LEGO Lord Of The Rings Returns To Steam After Mysterious Absence

After a year-long absence, the Lego game adaptations of the Lord Of The Rings and Hobbit movies are now available again on to purchase Steam.

After being missing from Steam since last year, it looks like both of Lego’s video game adaptations of Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings movie franchise are now back on Valve’s online store. Like most of developer Traveler’s Tales’ Lego titles, Lego The Lord of the Rings and Lego The Hobbit re-told the first five installments of the landmark J.R.R. Tolkien-based film series in a more lighthearted Lego style, utilizing actual audio from the films to do so.

Lego The Lord of the Rings received moderate praise when it was released back in 2012, and 2014’s Lego The Hobbit got only slightly less, despite neither title being particularly high on fans’ lists of favorite Lego games and a planned DLC for the latter covering 2014’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies being eventually canceled. However, both of these games quietly disappeared from both Steam’s online library and the downloadable services for the PS3 and Xbox 360 last January, with the closest explanation as to why being licensing issues due to the aforementioned audio clips, given the continued presence of other Lord Of The Rings video games on the platform.

According to Game Rant, Reddit user knightpowell noticed that the Lego Lord Of The Rings titles were back on Steam’s online store yesterday, and made an announcement of such on the r/PCGaming subreddit. There’s still no official word yet on whether the games have been made available again on PS3 and Xbox 360, nor why they are suddenly restored on Steam after a year of supposed licensing issues.

This is far from the first time that a game has suddenly vanished from Steam’s catalog of downloadable offerings only to be restored later on or preserved through some other means. Earlier this month, an update caused Final Fantasy IX to be removed from Steam, though thankfully publisher Square Enix remedied the situation not long after. Earlier still, Steam pulled Taiwanese horror game Devotion after an outcry from the Chinese government regarding certain in-game art assets in 2019, and while it was never restored to the platform, Harvard University would add it to their Harvard-Yenching library for posterity back in February.

In both those instances, there was a clear explanation as to why they were removed from Steam’s online platform, something that the disappearance of Lego The Lord Of The Rings and Lego The Hobbit lacked save for guesses from fans. However, if the games’ removal was indeed a licensing issue with Lego, then it has clearly been resolved now given their return. Nonetheless, getting a chance to play these titles is good news for shared fans of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings films and Traveler’s Tales’ Lego-based collect-a-thons.