A History of The Lord of the Rings Video Games
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As with everything Tolkien, it all started with The Hobbit. The first game based on The Hobbit book was an interactive text adventure published by Melbourne House in 1982. The game featured basic rudimentary graphics to illustrate locations, but there were no money shots of Gandalf and the dwarves kicking ass. You did get a taste of the dragon Smaug on the title screen, but for the most part, this was a Zork-like adventure set in Middle-earth.
Around the same time Melbourne released The Hobbit, a little known company known as Postern developed a primitive game for the Commodore 64 entitled Shadowfax. "Shadowfax" is the name of Gandalf's legendary horse, and the game was simply a white horse running and gunning through a never-ending gauntlet of Nazgul, or Ringwraiths...call them what you will, but for the sake of this game, they were just black horses. The game looked a lot like Activision's Stampede for the Atari 2600, but instead of roping doggies with your lasso, you were zapping Nazul with your lightning bolts. Fun stuff, but repetitive after a few tries. Things were simpler back then, people. Cut the old-timers some slack.
