

i know it's hard to get consent considering he's dead and all but maybe that a hint?

Oh, come on.  Some people like to actually at least sample something before deciding whether they liked it.  That aside, whatever your opinion on the films are, it could have been much worse.  Don't forget that a film version of the books was being seriously planned starring The Beatles.

He sold the movie rights. Perhaps that's a hint?

I like Tolkien, but I hate all the pop fantasy he inspired. I wrote a rant a while ago about how tacky and overused pop fantasy is, and how much I hate the concept of a fantasy world where a commoner could look out the window, see a group of ogres being chased through the streets by a supermodel in a chainmail bikini shooting lightning bolts out of her fingers, and not think anything is unusual about it.

There was a game released in 1993 called Darklands (I mentioned it in an earlier comment) which was an RPG taking place in 15th century Germany. It's one of the most brilliant game concepts ever. It did away with magic, having a well-researched alchemy system instead.
Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where the game didn't sell well so they didn't bother making the sequels they said they would make.

It didn't sell well because it didn't have a supermodel in a chainmail bikini shooting lightning bolts out of her fingers.

Actually, there were two different misleading images used for the box art which appear to have been stock fantasy art.
One of them features a warrior with a snazzy haircut, no pants, and his armour on inside-out, fighting next to Xena.
The other features a cleavaged biker woman standing next to a black metal musician with a model of a flying saucer, and in the background, three Ring Wraiths can be seen riding green dinosaurs. (Actually, now that I see the filename, I think it might have been a magazine ad.)
It seems that if gamers wanted scantly clad female adventurers, they would have bought Darklands! It has been theorised that people didn't buy it because they thought it WAS just another pop fantasy RPG.

However, several years later, the Darklands interface was stolen and used in Baldur's Gate, which was another pop fantasy RPG. And it was successful. I don't understand!

Look at those meat sacks!! What a Sexy Momma!!

it could have been the germany bit that put off potential buyers

Oddly enough, if Tolkein was alive today, he would probably be part of this wacko-conservative-anti-video-game organization. He would also be quite appalled to see his books championed by hippies and geeks.

Sorry for spelling Tolkien wrong.

Thank you, Ron, for admitting that you've never read the books.  The Lord of the Rings books, I think, are the most lied about novels of this decade.  Everyone claims to have read them now that the movies were a hit.

Well, if everyone had read (and UNDERSTOOD them), more people would've complained about the idiotic changes to the story.

E.g. (Sorry for any spoilers here), how the hell can the ring wraith shatter Gandalfs staff in the last movie? And why that major event reflect anywhere else in the movie?
(And how come noone even asks: "Hey Gandalf, where's your staff of power? Don't you need that?")
If the ringwraith could shatter his staff, then the wraith should be more powerful than Gandalf, which should've made later events a wee bit harder for everyone... Sure, the staff is just a symbol of power, but one point of Gandalfs death and rebirth was that he got a new assignment from the gods. Destroy Sauron, preferbly with the help of the humans.

Sorry for the rant... But after several (long) discussions with my father (who read the trilogy aloud when I was a child), it just seems that so many interdependencies have been fubar'd. :/

For my money, Ultima 7 has the best world simulation in a game to date and a great story to boot.  Would it have ever been made if there never was a Tolkein?  I doubt it, and that would be a shame.

....then again, it would have also saved us from the pain of experiencing the last games in the series, so I guess there'd be an upside, too.

The reality is, if Tolkien had never picked up a pen, we would still have wizards, elves, dwarves and the like, because Tolkien himself had based his stories on Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian literature, which stretches back to Beowulf and beyond.

So, while we might never had heard of Bilbo Baggins, we might have the story of Der Ring des Nibelungen -- you know, the story (and later, the opera) about the deadly ring created by the dwarves which must be destroyed by the young hero Siegfried ... hey! ... destroy the ring of power?  Destroy ... the ... precious?

This is all sounding mighty familiar ...

Except that before Tolkien came along, those mythos didn't make a racial distinction between elves, dwarves, goblins and the like.  Everything supernatural that wasn't a god was marked under Faerie - and there were wildly varying descriptions.

The concepts of dwarves, elves, et. al. we have today was established by Tolkien.

