The Lord of the Rings

The series based on Tolkien's books opened as early as 1985 with a text adventure for the ZX Spectrum, drawn from the book trilogy and, in the style of text games of the time, letting players explore Middle-earth through typed commands and work through tasks that mirrored the novel's plot - not unlike the earlier The Hobbit made by the same generation of British developers. It was a typical product of the eight-bit era: minimal graphics, with the emphasis placed on text and imagination, and already a fairly ambitious attempt to translate a sprawling literary story into interactive form on the limited home computers of the day.

The following instalments took nearly two decades to arrive, and in a completely different form. Around the turn of the millennium, riding on Peter Jackson's film trilogy, action adaptations appeared for the Game Boy Advance and GameCube, built around combat rather than exploration and puzzles. The GameCube version offered fully three-dimensional battles inspired by specific scenes from the films, from Moria to Helm's Deep, alongside characters such as Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, while the Game Boy Advance version, constrained by a smaller screen and simpler controls, switched to a clearer two-dimensional style of action suited to a handheld.

That shift illustrates rather neatly how much the approach to film and book licences in games changed over the years: a cautious, text-based adaptation of the novel that relied mainly on the player's imagination gave way to an action spectacle riding on the popularity and visuals of the films, built around familiar faces and scenes and aimed above all at the trilogy's broad fan audience rather than readers of the original books.