This episode is the first one with a game that I fully eviscerated. Even Callisto Protocol got off lighter than this. I felt that I was critical of The Callisto Protocol but that criticism was rooted in frustration at unfulfilled potential. LOTR Gollum got both barrels from me because it was horrendously lazy and felt cynical and exploitative in the way they tried to sell it to players.
Production wise, I was incredibly happy with how it all clicked together. The sounds I wanted to produce worked exactly how I wanted them, I found all the right audio assets. And the writing was strong as well. I plotted the story out nicely, got loads of jokes that I loved writing/editing in, and the criticism was strong even if it was one-sided.
My Gollum voice was a tricky point as I know I can do a good Andy Serkis ‘Gollum’ impression but I can’t do it at a loud enough volume to record well without it cracking, and doing it quietly doesn’t pick up on the mic properly, so I had to adapt it into my own take on Gollum that was more podcast friendy. I was impressed at how well I managed to make it seem like two characters that I was voicing were actually speaking to each other, that shit isn’t easy, so my hat goes off to Seth Macfarlane.
This is another contender for my favourite episode. Also, weirdly, this is the worst performing episode of the series in terms of listeners. I’m not sure if this is just lack of interest in the theme that month or if people are less invested in episodes when the conclusion seems obvious? This is why I made a callback to the episode in my GOTY 2023 special, I was hoping maybe it would get some people to give the episode a try just to hear what’s going on. But the GOTY 2023 episode also did poorly. Can’t fucking win some days.