Quoted from LTG:None.
dmarston touched on it.
What I once heard from a famous programmer is simple. Stern wasn't building what he needed to sell. Jack had built up quite a market with Pinball Sales, and he knew what he needed for them.
LTG : )
What I heard (and this is total hearsay so feel free to shoot me down and I’ll dump it), was that LOTR LE was jacks brainchild to fill pinballsales.com’s extra demand for LOTR. At the time, stern had everything to rerun lotr except the little figurines everywhere on the pf. They ran it, and for whatever reason, pinballsales did not get the promised allotment of games, so customer orders could not be filled. That motivated jjp to go forward.