That's only partially true. Elves, dwarves and so forth were distinct in Norse mythology, but they all became Faerie as you described by the time of Shakespeare.
I think Tolkien did invent hobbits and orcs, though.

Just a plug for a couple books I've just finished:

Gene Wolfe's "The Wizard Knight" has elves and dragons and knights and maybe a wizard and magic swords and trolls and giants and god knows how many other fantasy tropes, but it's all done in about the most un-Tolkien-derived way possible. It's the most refreshing piece of fantasy I've read in years, unless you count Wolfe's Sun books as fantasy (which I don't)

Even if there weren't Tolkien, there would still be mythology of orks and goblins and elves for fantasists to draw on. I think early D&D also owes as much to Jack Vance as to Tolkien. I wouldn't mind standing all night in line to watch Rhialto the Marvelous ;-)

That's called an alternate reality and is in the realm of speculative fiction.  The reality is, without Tolkein we would have the stories he drew inspiration from, but we would not have the creation that Tolkein synthesized from them which the result of then went on to inspire so many others.

Would someone else have stepped up to the place?  Possibly - I'll even go for likely - but would it have been remotely similar?  Doubtful.  Would it have struck the same chord as Tolkein's work did?  Maybe, but probably not.

You're such a nerd!

Admit it.  You love me.

I like to think that's not why it didn't sell well, but why the publishers decided it didn't sell well.

If Tolkien should have taken a bullet in WWI everyone would have associated dwarfs with creepy circus-acts, elves would have been just another synonym for gay men, we would still use the turks as the standard filthy and evil enemy and the number one wizard would be David Copperfield.

But then again, with no Tolkien maybe all the geeks and hippies would have discovered H P Lovecraft instead. Peter Jackson would have made these epic movies about Chtulhu and with the incredible power of cgi we all would have gone insane in the darkness of cinema. Mwa ha ha!

I've killed Tolkien during one of my journeys through time and space.
Nothing changed because he had stolen all his books from George Lucas' father.
George senior became so famous, that George junior. never thought about earning his own money.

The good: No "Jar Jar Stinks", no LucasArts of the present
The bad: No Star Wars, no LucasArts of the past

After taking my "long-live" serum from the "far, far away"-future (and there was NO "Monkey Island 5" !!!) I thought 100 years about it.
Then I decided to leave Tolkien alive and destroy my time machine.

Tolkien was rehashing old Celtic and Norse folk tales with a lot of his stuff, though he did bring a lot of elements together and tie them up in a neat bundle that everyone could copy.  He wasn't alone in fanatasy though; there were others like Edgar Rice Burroughs and of course Robert E. Howard churning out fantasy before the Lord of the Rings came along.

Someone above mentioned Moorcock and Elric.  That's an interesting example of using someone else's work as inspiration.  Elric was based on Conan, but by reversing all Conan's attributes.  Conan starts as a peasant and becomes a king.  So Elric starts as an Emperor but loses his Empire.  Conan hates magic, so Elric is a mage.  And so on.

Fellows, there's a lot of lore before LotR and all, take a look at scandinavian stuff, like the finnish Kalevala and Norwegian/Icelandic sagas. Tolkien was - lets admit it - excavating all of this. There is nothing new in LotR, just new packaging. Sorry to bring bad news.

It's not bad news at all. People who try to be entirely original usually won't succeed at coming up with something really good.
There is also other pre-Tolkien fantasy fiction that has similarities to Tolkien's works, such as The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany (1924). I haven't read it yet, though.

Tolkien was an influence on D&D, but authors like Jack Vance, Moorcok and Fritz Leiber were influential as well. In fact, Gary Gygax doesn't like Tolkien very much.

There was epic fantasy before "The Lord of the Rings". Vance's  beautiful "The Dying Earth"  predated it. And let's not forget ER Eddison, lord Dunsany, and of course all the authors who published in "Weird Tales", especially Howard and Clark Ashton Smith.

Tolkein's had a big impact on Western popular culutre on the last 50 years, so it would be more than the games industry that was different. Of course, this is counter-factual history, which has no answer at all. Maybe things would have been completely different, maybe not - but one thing we do know is that Tolkein's had a huge influrence in this universe, at least (as opposed to a parralel one).

