It’s not every day that you see something on Twitter that makes you wonder how many of your favorite childhood classics have been created with the game of golf. Today is one of those days, it turns out The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King built using the modified engine of the undisclosed Tiger Woods title.
“Lord of the Rings talks about large areas, then a castle at the end or a fortress – what is it like?”, asked. Callisto . protocol director Glen Schofield in the video below. “Tiger Woods,” he replied.
Huh.
We know this thanks to Wired, who created a Twitter quiz video for Schofield. Skip 30 seconds to see the Golf reveal.
In response to the question of why developers are so lazy to create their own tools, Schofield explained that creating tools from scratch is obviously difficult and time consuming. That prompted his EA anecdote, in which he told of coming to the company to find them after a year of developing their own tool for LOTRROTK and falling behind schedule.
That’s when they “look around and get creative”, scrapping their tooling efforts and instead modifying the Tiger Woods game (he didn’t say anything). LOTR has large areas where you get to a fort, Tiger Woods has “long areas and ends up where you go get food, where you get work done,” Schofield said. I can only see it. Probably.
The move was a success, at any rate. LOTRROTK knock it out of the park.
Gladly, fellow developer Nick Ferguson followed up to highlight how this came out in full, with LOTR’s VFX code being used for the smokes in the Tiger Woods PSP.
This is true, and then that code goes back to Tiger Woods. I remember the code for the VFX in Tiger Woods PSP is from LOTR (related to Gandalf, etc). All of that just to create little smoke when hitting a golf ball! https://t.co/odmTylBVUC
— Nick F ☁️🎮 @[email protected] (@ForensicGunk) December 5, 2022
bein.
