War in Middle Earth was created by well-known software designer Mike Singleton and was released by Melbourne House in 1988. Melbourne House had in fact been purchased by the newly merged Virgin Mastertronic, formed when Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson bought the Mastertronic Group. Melbourne House was allowed to keep its name, but its assets were now owned by the new company. In 1991 the company was sold to Sega of Japan where it became Sega Europe, Ltd. Melbourne House, however, retained its name which was purchased by Beam International, Inc. To my knowledge, Virgin Interactive now retains the rights to this game.

Now, back to the game. Created by Mike Singleton in 1988, this game encompassed five man years of production (as opposed to today's standards of 18 months). It was made available to MS-DOS, Apple II, Commodore and Tandy systems. Possibly the best versions of this game are for the Apple IIGS and Amiga as both feature 8-bit graphics and sound as opposed to the 16 color palette and no sound versions of the other machines. Although an MCGA 256-color version was made available as an upgrade to MS-DOS owners, soundcard support was never implemented.

With the recent advent of emulators, some versions such as the Apple IIGS have been reborn and even played (to some degree) on today's PC systems. Although far from perfect, this is the closest to playing the game without owning a copy you can possibly get.