It's been no secret in the past that the now shuttered Warner Bros. Games studio Monolith was at one time working on a Batman game prior to the release of The Dark Knight Rises.
Over the years, we've had a detailed documentary about the project from the wonderful folks at DidYouKnowGaming, as well as a bunch of leaked footage from the game giving us an incredible insight into what the planned open-world game might have looked like. Despite all of that, though, we've never been able to really understand why the project ended up being greenlit in the first place, with the proposed title making very little sense (at least from an outsider's perspective) due to the continuing success of Rocksteady's own Arkham series.
Because of this, while we were interviewing former Monolith personnel as part of our ongoing project to document the company's history, we couldn't help but ask one of the former developers on the game, Matthew Allen, for a little more information about the cancelled title. In response, the former Monolith artist and content director was nice enough to share some more details about the unreleased game, revealing that he and the team were just as confused as we were about why DC and Warner Brothers Games wanted more Batman games when it had already established a winning formula with Arkham.
As Allen told me, the origins of the project has its roots in the decision to move to a third person perspective, which was inspired, in part, by the work that the animator Richard Lico had been doing on the Condemned series of games.
According to Allen, Lico had been producing "gorgeous" player animations, but sadly "nobody ever had the opportunity to see them" due to the fact the game was in first person. As a result, it was therefore decided to switch to a third-person camera for the next project the team were working on, with the developers hoping that this would be a good showcase for some of the animation work that was being done internally at the studio. Before they could do that, however, the team would end up being drawn in to help out on F.E.A.R 2 — another project inside the studio that was struggling at the time.
Reflecting on this, Allen recalled, "We came out of Condemned and the team was mostly absorbed into F.E.A.R 2 because F.E.A.R 2 was having a lot of problems. And so we were asked to go help the F.E.A.R. 2 team finish, but most of my content team left to go work at Bungie because they didn't want to crunch. So one of the things I did to save an engineer, a guy named Aaron Leiby, was I said, 'Look, you don't have to work on F.E.A.R 2 , go work on this third person animation system instead. Because it was right at the time where motion matching was starting to become a thing.'"
As Allen recalled, while Leiby worked on this new system, the remaining members of the Condemned team chipped in to help F.E.A.R 2 out the door. Then, once their work was over, Allen then starting speaking to the senior vice president of production and development at Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment Samantha Ryan, to ask what was next for his group of developers.
Allen said, "I told her, 'I have this guy Aaron upstairs working on this third person camera and I think we can make a third person open-world game using just existing content from like F.E.A.R. Can we do a demo?' And she was like, 'You guys should do a Batman game.'
"I said, 'You already have a team working on Batman games.' But she was like, 'DC wants more Batman'. Also, at the time, this was before The Dark Knight Rises came out. So what I think Samantha was doing was saying, 'There's going to be a movie. It's going to be a pretty big movie. We can get it attached to that.'"
Among Allen and the rest of his team, there was apparently a lot of confusion over why DC wanted more Batman, and concern over whether it would negatively impact what Rocksteady was doing elsewhere. Nevertheless, they agreed to work on a playable demo, which would use elements of Nolan's films and would feature a fully explorable city similar to Rocksteady's Arkham City.
"It was always weird to us because we knew about the Rocksteady game," said Allen. "We were like 'Why the fuck are we making two Batman games?' Even Craig Hubbard and everybody else at the studio were saying, 'This is weird'. And then when they started to work through the pitch for the multiplayer game that became Gotham City Impostors, I really think it was just them saying, 'We should just make a third Batman game, but we'll make it fucked up and not ever have Batman show up.'"
The strangeness apparently didn't stop with just those inside the studio being confused about the project either, with Allen even ending up communicating with one of the Rocksteady art team, who was also curious to find out what exactly was going on.
"I remember talking to somebody at Rocksteady because we wanted to understand what they did with Batman's cape. I think it was their lead character artist. And he was like, 'Why are you guys working on a Batman game?' I remember thinking, that's a good question. I don't actually know, but it's cool."
In the past, there's been a lot of conversation regarding why this game was ultimately cancelled, with the leading reason provided online being that Christopher Nolan never ended up signing off on it — something which Allen confirmed to us.
"Christopher Nolan wanted nothing to do with this game," he told Time Extension. "He was like, 'Don't put this game out anywhere near my movie'. He hated everything about video games and wanted nothing to do with them, because he got screwed because I think the first film had a game without his permission."
"I understand where he was coming from," said Allen. "The guy's a genius and in a lot of cases these things are just cash grabs. And I think he knew that and knew that they're not usually good. So I think, for me, obviously it was Chris Nolan being like 'What the fuck are you guys doing?' But it was also internally us being like, 'Why are we cannibalizing Rocksteady?' Like it just seemed really weird to us that they were asking us to also do an open-world Batman game."