Before Arkham Asylum, a Batman: Dark Knight game was in the works

Good Batman games aren’t exactly plentiful. Before Rocksteady nailed the formula in their Arkham series, caped crusader games weren’t exactly…good. Sure, there had been some fantastic side-scrolling platformers from the 1989 Batman film and its sequel, Batman Returns. But then there was also Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu and Batman: Dark Tomorrow. Hrrrrrnnngghhhhh. The less said, the better.

If there was one game that did steer Batman in the right direction, it was the obligatory tie-in for the 2005 reboot of the franchise, Batman Begins. It’s not a perfect game by any means, but it had some solid ideas on the side, such as a fear meter that factored into how effective your billionaire bruising skills were in high-stakes scenarios.

Three years later, and Batman was back on the big screen, in the best remake of Heat that Hollywood ever produced. The Dark Knight broke box office records, and convinced the world that Batman could actually turn his neck if he had the right suit on. So where was the video game adaptation then? Turns out, there was a game in the works, at least until EA pulled the plug, according to Unseen64:

Too long , didn’t watch? The short story is that Saboteur developers Pandemic were crafting The Dark Knight game. Pandemic had problems realising their vision for an open world Dark Knight title, missed the original deadline of June 2008 and again in December that year. Electronic Arts had had enough, and decided to shut down production and a bill for $100 million. Which I imagine looked something like this:

This of course, led to Pandemic’s Australian office getting a Christmas day gift of pink slips in 2008, before EA went ahead and closed down the studio entirely in 2009.

Last Updated: February 3, 2016