I'm planning on doing my own LOTRathon soon too. Can you post something to tell us how your own went, perhaps with a few tips?

What everyone is failing to realize is that, while there was all of this literature before Tolkein, and even if Tolkein was an untalented hack that just pieced everything together, then where was all of the fantasy craze before Tolkein?

Face it, the fantasy before Tolkein had about as much impact on popular culture as ancient epic poems.  People may have known of them, maybe even have read them, but they held little sway in the popular culture.

The reality is, Tokein came along and put something together that struck a chord with lots and lots and lots of people and that is why his work has had such an influence whereas the work before him does not.

I always hated magic in action games. It kills all the realism. What fun is it to take some sucker out with a blue ball of light when you can crack his skull in two with a nice arrow or an axe? If this T. fella is to blame for this, put that diamond in your chron-o-john and say hello to that mothafucker.

Me too. Also in RPGs. It seems like magic is just an easy way out of coming up with good ideas to add to the gameplay (kind of like crate pushing and jumping puzzles). Making it so common in a game demystifies and cheapens the concept of magic.

Don't blame magic!
How would you have escaped from Monkey Island without the magic "Voodoo-Head-Thing-Whatever".
Remember her (I like the idea that it's a "she") beautiful smile and then try to blame magic again!!!!
You must have a frozen hearth if you're able to do so.
Damn frozen!

Magic in MI is great, but that's an advanture game. You can have whatever you want in advanture games if the story is fun, and in MI it IS. But I just hate it when they use magic as an excuse for a bad particle engine in, for example FPS. Like, when I hack someones arm off with a sword I wanna see his arm fall to the ground and a lot of blood flying everywhere and sticking to the walls and stuff. I don't want some magic ring that I point at a dude and he just implodes and disappears from the screen.

I haven't read any comments so pardon any duplicated discussion :)

Tokien just expratolated a regular myth. If he was hit by that bus, we only would have extrapolated that myth alone. It's the same that saying we own Marvel for superheros. Crap, DC would have came up with the same crap. What we'd miss was Frank Miller doing good super heros. But if it wasn't him, another would came to fill the gap.

The point is that the gap must be filled. And the myth of elfs, dwarfs and all was alread there.

@Robert
Yea, that's right.
Especially in Multiplayer Deathmatch it's very stupid when people win because
they use kind of magic (like the force-lightning in "Jedi Knight").
I want a sword fight!
In RPGs I also never use the wizards, sorcerers or magicians.
Except for D&D or other Roleplaying Games that are played cooperatively.
In my opinion magic there is very important for the team play and gives much room for cool tactics.
The same with "Phantasy Star Online".
The problem with most of the FPS and some RPGs whitch contain magic is that the spells (or whatever they call it)
are overdosed and you have too much mana (god knows what million other names they call it).
So as long as magic isn't equivalent to the "classic" weapons, sometimes it can be fun.

Clearly, if Tolkein never existed we would all be playing Jane Austen MMORPG games. Did you see how forward that Mr. Darcy was? My heavens.

Yeah, magic totally ruins games.  You know, being that running a million miles per hour and having the ability to take a number of shots from a gun or sword and keep fighting are such realistic attributes anyways.

Jane Austen games indeed!  These are just game and/or plot mechanics!  What's the big deal?  If the game is unbalanced in any way, of course it won't be fun.

And, in reference to the arguments that A) Tolkien is a hack who just stole and molested others ideas, and B) Peter Jackson is a hack that stole and molested Tolkien's ideas, what about the people who do productions based on Shakespeare's plays?  Shakespeare is dead, but no one is complaining about the fact that people are still doing versions of his plays around the world.  The whole point of Game design, or even art, for that matter, seems to be to repackage existing ideas in such a way that is both exciting and compelling for a specific audience.  If you start arguing over the logic of changes that were made to already fictional material, it seems to me that you are missing the point.  If the films were well done, whether or not they were cliche should not be an issue.  I mean, its not like Peter Jackson is dissuading people from the truth about what happened in Middle Earth.  For that to be the case, there would have to be a Middle Earth somewhere, which, unfortunately, there is not.

