You have the literary license rather than the film license -- how do you see that?

JS: You couldn't make an MMO out of a movie license. It's just not possible. I certainly can't say anything but good things about what they did in terms of Peter Jackson being able to take fiction that spans 1,400 pages and God knows how much density and complexity, and turning it into something that you can actually tell in a ten or eleven hour period. It's the task that they had, and they did really, really well. But in order to do that, they had to trace a very small path through a very large story in a very large world.

It's the difference between going to Disneyland and walking in the front of the park and spending the day exploring wherever you want to go, or taking the tram ride that takes you to all the hot spots one after the other, but you don't really get to spend time there. The movie license is way too confining for making this kind of world. We're making a world, so we need the whole depth of the literary fiction.

What about restrictions that the literary estate might put on you? Has that affected anything?

JS: It's a double-edged sword, quite literally. The great thing for me and for all of us is that Tolkien Enterprises has been great to work with. And I'm supposed to say that, because you expect to hear that from anybody talking about their license, but I've been doing this for a long time and I've worked with a lot of different licensors -- major film companies and Disney and manufacturers of different kinds of toys -- and I've never worked with a licensor that's as interested in what we're doing and is supportive as they are. They understand that we're making a game, for example, and we have to do things that are not right, necessarily, for the lore, if you take it literally, because it needs to be a great game.

AM: It's a bend-not-break type rule. You bend some things, but there's other things that you just can't go past. We talked about how we implemented PvP, and there were some restrictions, so we came up with what we think is a pretty creative way to enable players who like that kind of play style to experience that without messing with the lore, and without forcing people who aren't into that to have to participate in it.

JS: It also forces you to be more creative. There's good side effects to that. We've had people say, "I've never played PvP before in my life. I thought it was something I wouldn't be into, but because it's a little more accessible and not so big a deal and I can do it quickly and it's in Tolkien's world, it's kind of fun. And guess what? I actually like this more than I thought I was going to, and I'm probably going to try it elsewhere now."

Back to the question in terms of constraints, there are definitely constraints in big things, like magic. Making a role-playing game in a world where there are five wizards and you know who they are and no one else does "magic" -- that's a place where we had to bend, and bend a lot. We just showed you a skill where he's pulling lightning down from the sky to toast a guy. It's really about how you package it.

The reason why I think Tolkien is -- as if he needs me to explain why he's been so successful -- but the reason why the books to me are so successful is because he built a world that feels like it could exist. It has so much internal consistency with the ruleset and how things work, and things don't contradict that anywhere in the book. Things always work the way that they're supposed to work. It feels like you could step out of our world and into that world very naturally, and it would exist. It's not so fantastical that it feels made-up and things don't make any sense.

If we follow the same approach, and we needed to invent a whole new antagonist in Eriador, for example, Angmar was the only choice, because Angmar has been an antagonist there in the past, so it makes sense that Angmar is there. It wasn't an arbitrary choice. Lightning from the sky comes from a species called the Loremaster -- the knowledge of the way that the natural forces in Middle Earth work, and the knowledge of how to harness those and to bring them to your side. It's also good to have some boundaries. In any creative endeavor, there's a danger to having a big white canvas, because you can go in every direction all at once. And also the fact that we know where we're going. We know the world that we have to build forever.

AM: Once we have that frame, you can use more paint on that picture, as opposed to if you had this wide-open space and you could easily get lost in the middle of the process, because you don't have those restrictions to drive that creativity.

JS: And there's a built-in expectation from the consumer. They've got a laundry list of things in their heads that they can't wait to see.

There are a lot of expectations from people who are fans.

JS: Again, it's a double-edged sword. We've got to deliver on it. When they get to Rivendell, it better feel like Rivendell. And it does, I think.

AM: There's debates on forums. I remember before launch it was like, "You know, in the books, it took them six months to get from the shuttle to Rivendell, and it should be totally authentic. If I can just run there in two minutes, this game's going to destroy Tolkien!" Look, it would be great for us if it took you six months to run there. We charge subscriptions! But it's not very fun.

The other thing was the red and the gray squirrels. People were arguing about what color the squirrels were in Middle Earth. The big challenge was delivering a believable interpretation of Middle Earth, because if we didn't do that out of the box, we wouldn't be sitting here talking to you right now. To gain the credibility of the core fans of MMOs and Tolkien -- that was priority one. And we succeeded at that, and now it opens up all these other opportunities, because now we've got the credibility as interpreters of Tolkien's work.

JS: But there's just going to be some things where, if it was another project or an original IP we've created, it would be "easier", because you could do whatever you wanted to do. But there's always ways to make it happen. The bestiary that Tolkien talked about in the books is too confining for an MMO. There's not enough monsters. There's a lot of them, and they're cool and distinct, but there's just not enough of them. So what do you do about that? Do you just make monsters up? Yeah, kind of, in some respects, but you make them up in a way that they fit into the rules. You don't make monsters that don't make sense in Middle Earth, but they can still be wild and crazy.

AM: Like the Neeker-Breeker, right? It's basically a giant bug, but the name comes from the noises that Tolkien wrote about coming out of a marsh. There's Neeker-Breeker sounds, but what is that? Well, let's just create a monster that would probably be in a marsh, so a giant insect, and we'll call him a Neeker-Breeker. It's still very tied to the lore, but not one of his official pieces of Middle-earth.