You want to play a Batman game? Here, you can choose from one of roughly three billion games featuring the dark knight provided you don’t say the M-word. Want to play as Spider-Man and hope that nothing bad happens to that lovely Uncle Ben fella? Lots of choices! You want to play a Superman game outside of the Injustice series? Buddy what the hell is wrong with you, do you like pain that much?
The point of all this, is that provided that there’s a superhero there will be a video game featuring them. If your source material is paper, your costume looks like it was painted on you and you’ve got a film featuring Ben Affleck dressed up in your trademark leather, then chances are high that you’ll have your feature game adaptation.
Unless you’re daredevil that is. The devil of Hells Kitchen has popped up in video games before, but usually as a character who has had to share the spotlight. A solo effort was due to show off Hornhead in all his glory, kicking ass and taking names on the PlayStation 2 but that project was pretty much binned due to creative differences back in the day.
What of the now though? With a Netflix series that has reinvigorated Matt Murdock’s brand of religious terror via fist to face doctrine punches and the gaming industry having no shortage of studios willing to take a stab at the unique prospect of adapting the blind hero for gaming systems, could a Daredevil game ever happen?
Short answer: Not currently. Longer answer: Marvel’s video game big cheese would love to see it happen eventually. Over on the hellscape of Twitter, video game voice actor Troy Baker (He’s apparently in some small indie game called The Last of Us Part II next month) roped in vice president and creative head of Marvel Games Bill Rosemann into a tweet about dream superhero video game collaborations:
To which Rosemann replied with a certain quote taken straight from the pages of Daredevil.
Reading this, the Internet naturally put two and speculation together, declaring that a Daredevil game was in development and that they were already angry that the rather excellent EXTREME 90s outfit that the hero sported back in the day would be a pre-order bonus. To which Rosemann had to respond and confirm that a Daredevil game wasn’t in development at this stage:
And there you have it. As much as I like Daredevil, I don’t see the character being able to headline a large-budget game the same way that Spider-Man did back in 2018. Daredevil would work better within a more confined space of gaming, something similar to the recent John Wick Hex that made amazing use of the best elements of a character and polished them to a mirror finish. Daredevil could make for a spectacular game, if the right pitch for it lands on the Marvel video game desk.
Until then, I’ll be crying about how the Netflix version of the character isn’t even getting a cameo in the next Spider-Man film.
Last Updated: May 19, 2020
Original Heretic
May 19, 2020 at 14:53
Make it! But please not a POV game… https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c4a5ba82622f4fc4c67e955df33ad30f137f6fc1493f93eac2ea53a96b2b8d63.png
OddSockZA
May 19, 2020 at 15:13
No, absolutely make it a POV game, but one where you have to really rely on positional audio, with sounds in the environment adding pseudo visual touches to simulate his heightened senses.
Original Heretic
May 19, 2020 at 15:13
That could only work if playing with superb headphones.
The D
May 19, 2020 at 17:05
I could easily see this working with the Superhot formula as well, for corridor fights.