Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and Witcher: How You Can (and Can’t) Adapt Famous Fantasies To Games

As a 12-year-old Christian Cantamessa sat in bed and read The Lord of the Rings, he never imagined having the chance to one day create his own story set in Tolkien’s world with Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. Nor could Brad Kane, as he walked down the aisle on his wedding day to the Game of Thrones theme tune, picture himself writing a Westerosi tale of his own through the Telltale series. And the same goes for CD Projekt Red’s Marcin Blacha and Magdalena Zych, who as kids read Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books – Wiedźmin in the original Polish, where it’s practically required reading.These writers have each created video game stories set in established and beloved fantasy epics, but despite the opportunities to do so being fantasies in themselves – genuine dreams come true – there are myriad challenges and pressures that come alongside.Shadow of Mordor Bright Lord — Photo Mode ScreensTake The Lord of the Rings, for example. J.R.R. Tolkien created an entire plane of existence with its own history, myth, politics, and so on. He did so not only through the main series of novels but through countless smaller stories and unfinished tales, not to mention the immense amount of adaptations that have added layers upon layers of lore.Monolith Productions’ Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor takes place amid this complex web and lead writer Christian Cantamessa worked with the Tolkien Estate (the legal body that controls the late author’s work) alongside a writer who worked on Peter Jackson’s film adaptations and a literal Lord of the Rings scholar in order to create a lore-accurate story. “It was helpful to be like, ‘hey, what you’re doing over here isn’t going to work because this either happens here or there’s this statement in the book that contradicts it’, and we never wanted that,” Cantamessa says.A similar process is administered at The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, as senior writer Magdalena Zych says that remaining accurate to the source material – a collection of eight novels dating back decades – is almost as important as creating a strong story in the first place. “Obviously we add to the material, expand on it, sometimes even change it, but the latter is never accidental,” she says. “It’s vital that we keep The Witcher world intact, otherwise we would squander it and ruin what makes it so compelling: its integrity.“When it comes to RPGs, what’s most important is the story,” Zych continues. “Regardless of what it’s based on, it first needs to be mature, captivating, immerse the player, offer the right mixture of emotions, and present players with choices that seem impossible to make. But staying true to the source material is a close second, especially when working on such a beloved franchise.”Best Reviewed Games of 2022Creative Red TapeKeeping true to the source material can be restrictive too, according to Brad Kane, co-writer on a number of Telltale’s Game of Thrones episodes and a cancelled second season. Kane was a long-time fan of the series, even before the hit HBO show, and says it was a dream come true to be immersed in Westeros and Essos every day. But having to write within someone else’s world was “probably more limiting and restricting than it was freeing,” he says.“On more than one occasion we had pretty good ideas that HBO came back and said we couldn’t do, and it’s partly because that’s where they were going with the story. There was a really fun idea put forward early in the show by [fellow writer] Meghan Thornton about this whole thread involving an ice dragon in the far north,” Kane explains. The Telltale series was released in 2014, the same year that HBO released the fourth season of Game of Thrones and therefore, spoilers, three years before it created its own ice dragon.There are strategies to generally avoid stepping on toes of course, Kane says, and the main one deployed by the Telltale team was to find a minor jumping off point from George R.R. Martin’s novels that could then be used to carve out a fresh space. The game’s main characters are from House Forrester, a family only mentioned once, and very briefly, in the books. “We intentionally didn’t go into some deeply established stronghold,” Kane explains. “We needed the freedom to create a gameplay sandbox, have characters who could live or die, and do something that felt original within the world.“We really can’t change a lot about Daenerys Targaryen or Tyrion Lannister,” he continues. “They’re known quantities, and we’re in a certain period of time in the chronology of the show, so we can’t do a whole lot with where they’ve been and where they’re going. The challenge was how to not have them become these unmovable, powerful character forces, but rather, have something that we can interact with and make part of the gameplay experience.”Keeping this gameplay in mind is another critical part of a video game writer’s job, Cantamessa explains, as the task is much more complex than just writing a plot synopsis and handful of cutscenes. Coming up with a character that fits perfectly within the story and the source material’s world isn’t enough. “He also needs to serve a function for the game,” Cantamessa says, “and juggling all these things is a little more difficult.