Yosemite Lands Tolkien

Yosemite Entertainment used to be known as Sierra Publishing, the design studios for Sierra On-Line. Despite the name change, they're still working with Sierra On-Line. Yosemite has finalized negotiations with the Tolkien Enterprises to develop interactive games based on J.R.R. Tolkien's books The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

The first fruits of that deal will be a title called Middle-earth, an online roleplaying game based on the world Tolkien created in his novels; Yosemite hopes to have a beta version of that game ready by mid-1999. The game will "utilize much of Sierra On-Line's existing massively multiplayer technology ranging from early work on The Imagination Network to its most recent on-line game The Realm," according to Yosemite.

The company says the game will be made up of 20,000 distinct regions, that the game will support up to 10,000 simultaneous users and that player characters will be able to choose to portray a hobbit, an elf, a dwarf, or a human.