For the better part of a century, the Caped Crusader has maintained a level of aura rarely seen in characters kissing the public domain. He’s been a purple-gloved pulp avenger and a swashbuckling ‘70s love god, a camp icon and a goth baddie. Frank Miller’s iconoclastic boomer, Grant Morrison’s avatar of determination, and Scott Snyder’s Absolute unit are all wildly different iterations of a timeless concept existing under the same cowl. The games have only been a little more consistent.
We’ve previously explored the rocky origins of Batman in the world of video games, and today we look at arguably the Dark Knight’s most challenging chapter: navigating the extreme highs and lows of an era dominated by The Animated Series and Joel Schumacher’s nippled Batsuits, right as video game hardware changed how we played forever.
Almost Got ‘Im (1993 – 1994)
Batman: The Animated Series is a high-water mark among all Bat-media. Premiering in 1992, it is the platonic ideal of the Dark Knight, anchored by iconic voice performances, unheard of depth and undeniable style.
The series inspired four video games during its initial run, although one of them barely counts. Only Konami’s 1993 Game Boy title actually released under the “Animated Series” moniker, which features excellent platforming and an impressive dedication to showcase the show’s lavish production into a 2.5 inch cartridge. There’s a lot of game in that little grey box. It’s the first time Batman’s rogue’s gallery was really showcased, featuring seven A-list villains unrestrained by the smaller scope of a film adaptation. It’s also the first time we get to play as Robin, a keystone of the comic franchise whose relationship with Bruce remains criminally underexplored in movies and games to this day.
Konami followed up with an SNES title in 1994. Originally developed as a BTAS tie-in but published as The Adventures of Batman and Robin, the boy wonder is barely involved in the proceedings. Instead, a solo Batman battles through stages styled as episodes from the TV series, complete with unique art deco title cards for each. This format offers more than most Batman sidescrollers, with impressive Mode 7 boss battles, overhead Batmobile sections, and levels that mechanically complement the signature gimmicks of their respective rogues.
Not to be outdone, Sega published its own BTAS adaptation the same year. Batman and Robin for Genesis was developed by Clockwork Tortoise and is a technical tour-de-force of pseudo 3D scaling and rotation effects, utilizing brilliant tricks and scanline-level hacks to create visuals that simply shouldn’t exist on hardware primarily designed to play Altered Beast.
The gameplay doesn’t even pay lip service towards Batman’s skill as a detective, or his finely-honed physical combat skills. Instead, it’s a pure run-and-gun in the explosive tradition of Contra and Gunstar heroes, in which the Dark Knight and his ward run to the right, flinging an infinite supply of Batarangs at full auto while their tireless arms never flag. The dynamic duo can finally be played in co-op action here, though the presence of your trusty sidekick does little to alleviate the game’s notorious difficulty.
There are only four stages, but they are merciless and enormous– one autoscrolling Batwing section clocks in at over 16 minutes. Buildings explode, zeppelins are hijacked, and the entire world dissolves into a virtual reality hellscape as you make your way to Mr. Freeze’s sci-fi fortress. Anyone who can conquer the hyperactive gauntlet and throw the down-bad doctor back in his icy cell with a mere three lives and two continues deserves to be adopted by Bruce Wayne.
There’s one last game to round out this brief, beautiful era before the Bat-nipple arrived to change everything: Batman and Robin for the Sega CD. This one is particularly strange. For one thing, it’s a fully-priced release made out of what’s essentially a minigame, consisting of naught but a series of vehicle stages using the old Batman Returns engine in which the Dark Knight never gets out of his car.
What sets the Sega CD version apart, however, has nothing to do with the gameplay. Between the boring Batmobile levels we’re treated to full-motion video cutscenes that, at first glance, appear to be ripped directly from the Animated Series. That’s not technically correct, since the disc actually includes completely original footage, voiced by the same cast, directed by Bruce Timm, written by Paul Dini, and animated by Tokyo Movie Shinsha, the studio behind the standout episodes like Feat of Clay and Robin’s Reckoning. The 16 minutes of footage essentially comprise a lost episode, and if you can stomach the extremely compressed and dithered, 64-color video at 160p, the Sega CD cutscenes are worth tracking down.