With that said, let me just say that I agree with the folks who have pointed out that yes, the lore was already there, and all Tolkien did was pick up the pieces and put them together.  But, my point is that the real good that the man did was put the pieces together in an interesting and entertaining manner, therebye allowing the myths to be injected into the mainstream.

Just because something is original doesn't mean its better.  Composition, flow, and presentation are pretty important elements for the success of any art.  If you can't connect with and/or entertain the mainstream, that's your fault.  So don't complain when people take elements of your product and make it more palatable to the general public and, gasp, make money with it.

Ok, sorry, /rant off .  =)

Shakespeare's stories aren't even original. He just rewrote previous stories into his style of play. Again, it's not a bad thing.

About your first point - yes, the concept of hitpoints is entirely unrealistic, but it's also necessary. If games were realistic, it would be too easy to die, and that would get really annoying. I'm more bothered by the fact that maximum hitpoints tend to increase enormously. This is obviously to counter the fact that weapon damage increases, but this is also unrealistic and unnecessary.

I know Shakespeare's stories aren't original.  Thus, my point.

And also, I was being sarcastic when I criticized games for having unrealistic systems like hitpoints.  Absolute realism is an unfulfilling and unrealistic goal in video games.  Realism is simply a gimmick that is used for immersion purposes.  I mean, what about Tetris.  Is that realistic?  Or Frogger.  Or any "arcade" style game, for that matter.

You didn't actually mention the fact that Shakespeare's stories aren't original, though. You were just mentioning that people are doing versions of his plays.

Also, apparently sarcasm doesn't transfer well over the internet.
The thing about magic isn't so much that it's unrealistic. It's exceedingly hokey. Like power rangers.

I think that's a bit harsh. It's true he often took old stories, but he changed a lot of the details and added his own unique twists. It depends how strict you are with defining "original", I guess. :)

It's not harsh, really. I meant his plays are about as unoriginal as Tolkien's works, though in a different way.

Gormenghast was a good alternative fantasy idea. There wasn't any actual magic or elves or giants or anything, but it was fantasy just the same.

Elves and Orks and Dwarves and stuff are instantly recognisable to 99% of computer players though and are safe to use... you could try inventing something else but it won't work... 'well, my race of Ngings is tall and thin and wise and they have blue skin and white hair'. Ngings will actually seem unoriginal because of their originality. Odd paradox.

If you haven't checked out King and Borland's "Dungeons and Dreamers", it's worth a read. Basically, they make a pretty strong connection between some of the key early videogames guys and D&D--specifically, Garriott, Carmack and Romero.

So, without Tolkein, no D&D nerds. No D&D nerds, no Doom and Ultima. No Doom and Ultma, more Monkey Island.

-- David

Its a good thing Ron didn't lie about having read Tolkien...

We would have picked it up from the fact that the the troll at the bridge on Melee island wasn't a big fat monster.

(alo notice that the troll in Harry Potter #1 is pretty much a direct lift from the Tolkien books? The LOTR movie came after Harry Potter #1)

I'm currently working on my own fantasy books and I pretty had to deal with not "stealing" anything.
So I created a whole new world with it's own genesis.
There are no Orcs or any other known fantasy creatures in my novels because I write
about a world that's "ill" so the animals which are living in this world are "ill" too and become kind of monsters.
There is also no magic in my storie, just something I explain with the influence of the good and bad sides of creature's souls.
I've already writen the first book and perhaps it will be released soon in germany.

I'll post more about this project later this year when the new homepage is ready.
My first one was...well...it was a first try.
You can check it out ( http://www.skonabilen-trilogie.de ) and laugh at me because of all this stupid "FLASH" crap and the damn loading times.
But the pictures might be worth checking it out and my Forum as well as the community are okay too.

Yeah I got a license to ill too.

Sweet christ man, you post a hilarious (and apparently time-consuming) comment on the bullshit of game making, set to a classic holiday tune, and it gets 35 replies in a month. You post some crap even remotely related to hobbits and in three days 46 (well, make that 47) jerkoffs all of a sudden have somethin to say - give or take a few repeat-offenders.

Something about this just seems very fucked up to me.

