I lived with my grandmother and she was a teacher, so she taught me to read before I had started school," de Plater said during a recent interview. "That was the first thing I ever read. And then I read The Lord of the Rings straight after that, I was maybe six. It was the first thing I was introduced to."
De Plater was drawn into game design not through video games themselves but through pen and paper role-playing games, dungeon-crawling adventures set in fantasy worlds that required less button mashing and more imagination to complete. And while he loves the realm of fantasy, in working on Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor he was carefully not to build the game like the universal fantasy archetype that often comes to mind.
"We wanted to stay away from guiding people into thinking of Middle-earth as a generic fantasy," he said. "It’s history and myth that really differentiate it."