Project Apollo
Image: Monolith Productions

A bunch of remarkable footage has resurfaced online of Monolith Productions' abandoned Batman game that was in development for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC around the time of the Dark Knight Rises (thanks Eurogamer!).

The game, which was codenamed Project Apollo, was previously covered in an in-depth video from DidYouKnowGaming back in 2019, where the video game historian Liam Robertson spoke to several former Monolith to get the scoop on the project.

In the video, Robertson revealed the studio hoped to tie the game into the hugely successful Dark Knight series of Batman films, but that the project was ultimately abandoned after the studio was unable to convince the director to sign off on it. The tech from the game was eventually salvaged to help build the 2014 title Shadow of Mordor, with sources telling Robertson that some of the AI behaviours associated with the Nemesis System were originally built for the Batman project.

As mentioned, a bunch of incredible footage from this game recently resurfaced online, in a set of tweets from a user on Twitter called SpiderGeeky. This footage included a closer look at the open-world traversal, gadget load-outs, and stealth combat, and was apparently posted on Archive.org by a Batman fan/preservationist named Back2Life.

Looking more closely at the Archive.org page, it is possible the footage may been available online since 2022, but judging from the enthusiastic response to SpiderGeeky's thread, it seems that most people are only just now coming across it for the very first time.

[source twitter.com, via eurogamer.net]