The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was developed using the Tiger Woods engine

Apparently, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was developed using the engine of a very different game: the untitled Tiger Woods game.

This is thanks to Wired and Glen Schofield, who participated in a recent interview, and the CEO of Striking Distance Studios answered questions on Twitter. In response to the question “Why don’t start-up studios just make their own game engines?”, Schofield said his team had made engines before, but it was a lot of work.

“They’ll take years, especially now,” prompts Schofield to talk about his time at EA. “When I came to EA, they had a lot of different engines. We started building one for Lord of the Rings.”

With two years to go until launch, Schofield said the team “looked around” and “got creative.” He explained, “Lord of the Rings is about large areas and ends up with castles or fortresses. What was that like? Tiger Woods.”

“Long area, where you go to eat at the end, and you’re done,” Schofield explained. This is how two very different games that most of us will probably never pair up end up being built with the same engine.

After the information circulated on Twitter, developer Nick Ferguson followed up with more details. It turns out that the Lord of the Rings password also circled back to Tiger Woods. “I remember that the VFX code in the Tiger Woods PSP was from LOTR. It was all about puffs of smoke coming out when you hit the ball!” The result was, of course, that the Tiger Woods code then led to LOTR references all over the place.

It’s a rather obscure but neat crossover in development. Callisto Protocol may have posted some pretty nasty comments, but it’s nice to hear game developers talk in depth about their work and how it all fits together. If you’re interested too, I highly recommend the full hookup video!