Yeah, god forbid that anyone would actually want to carry out an actual discussion of some sort.  People might actually establish a dialogue, or even learn about other people's views!

I don't want to be too pretentious, but are you unfamiliar to this whole internet thing?  I've seen blogs where the comment list stretches well past 100.

I think Gage's point was more about how different topics rake a different number of responses. The Crunch Time epic was clearly a lot of work and contained some great commentary about the game industry, yet it got a relatively small number of posts. But hey, just mention hobbits and you unleash a firestorm of opinion. That is funny, and at least somewhat fucked up.

Now if Ron would just post something about Xena, Warrior Princess or the latest ironic retread of some old crappy pop culture (probably Rainbow Bright), we'll really see some posts!

Oh.  Ha, that is kind of funny.  I mean, fucked up.  Whichever.  Both.

Still on the subject of Tolkien and his various legacies..

I was reminded that the "trolls" in Willow are nothing like LOTR trolls, and instead, are big hairy monkeys.

What I would like to know is: Had Lucas read LOTR prior to writing Willow?

or did Willow grow from the study of various mythologies that he apparently undertook prior to starwars?*

or somewhere else?

(I know nothing more of this other than, a friend told me recently that Lucas supposedly studied lots of mythology and folklore prior to writing starwars)

I don't think the way Tolkien described trolls necessarily excluded the possibility of them looking like monkeys. It was kind of vague, if I remember right. It's sort of like how orcs are sometimes depicted as pig men, which is properly where Lucas got the idea for Gamorreans.

I mean probably, not properly.

Oh yes, someone please go back in the past and assassinate tolkien.  Maybe, just maybe, more designers would have actually thought about creating new worlds instead of "yeah lets stuff in dragons/elves/dwarfs/trolls/vampires/nazi/...".

lol You are slow. I've got the same problem. My Ex-Firm means that I'm living in Slow-Motion... Fools!

If it weren't for the influence of Tolkien, ALL video games would be based on war. Instead of just 99% of them...

Check www.gamerankings.com and tell me what the % of war themed games is.  Besides I didnt mean to bash the fantasy setting, just that a lot of devs just take rehash the same settings over and over again.   At least in scifi you dont have the 'template' world inhabitants.  To a lesser degree at any rate.

Well maybe in a parllel universe tolkien been hit by a bus or whatever before he could write those books but maybe just someone else wrote some fantasy books there who isn't a writer in this world, whose books might be very different to the tolkien stuff, but this fantasy stuff maybe rules this world then.
err... yeah

you could say the same about star wars. what would scifi games be without star wars eh?
eh???

If I move slowly, will the past not catch me up and so Tolkien will still be alive?


Get out of that paradox... thing.

It's true Tolkein had a big influence on the fantasy genre. It's not that he invented it- he just popularised it. Unfortunately a casual stroll through the bookshop will show that it's probably his fault that we ended up with a lot of lousy fantasy books we could have done without.
But writers like me still owe Tolkein a favour for that. What's more ironic than anything is that LOTR is a very dull, pretentious and overstuffed trilogy.
Oh well. I just won't read it again.

Hey Ron guess what, me and my friends watched all three extended editions of Lord Of The Rings AND 40 minutes of Aliens in one night! HA! Eat that!

We also found out that after going through the 5 stages of grief backwards there's another stage that requires at least additional 20 minutes to get to and can vary between a seizure and a disassociative coma (I got the seizure).

"I wrote a rant a while ago about how tacky and overused pop fantasy is, and how much I hate the concept of a fantasy world where a commoner could look out the window, see a group of ogres being chased through the streets by a supermodel in a chainmail bikini shooting lightning bolts out of her fingers, and not think anything is unusual about it. "

Well, no world I can think of would be like that. Even the most garbage magic-heavy D&D world wouldn't emulate that. I think the analog to the real world would be: Would someone in New York look out the window and rubberneck if a cop was chasing a midget firing a gun? Yes, they would, even though midgets and guns aren't totally out of their experience.

Besides, it's been culturally common that magic has been considered pretty pedestrian. The Egyptians essentially had household hexes and counter-hexes.

Here's my take on LotR: Movies are good, books suck because they're too damn dry. I like your idea Ron about what would happen if Tolkien died before writing the series.