What was so magical about The Two Towers is that the bending of the Lord of the Rings films’ plot to video game tendencies felt both perfectly executed and somehow missed the point of the entire series. Viggo Mortensen would be on the screen, and then he would morph into a lumpy digital Aragorn who you could control, in third-person action gameplay that was a little bit Gauntlet Legends and a little bit Devil May Cry. The game took the strange route of combining live-action footage from the films with in-engine cutscenes and gameplay, stitching these two mediums together “seamlessly” to make it all one thing. Bizarrely, its content was half Fellowship of the Ring and half The Two Towers, but at the time we were willing to accept that. A multiplatform game that first appeared in October of 2002 for the Playstation 2, it was released two months before the film of the same name. Into this fray stepped EA Games’ The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli were left to their own devices.

Frodo the Ringbearer and his companion Sam had fled toward the eastern horizon in search of a mountain that could kill a piece of jewelry. We knew that a fellowship of hobbits, men, an elf, and a dwarf had dispersed during the holiday season of 2001. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story.

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