This submission is for the unreleased Atari 2600 Prototype for The Lord of the Rings - Journey to Rivendell. It's... a journey, alright.

So, yeah. The objective of this game is, shockingly, to journey to Rivendell without getting caught and wounded 3 times by Nazguls. You play as Frodo, with Sam in your "party" but he is basically just a meat shield, he'll absorb a Nazgul hit for you so you don't get wounded. What a guy. The Nazguls can't actually be killed so you basically just have to avoid them. You can also find other allies such as Legolas (faster movement through open ground) Gimli (faster forest movement) Strider (who helps you find Gandalf) and Gandalf, who keeps Nazguls from getting near you but also randomly wanders off and you have to go find him again.

Or, we can ignore most of those characters and run down the conveniently placed road for most of the game. On the road, your speed increases. You don't have to fully be on the road, just near enough is fine. On your way you'll have birds fly around that alert the Nazgul to your presence but it seemed inconsequential so I just ignored them. The game also has a day/night cycle. During daytime, Frodo moves faster and the Nazguls move slower. The opposite is true for night time. Frodo also has the ring which renders him invisible for as long as you hold the button, at the drawback of permanently making Nazguls faster for the rest of the game.

The overall map is actually pretty large for a 2600 game, all things considered. It was likely too ambitious for its own good though, as it seems to be difficult to fit a huge RPG based on a classic fantasy adventure franchise into an 8 Kb Atari cart. It had good ideas but it's understandable why it was never released.

So, we head northwest and walk a lonely road, the only one that leads to Rivendell. Near the end of the road we take a small detour to pick up Legolas for the move speed for the remainder of the game. We then get around the river and finish the last leg of our journey, doing silly things with the ring on the final steps.

And that's about it. This was a test of my patience and sanity and a "boundary push" of sorts to see if a game like this is deemed worthy and/or not trivial despite being boring and simplistic.

slamo: Claiming for judging.

slamo: It's just like the movie! There's not much information on this prototype, but it does look like you beat it, since the blinking dot moves from Hobbiton to Rivendell on the map. The optimization is about as good as it could be. Accepting.

Note to the publishers: I think the title may need to be changed to just "The Lord of the Rings". That's the name on the boxart and the title screen, and "Journey to Rivendell" is only tacked on in some old catalogs.

despoa: Processing...