The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, the final game from studio Pandemic before its closure in 2009, is back online thanks to the efforts of the modding community.
Based on Pandemic's Star Wars: Battlefront series, The Lord of the Rings: Conquest allows you to experience Tolkien's high fantasy narrative from both sides of the conflict, and is based on Peter Jackson's Hollywood movie franchise.
While it launched to a lukewarm critical response, the game still has its fans – hence this recent resurrection, which not only bundles in all of the available DLC for the game, but also allows you to play it online again.
The latter is thanks to the MordorWide project, which "aims to revive the multiplayer experience by re-implementing the EA Nation backend, allowing players to enjoy online matches once again."
If you're a fan of the game, this is worth checking out – you might also want to note that there's an ongoing effort to remaster it entirely.
Pandemic was founded in 1998 by Andrew Goldman and Josh Resnick, and produced the likes of Battlezone II: Combat Commander (1999), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2002), Full Spectrum Warrior (2004), Star Wars: Battlefront (2004), Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (2005) and Destroy All Humans! (2005).
The Lord of the Rings: Conquest was seen by some people as EA (which acquired Pandemic in 2008) being overly greedy with the license and milking it with too many titles. It is also considered to be the game which "killed" the studio.
In February 2009, EA closed Pandemic's Brisbane office, and, by November of the same year, closed the studio completely, costing 228 employees their jobs. 35 Pandemic employees were absorbed into its EA's Los Angeles studio to help complete The Saboteur.