I'm following my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for the drive to work.

Okay, so today I'm telling the story of the Lord of the Rings, Tales of Middle Earth, the Design.

So I'm going to talk about how we made it and talk through all the mechanics and just explain the ins and outs of the making

of Lord of the Rings. Okay, so first, let me start with the beginning. So this was the very first

set that we worked on after the pandemic had started. Now, we normally a set will be in Vision for four months,

and then it'll be in set design for like 16 months,

and then play design for a couple months, about two years, about two years.

We spent a little bit longer on this.

Lord of the Rings was the very first sort of

large universes beyond set we were going to do. In fact, when Aaron Forsyth first pitched

universes beyond, in his document, he said that the first large set we did should be something

like Lord of the Rings because it should be something very adjacent to what magic is.

It's another IP, but it's close in spirit to what magic is.

And so when we got time to make it, we're like,

well, you know what's really like Lord of the Rings?

Lord of the Rings!

And so we were so happy when we got permission to do Lord of the Rings.

So we put the team together.

I was on the Vision Design team.

Ben Hayes led the team.

I did not lead the team.

And the very first thing we did is we made what we called the Knowledge Pyramid.

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