If you think of The Lord of the Rings, you likely think of Frodo, Aragorn, or Gandalf. If I mention celebrities, maybe you picture Ian McKellen or Andy Serkis? Maybe recent events are at the forefront of your mind, and you think about The Rings of Power. If I gently push you towards video games, you might think of Talion or Celebrimbor. My point is, you would practically never think of Tiger Woods in relation to J.R.R. Tolkien.

But it turns out the two are linked through their respective video games. Glen Schofield spilled the beans in a recent interview with Wired, as he shed some light on the making of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King from when he worked at EA Redwood Shores. Half a decade before Dead Space, Schofield worked at the studio that would become Visceral Games, and helped develop the iconic movie tie-in games that released alongside the Jackson, Walsh & Boyens trilogy.

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When asked why studios don’t build game engines from scratch with every new game (these were questions from Twitter, not Wired’s journalists), Schofield explained that those are very difficult, expensive, and time consuming to make. And that’s where Tiger Woods comes in.

Tiger Woods And The Lord Of The Rings golf swing

No, the pro golfer didn’t personally build an engine for the games, but it’s the next best thing. Of all the engines that Schofield and his team had at their disposal, they realised that the one that fit EA’s vision for its The Lord of the Rings games best was that of Tiger Woods PGA Tour series. I was incredulous too, but it makes a fair bit of sense once he shares his logic.

While The Return of the King game doesn’t involve Gimli decapitating an Orc so hard that its head flies across the map and into a tiny hole with a grubby, White Hand-emblazoned flag in it, the levels aren’t that dissimilar to that of a golf course. Schofield explains it better:

“By the time I got to EA, they had a lot of different engines around,” he says. “And we were starting to build one for The Lord of the Rings. And, I don’t know, they were about a year into it and I said, ‘What are we doing? We’re two years away [from release].’

“So we looked around and got creative. The Lord of the Rings [the video game] is about large areas, and then a castle on the end, or a fortress. What’s like that? Tiger Woods. Long areas, and at the end is where you go get food, where you’re done. So we took the Tiger Woods engine and turned that into a The Lord of the Rings engine. You just have to be smart about what you do and what you use for an engine.”

Tiger Woods And The Lord Of The Rings gandalf uruk hai

This creative and outside the box thinking helped create one of the most iconic movie tie-in games of the ‘00s, a golden era for the genre. Who’d have thought that putting greens were like Minas Tirith? Or that trekking through Mordor wasn’t dissimilar to the slow trudge down the fairway when you know you’ve sliced your drive?

These tenuous connections serve as a reminder that video games aren’t just made of code and pixels, they’re made of magic and held together with the sheer brilliance of the devs who make them. Golf courses can become fantasy worlds, bunkers are turned into artillery emplacements, and loud-trousered golfers become Orcs and Goblins. You can’t tell me that’s not magic. All that remains is to return the favour and make the next Tiger Woods game using the Shadow of Mordor engine – or make a fully fledged The Lord of the Rings golf game starring Bandobras ‘Bullroarer’ Took. Your move, Schofield.

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