For months, little information has come out from Turbine regarding their MMO based upon the hottest fantasy license in the world. In retrospect, it seems inevitable. Vivendi has been trying to build a Middle Earth Online for nearly a decade as far as I know of, including two attempts to build it at their Sierra studio. Their first attempt was cancelled near the beginning of UO2 development. Which was a lifetime ago. When looked at that way, from a business perspective it’s absolutely shameful that some version of MEO wasn’t up and running when the Peter Jackson movies were providing joygasms to the entire geek universe.

So it came as little surprise when, basically, Turbine and the Tolkien estate basically cut Vivendi out of the picture. What’s interesting is that this isn’t the first time something like this happened. A little more than a year ago, Warner Brothers and Monolith found Ubisoft equally extraneous.

If you read the interview with the Turbine guys, you get a sense that the problem was one of ‘too many chefs in the kitchen’. MMO development is hellish enough without trying to serve 3 masters with different goals and ideas of what the game should be (hell, it’s hard enough getting 3 designers on the same team to agree!). It’s mildly humorous that, in both cases, all parties involved realized that the Publisher was the most extraneous party involved.

Anyway, congratulations to the Turbine boys on their coup. Now, please, try not to screw it up. I don’t think you want to see what an angry mob of Tolkien diehards can do to a Boston office building.

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