When you think of The Lord of the Rings, you likely think of bare-footed Hobbits, Gandalf's epic showdown against the Balrog, elves that speak in magical tongues, and rings that contain immense, corrupting power. You probably don't immediately picture hulking brutes in power armors that'd struggle getting through the average doorway, swarms of aliens, and massive guns. Nonetheless, a lead on the sci-fi shooter Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 thinks that the series' expansive, genre-hopping universe and the work of J.R.R Tolkien have more in common than you think.
Oliver Hollis-Leick, who serves as creative director on Space Marine 2, recently told Edge that he felt the IP was "up there with Tolkien." Hollis-Leick added, "Its vast history and story is just such a rich playground for any fantasy or quest, or whatever kind of journey you want to take someone on."
Hollis-Leick is, of course, gesturing at two things here. The first is the wider and more expansive world of Warhammer, not just the 40,000 sub-series in which Space Marine 2 is nestled. The 40K games (as they're often shortened to) are a sci-fi counterpart that was eventually developed to bring the appeal of Warhammer, a strategy tabletop role-playing game set in a fantasy world Edge calls "cheekily Tolkien-like," to a wider audience.
The second is the brand's immense flexibility, which Hollis-Leick discusses at length with Edge. He makes specific reference to Warhammer's ability to transform to meet the wants of its sizeable audience, whether that's into a deep single-player RPG like Rogue Trader, a first-person cooperative jaunt through fantasy or sci-fi settings like Vermintide and Darktide respectively, or a chunky third-person shooter like the Space Marine titles.
In this regard, Hollis-Leick's comments feel less pointed at The Lord of the Rings, the most famous of Tolkien's work. Instead, they feel more directed at the books' complementary texts, like the Silmarillion, which is a collection of stories that elaborate upon, among other things, the creation of the world in which Middle-earth is situated and its history and mythology over the course of several ages. These stories, as well as many of the incomplete works that Tolkien's son would eventually release, have taken all kinds of shapes, sizes, and, as such, adopted many perspectives. So too have a lot of adaptations of the source material.
In the world of video games alone, Tolkien's work has been shaped into countless forms: text adventures, action-oriented titles, real-time strategy games, open-world RPGs, an MMO, a poorly received stealth game, a procedurally generated survival game, a cozy farming sim, and more. Most recently, it was announced that Warhorse, the team behind the critically lauded Kingdom Come: Deliverance games, would be making a brand new RPG set in Middle-earth.
Perhaps, Hollis-Leick is onto something, and we ought to be treating Warhammer with more esteem than we've been giving it.
