Platforming is Fun in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum - Let's Play & Lore Explanations - Episode 2 

He has some appearances as the burning eye.

I think Gollum during LotR would be far too ambitious for such a small studio esp. with their limited possibilities and a beloved performance of Andy Serkis. I also think it's an interesting story to learn about Gollum's time in Mordor and see his escape from Mirkwood later, but they had only very few good ideas for such a mysterious place like Mordor and the gameplay and game design was not good.

Yes the game did not do well and the developer (Daedalic Entertainment) was not in a good spot before. Their last Point & Click games were well received, but did not sell well (also the people behind their most successful Point & Click adventures left the company some years ago). Daedalic kind of hoped that TLotR: Gollum would improve their situation. Sadly it did not and they will now close their development studio and only keep their publishing branch (Daedalic Entertainment also worked as publisher for some pretty great indie games like Shadow Tactics, so that branch of the company seems to do well I guess). Really sad for the developers. 25 people were laid off so far =/

Yes that is another instance, but it could also be a case of unreliable narrator. He maybe introduced him with a different name, but the Dwarves of Durin's house would not use any friendly name for Sauron, when talking about him. Or he used the name to make clear who he was talking about. That the horseman was the Mouth of Sauron is also a very good idea, but I could also imagine a Nazgûl > "And then his fell voice was lowered, and he would have sweetened it if he could."

Sorry to here =/ And it's nice to see you enjoyed the series so much. As explained in my last answer to you, my film/book series was always intended as a side project, that means I make more videos, when I have no other projects I'm working on. I was very busy the last 2 years. I cover the lore topics that I currently feel passionate about. I played the Gollum game and felt the need to talk about it, so I did. I tried to bring in the lore in-depth lore discussion into my let's play, that people are used on this channel, even if the game bad, it has still some decent lore details in it. And it does not matter if the game is bad or not. Tolkien's lore is not bad and that is what I mainly discuss on this channel. My channel is not the film/book differences channel, I make video "essays" about topics I like and I created side channels for the other big topic (gaming), so here I mostly make videos that focus on Tolkien by now. I often don't do mainstream or "hip media" stuff. This channel started as a video game channel in 2013 and I had a genuine interest in playing LotR: Gollum, because I still love video games. Covering Gollum much is also not a "hip" thing to do. All people moved on, my numbers show this as well. I also had a genuine interest in covering Rings of Power last year, though to be fair I was also driven by the fact, that it was "big"/"hip" thing, but it was also one of the few times since the LotR films released, where Tolkien was really big in the media. I would completely not agree with you here. I almost find that statement insulting to be honest. I don't focus on hip stuff, else this channel would look completely different. A video like "How did Oromë get the Elvish Ambassadors to Valinor?" is not hip in any shape or form and it did not got much attention - as I expected before I even started working on it. And I still did that video, because I liked the question. Even a more "hip" topic like discussing "Misconceptions of the Twenty Rings of Power" (was too late to be really hip though) got very little attention. But I also did it because I loved the topic. Same with my Chat GPT experiment. Further this year has been insanely rough for this channel view wise compared to the last 4 previous years. Why? No clue, it's YT not pushing my channel anymore, randomly changed recently without me doing anything, because it's from my perspective mostly random. It's not a good year and feels like I was thrown back by 4 years. All the classic lore videos performed far below my expectations since October last year. Which I expected in parts, but not so heavily. I tried to counter it, while resting a bit as well, but it did not work. That is why I at some point decided to use the time to work on a lot of other projects, until YT treats my channel better again. I tried making good lore content, it did not work and it feels like channel performance is not in my hands and absolute random. Would the film/book series have resulted in better performance though? No, not by my experience. Last episode performed pretty poorly as well and I released it at a time where my channel performed a lot better in general. Also in the previous film/book videos I saw some decline in performance of the series with some exceptions. Videos with certain titles (like Gandalf's biggest Mistake) performed pretty well, but not videos like "Morgul-knife, Athelas, Healing Hands Lore". And I already moved to making these videos more topic specific at some point and title them in a way that makes them appeal more as stand alone videos, which worked in parts. But I simply won't have high profile topics all the time in a detailed series like that. But potential success is often not what I look at when making videos (it's not like i don't look at that at all, but it has fore sure a lower priority for me). If so, I would do what Nerd of the Rings does, just years ago) when it comes to choosing topics and length (and this is not a criticism of Nerd of the Rings here). He chooses his topics wisely and very often covers high profile topics (looking through the list covering Fingon was probably his most niche video in recent time and Fingon is also not all that niche). He also focuses on summarising the lore very well and making this "summary" an experience. He does it like no other. He also covers every hip topic, like the Gollum game + a Travels of Gollum Lore video or covering the LotR Edition of Magic the Gathering, which I skipped completely, though I played Magic in the past. I could have chosen a similar approach and be potentially much more successful as well (not as successful ofc, I like certain things for that), but I prefer discussing some unusual detail for 20 minutes. Also if you are looking for a similar series like my film/book series anywhere else, you won't find it. You know why? Too much work for too little pay off. It's not because it's a niche topic with great potential nobody else has discovered. Else Signum University would be the biggest Tolkien channel on YT and not Nerd of the Rings. On that channel Professor Corey Olsen goes through the books (not the films though) in so far in 258 episodes (often over an hour long each) and discusses every possible detail on an academic level (much more than I do here). Every other channels would cover each film differences in one 10-20 minute video and move on. I made 7+ hours of content and just reached Rivendell in FotR. On YT that is insanity, because in the current YT meta long series are not popular at all. People see episode 25 and think, no way I#m watching 25 episodes. Only few people appreciate that format. When it comes to success, making a format like this, is a mistake. That is why none of the big channels have a long formats like this. I also want to hint at that my Who is Elrond videos were originally planned to be part of the film/book series (currently also ~8 hours of content). But I made them standalone. It's one of the most detailed work I did on this channel ever and I'm very proud of it. You could say the film/book series evolved into Who is Elrond. Will there be more episodes of the film/books series? Yes at some point. Maybe in 3 months, maybe next year, maybe in 2 years, maybe in 3 weeks. Depends on how I feel about making a new episode. It's not like I don't like the series anymore. It's just a project I work on whenever I feel like making a new episode and have the time for it. Also please keep in mind that film/book is free content. I don't have Patreon or anything, where I promise to make an episode each month.

@@ThePhilosophersGames I know that this discussion is none of my business, but I just wanted to say (as a counterweight, so to speak) that _I_ (and many others, I suppose) do find it completely acceptable how you are choosing your content and I also appreciate the huge amount of work you put in it (and also into the comment section; if I was you, I most likely would have just ignored someone who finds a video "unacceptable"). I must admit that I do not watch all your videos, but I am always happy to find one every know and then which I find really interesting (and then, the longer the better :) ). And I really liked "How did Oromë get the Elvish Ambassadors to Valinor?" for example, because this is an interesting detail that I have never thought about. So I wish you that your work gets the attention it deserves and that you can keep doing what you like to do :)