10 years on, leaks have given us a long look at the canned Batman game that became Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Middle-earth was always a bit of an odd setting for Monolith’s Shadow of Mordor, the 2014 game that introduced the absolutely brilliant (and criminally under-imitated) nemesis system. Subjecting the game’s orcs to harrowing physical and psychological warfare as a one-man guerilla army was great fun, but it didn’t exactly fit with the high-minded, mythical tone of either Tolkien’s original books or the Peter Jackson films.

Perhaps the reason for that is that the game was, once upon a time, a Batman game. Codenamed Project Apollo, the thing-that-became-Mordor was originally intended as a Dark Knight thing set in the Nolanverse of Batman films. It got some way into production before eventually getting reskinned as a Middle-earth game, but thanks to posts by Twitter user Dageekydude (via IGN), we’ve gotten a deep look at its original incarnation.