Action games based on "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King" are considered among the best Lord of the Rings games by fans

A good measure of how alive a game still is isn't its launch-day scores but how many people argue about its mechanics from memory two decades later. EA action games based on Peter Jackson trilogy pass that test easily – any conversation about them quickly turns into details like who got the mithril arrows and who first figured out how to knock down ladders in Minas Tirith.

Technically we're talking about two games here. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers came out in 2002, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King followed in 2003, with the sequel adding couch co-op and a solid roster of unlockable heroes.

The confusion between the two still hasn't gone away: Isildur was a bonus for beating The Two Towers, while The Return of the King let players unlock Faramir, Merry, and Pippin.

The balance was charmingly broken, and that's part of the appeal. Legolas got the strongest ranged attack, Aragorn the strongest melee, and Gandalf could just take both, which is why co-op groups sometimes banned him outright.

The hobbits were nearly identical to each other, but Pippin ended up with the highest base damage of anyone, so the smallest member of the Fellowship mowed down orcs faster than Gimli with his five-second kill animations.

Fans of the franchise still love these games to this day.

The strategy side of things tells a different story. The Battle for Middle-earth, its sequel, and the expansion The Rise of the Witch-king have been officially dead since EA license expired, but the community has kept the series going on its own – an unofficial patch 2.22 bundles all three games into a single launcher, and the Age of the Ring total conversion mod for the second game automatically pulls the required files and rewrites the campaign to follow the books more closely.

The online scene is still active, tournaments included. Other ways to revisit the series look like this:

• The Two Towers and The Return of the King run through PS2 and GameCube emulators with higher resolution and anti-aliasing

• the PC version of The Return of the King runs fine on modern machines if you can track down a disc

• The Third Age from 2004, with its turn-based combat in the style of Japanese RPGs, remains the most underrated part of EA legacy

Hopes for a legal re-release got a boost from the return of The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, which always belonged to Warner Bros. The movie-based games sit under EA, and after the publisher changed hands and talk of selling off non-core licenses started, the odds of these rights moving elsewhere stopped looking far-fetched.