Lord Of The Rings: Two Towers And Return of the King Ports Hit PC

Published Oct 19, 2026, 7:07 AM EDT

James is a gaming writer from London who has spent thousands of hours exploring titles from every genre. Though he has a particular affinity for multiplayer titles like World of Warcraft, Destiny 2 and League of Legends, he has also put thousands of hours into single-player experiences, from deep RPGs to epic PC strategies. When he's not playing or writing, he can usually be found supporting his beloved Brentford FC.

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Of all the major fantasy franchises out there right now, The Lord of the Rings is probably the one that has seen the greatest number of solid forays into the world of video games. In recent times, both Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War did a spectacular job of bringing us releases in Tolkien's universe, even if the story does stray very far from the original texts.

Those are only the more recent entries in that stories history, though, and the 2000s were even more of an exciting time if you were a fan of the franchise. A big part of that golden era for Middle-earth gamers was bizarrely the direct movie tie-ins which (aside from Fellowship of the Ring) really showed that there is no need for games of that ilk to be bad.

In fact, they were genuinely spectacular examples of the action genre in their own right, and they're well worth returning to today, over 20 years since their original release. If that does sound like something you might be interested in, you might not have to dust off the old consoles to get in on the fun.

As first reported by DSO Gaming, unofficial PC ports of both The Two Towers and The Return of the King have been released, leaving emulation far behind in terms of use case for the average player. Starting with the former, developer Gumpolas has been working on a PC port for quite a while now, and the list of features included in the package is very impressive.

This release has 33 extra languages for all in-game text and subtitles, while you can also fix the aspect ratio from an archaic 4:3 to a much more modern 32:9. You can raise its internal resolution up to 12x as well, and the port also supports supports Direct3D 11, Vulkan, and OpenGL. Lastly, many of the settings that we have become used to on the PC are also available for players to tune the experience to their liking.

Meanwhile, user Shagg88 has created a very handy launcher for three Lord of the Rings games, including the Xbox version of The Two Towers and the PC and Xbox versions of The Return of the King. The latter comes with all sorts of modern upgrades as well, including framerates up to 240 FPS, keyboard and mouse control, and support for custom HD Texture Packs (which are very useful for bringing the game closer to our visual expectations in 2026.

The latter is available to download for free via the creator's GitHub, though you will want to make sure you have a legitimate copy of the games at home to keep everything above board.

Outside of that, there's even more exciting Lord of the Rings on the way for video game fans over the next few years. The big project is the Warhorse Studios-led open-world RPG which, if it's anything like Kingdom Come, could easily be one of the best games we have seen attached to the fantasy franchise to date.

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