The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King was made using Tiger Woods
A hole in one (ring)
It's not everyday you see something on Twitter that makes you wonder how many beloved classics from your childhood were made using golf games. Today is one of those days, as it turns out The Lord Of The Rings: The Return of The King was built using the modified engine of an undisclosed Tiger Woods title.
"Lord Of The Rings is about large areas, then a castle at the end or a fortress - what's like that?", asks Callisto Protocol director Glen Schofield in the video below. "Tiger Woods", he answers.
Huh.
We know this thanks to Wired, who've made a vid where they put questions from Twitter to Schofield. Skip ahead 30 seconds for the Golf reveal.
In response to someone asking why developers are too lazy to make their own engines, Schofield explains that creating engines from scratch is, obviously, hard and time-consuming. That prompts his EA anecdote, in which he tells of arriving at the company to find them one year into the development of their own engine for LOTRROTK and well behind schedule.
That's when they "looked around and got creative", scrapping their engine efforts and instead modifying a Tiger Woods game (he doesn't say which). LOTR has large areas where you wind up at a fortress, Tiger Woods has "long areas, and at the end there's where you go get food, where you're done", Schofield says. I can just about see it. Maybe.
The move was a success, at any rate. LOTRROTK knocked it out of the park.
Pleasingly, fellow developer Nick Ferguson followed up to highlight how this came full circle, with LOTR's VFX code used for puffs of smoke in Tiger Woods PSP.
Smashing.