“They need to be able to fit within the mechanic of that type of story and so that adds an extra guideline. Once all those guidelines are down, then you have a little bit of wiggle room, but you don’t have a lot.”Wiggle RoomMiddle Earth: Shadow of Mordor’s main antagonist – the Black Hand of Sauron – is an example of these concepts combining, as Cantamessa explains how he and the writing team took a small jumping off point from The Lord of the Rings books and gave the character a purpose within their game. “That was actually [creative director Michael de Plater’s] idea, to actually personify a line from the book that refers to Sauron’s black hand.”Though there’s debate as to whether this line was talking about a literal body part or something more, the writing team adapted it to mean “the Black Hand of Sauron is somebody that’s doing his bidding,” Cantamessa says. “We embodied the spirit that Tolkien was trying to convey with that sentence, with that paragraph, with that page of the story.”Some characters are a little more obvious, he added, like the inclusion of Gollum as a quest giver, though even this was deeply thought through to ensure he would be in the right place at the right time in wider Lord of the Rings lore.Using these known characters can often make the writer’s job easier according to The Witcher story director Marcin Blacha, and seeing familiar faces also helps establish the authenticity of the game in the wider lore. “There are three pillars of The Witcher books: characters, an original take on fantasy tropes, and the dialogue it has with our reality,” he says. “In an adaptation it makes the job easier for the narrative teams because they can start working on a story with characters and the relationships between them without having to create or figure out those relationships from scratch.”Staying True to the Source MaterialThough CD Projekt Red has deployed a similar strategy to Cantamessa’s Black Hand of Sauron with characters like The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings’ Iorveth, who was only mentioned vaguely a handful of times in the books, it also committed to bringing beloved characters straight from Sapkowski’s pages. This is headlined, of course, by protagonist Geralt of Rivia, but the stories of Yennefer, Dandelion, Ciri, and many more have all been extended in the game series.Regis is another main character that was brought back in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Blood and Wine expansion, and one that (again, spoilers) was rendered very much dead at the end of the novels’ main saga. “Having him regenerate and come back to life in the relatively short period of time that passes between [the books] and Blood and Wine may have been a bit of a stretch in terms of The Witcher lore, but it was worth it,” says Zych.“Of course with Regis we didn’t have the freedom [like] when it came to writing Iorveth: Regis was already a very distinct, very well-developed character, and we had to be extremely careful in order to do him justice. The way he looks, the way he talks, his friendship with Geralt, his mindset, his views – everything had to be just like it was in the books, otherwise he wouldn’t be himself.”While the end result is incredibly rewarding, getting there is tough, and it’s unsurprising that a writer may not be incredibly eager to take on a project with so many rules behind it, not to mention an impeccable prestige. This was certainly the case for Cantamessa ahead of starting work on Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, who admitted he was hesitant to write within a franchise as beloved and artistically sacred as The Lord of the Rings.“On one hand I’m like, ‘hey, this can be done, it has been done, it’s very difficult, and I’d love to do it,” he says. “On the other hand, as a fan but also as a normally anxious person, I’m very apprehensive that they could misfire and I could do a poor job and then – not so much as it would reflect negatively on myself – it was just something that I’m very passionate about. When you’re a fan of something, you want to make sure that, whatever you do, it doesn’t make it worse.”Thankfully for Cantamessa, the game was very well received, and so a lot of that pressure was lifted. “As big fans, we certainly tried our best to be respectful of the material, to create something new, and to make a good game,” he says.Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor ScreenshotsBut what would Tolkien, who died in 1973 and therefore long before video games became the storytelling mediums they are today, think of his story? “Oh god,” Cantamessa laughs. “I hope that he’s not spinning in his grave.“There’s something in the back of my mind that makes me think that Tolkien would be happy with the work that we have been doing, that Peter Jackson has been doing, and frankly that all the papers have been doing.“In one of his letters, he says that he was creating this new mythology. And he says that he was hoping that some of the parts that he had left sketched, that other minds would come and fill them in with music and drama and poetry.“Of course, video games didn’t exist, but it makes me think he was open to this idea that other minds would come in and fill in some of these sketches that he had done. He never wrote, ‘I hope no one touches my stuff.’ And so we just took the parts that he left sketched and we went and played with it, and so at the very least I know I haven’t betrayed something that he believed in.”Some quotes have been edited for clarity.



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