A 2011 Lord of the Rings Game Lost to Skyrim Is Back — And a Former WB Boss Says He Warned Everyone
A former Warner Bros. Games leader says he fought hard against releasing The Lord of the Rings: War in the North ten days before The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — and was overruled. Now, fifteen years later, the game is getting a second chance.
War in the North, a co-op action role-playing game originally developed by Snowblind Studios, launched on November 1, 2011. Bethesda's Skyrim followed on November 11. The same day as War in the North also saw the release of Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 arriving a week later. That crowded window, according to Christian Allen — who was on the studio leadership team at WB Games though not directly in a development role on the title — doomed the game to get "lost in the wash." Every review compared it to Skyrim, he said, exactly as he had predicted. (GameSpot)
Allen, whose 24-year career spans creative and design director roles on the Ghost Recon games, Halo: Reach at Bungie, and a stint as Epic Games' lead Unreal Engine evangelist, is now design director at The Indie Stone, the studio behind Project Zomboid. He posted on his personal X account on August 12, 2026, that "15 years ago" he had "argued vociferously" not to release the game against Skyrim because it would not get a fair shake. The post drew roughly 144,600 views. (VGC)
The game had "hardly any marketing" at launch, Allen said. He theorised that executives either wrote it off entirely or assumed hardcore Lord of the Rings fans would discover it on their own. He also pointed to a structural pressure: higher-ups at publicly traded companies may be reluctant to shift release dates because of how such changes could affect quarterly revenue and bonuses. "Quarterly revenue motivations drive more decisions than people realise," he wrote. (GameSpot)
The developers at Snowblind, Allen stressed, "deserve all the credit" for the game. Snowblind merged with Monolith Productions in 2012 and no longer exists as a standalone studio.
The re-release, titled The Lord of the Rings: War in the North — Legacy Edition, comes from Aspyr Media, which licensed the game from Warner Bros. and handled both development and publication. PlayStation's official account announced on August 11, 2026 that the title brings co-op action to PlayStation 5. It is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2, Switch, and PC at US$19.99. The Legacy Edition adds 60 FPS support (except on the original Switch), enemy lock-on, auto-saves, extra save slots, and improved AI with visible health, mana and EXP bars. (VGC)
Allen said he is happy the game is coming back, because it never got the fair shake he warned it would miss back in 2011.
