The Hobbit: The Prelude to The Lord of the Rings

Bilbo Baggins is not a hero, and the 2003 adaptation of Tolkien's first novel makes a small design virtue of that. His main weapon for much of the game is a thrown stone. His sword arrives late, his best trick is hiding, and the game's progression currency is called Courage, earned by doing things a hobbit would rather not do. For a licensed tie-in released while the film trilogy was sucking up every ounce of attention, that is a surprisingly considered starting point.

Inevitable Entertainment built it as a straightforward third-person platformer with light combat, and the book's episodic structure suits that format well. Hobbiton serves as a tutorial village full of fetch errands, then the chapters march through the trolls, Rivendell, the goblin tunnels, Mirkwood and Erebor in order. Because Sierra held only the book rights and not the film licence, nothing here looks like Jackson's Middle-earth. The art is bright, storybook, slightly cartooned, and it dates far better than the era's grim-brown alternative would have.

What holds it back is the platforming itself. Jumps are fussy, ledges are unforgiving, and the camera has a habit of swinging just as you commit to a leap, which in the goblin caverns and the Lonely Mountain's ledges turns tension into irritation. Combat is simple to the point of thinness: block, strike, throw, repeat. The stealth sections built around the ring work better in concept than in execution, since the enemies patrol in loops obvious enough that sneaking is rarely a real puzzle.

It was pitched at younger players, and it lands there. Gandalf narrates between chapters, the collectibles are generous, the deaths are gentle. Adults who came to it looking for a companion piece to the film games found a much older kind of game, closer to a late-nineties mascot platformer than to anything with Aragorn in it. That mismatch of expectations probably hurt it more than its actual faults did.

Two decades on it survives as one of the few games to treat The Hobbit as a children's adventure story rather than a war epic, and the version of Bilbo it builds, a nervous burglar armed with pebbles and second thoughts, is truer to the page than most of what followed.