I was disappointed by Amazon’s decision to cancel its TV adaptation of The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan’s long, winding, and endearingly extra series of fantasy novels. After a rocky debut in 2021, the show demonstrably improved in season 2, while season 3 delivered one of the best episodes of TV I’ve seen in years.
While Amazon’s decision isn’t completely baffling—the show cost a fortune to make to make and hadn’t delivered the Game of Thrones-level plaudits the company clearly wanted—I think another season might have brought it that recognition. Certainly, it had a better chance of bringing widespread critical acclaim than Amazon’s dreadful Lord of the Rings show. I doubt anyone would shed a tear if they cancelled that.
But what’s done is done, and while I’ll miss ogling the show’s tremendous cinematography and set design, The Wheel of Time hasn’t completely stopped spinning. The videogame adaptation announced in April remains in development. Moreover, developer iwot Games has recently recruited yet more veteran game designers to help bring it to fruition.
Those developers are studio design director Lori Hyrup, art director John Lindemuth, and technology director Steve Gray. There are some interesting crossovers between these creatives. Hyrup and Lindemuth, for example, both have extensive experience developing MMOs. Hyrup’s experiences goes way back to primordial 3D MMO Dark Age of Camelot, before she moved on to the ambitious but ill-fated Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Lindemuth, meanwhile, worked on the long-running Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons online.
Gray doesn’t have the same MMO heritage, but like Lindemuth, he does have connections to The Lord of the Rings. He oversaw EA’s handling of the series in the early 2000s, which would include the excellent Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers hack ‘n’ slash, and the Battle for Middle-earth games.
This is in addition to hiring former Quantic Dream designer Stéphane D’Astous as director of studio Operations in early May, as the company aims to grow to between 200 and 300 employees. The project itself is being led by Craig Alexander, who also worked on LOTRO and D&D Online.
Beyond the talent behind it, we don’t know a vast amount about the game itself. It’s being described as a triple-A, open-world RPG, and despite the heritage of many of the developers involved, there’s no mention of it being an MMO or multiplayer in general as yet. Iwot CEO Rick Selvage has stated that the game will be a comprehensive depiction of Jordan’s fantasy world, featuring “everything that is covered in the books, as well as all the backstory elements of it,” which sounds ambitious to say the least.
Given the only Wheel of Time game produced so far is the 1999 first-person spellcaster by Legend Entertainment (which is not a bad game, but inevitably constrained by the technology of the time), I’m certainly rooting for this project. It must be strange to be spooling up this massive endeavour just as the TV show which led to it gets unceremoniously cut down, but let’s hope iwot gets the chance to see it through.
In the meantime, while it’s difficult to recommend watching a show that got cancelled way before it was finished, I would urge you to check out the Rhuidean episode of The Wheel of Time (season three, episode four). It’s quite the spectacle, and given its subject I reckon it would work reasonably well as an isolated experience. Who knows, maybe if enough people watch it, the series will get a second chance.