The 16-bit era was very good to Batman, but a new age lurked ominously on the horizon. Casting aside Tim Burton’s vision and the Animated Series it inspired, a very different version of the Dark Knight would rise, bathed in a neon glow, and heralded by the haunting sounds of Seal and the Smashing Pumpkins. The games wouldn’t be much better.
The Ice Age (1995 – 2003)
On the big screen, new Batman director Joel Schumacher crafted a more toyetic vision for the Dark Knight. His first film, Batman Forever, spawned just two games. And for the first time, the movie tie-ins would be largely the same game ported to every platform, and who better to do that than the devs who brought Mortal Kombat into your living room?
Acclaim and Probe Entertainment’s Batman Forever is essentially a 2D fighter bolted to a beat ‘em up, a star-crossed pairing if there ever was one, and much like the later Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub Zero, it commits the cardinal sin of mapping jump to the up button, turning exploration into aggravation. The Dark Knight is no stranger to fighting games, but the execution in Batman Forever is, frankly, embarrassing, with so many esoteric button combinations that the instruction manual looks like sheet music.
Like Mortal Kombat, the game uses digitized sprites of stuntmen in bogus imitations of the film’s sensuously molded rubber, shuffling across bland and illegible scenery with zero Schumacher swagger onscreen. It’s astonishing anyone managed to make a movie that’s so extra into a game this dull.
If you just read a description of Batman Forever: The Arcade Game, you’d think it was largely the same as the console version. But look closer at its digitized sprites and you’ll notice that the schlubby stand-ins have been replaced with juiced-up CGI renders ala Killer Instinct, ready to melt your brain with nonstop button-smashing action. A psychedelic braindance of Game UI bombards the screen with combo counters, massive health bars, and bouncing powerups. Batman and Robin can annihilate waves of enemies with godlike ultra moves while an announcer barks phrases like “FRENZY MODE!” to a backdrop of speed metal guitars.
For all its extravagance, The Arcade Game received little fanfare. Notably, it’s the first Bat-Title IGN ever reviewed – we gave it a 5/10. Beat ‘em ups might have been Batman’s specialty, but by the late ‘90s they were considered stale and old-fashioned. The same could be said about 2D graphics, which is why the Dynamic Duo sprinted into the third dimension for their next game: Batman & Robin.
Based on the much-maligned film of the same name and originally set to release alongside it, Probe needed extra time to finish the game which forced Acclaim to delay it by a year, meaning that not only did Batman & Robin for Playstation miss the movie launch, by the time it came out the movie it was based on was already a global laughingstock. It’s a shame, because if you strip away the Schumacherian specifics there’s something genuinely ambitious underneath: a 3D, open-world Batman simulator bashing its head against the limitations of the Playstation hardware.
You control one of the three Bat-characters, including Batgirl in a series first, each patrolling the city with their own mean machine. You take discovered clues back to the Batcave, where you’ll decipher them to find out where, and more importantly when, mischief is afoot. The game runs on a relentless real-time clock, forcing you to be on time for Mr. Freeze’s latest caper or face an automatic game over. There are no checkpoints or quick restarts, so you’d better factor in the five-minute travel time to find an extremely rare save point. No one said it would be easy being Batman.
Batman and Robin has a reputation as one of the worst Batman games of all time, and it probably deserves it. Between the busted tank controls, tedious difficulty, obnoxious sound effects, and utter confusion about what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s not a pleasant experience. Look deeper, however, and you’ll see some pretty fascinating stuff buried within. Gotham is littered with locations to explore, from Arkham Asylum to the Ace Chemical Plant to Crime Alley itself, all accessible by Bat-foot or vehicle. The game looks great for its age, and if you’re enough of a sicko to somehow beat it, you’re rewarded with a credits scene featuring dorky caricatures of the development team. They might not have delivered the best Batman game, but these doe-eyed goofballs clearly gave it all they had.
No Man’s Land (2000 – 2003)
The next Batman game wasn’t really a Batman game, in the sense that the man under the cowl isn’t Bruce Wayne. Instead, it was based on Batman Beyond, the cult classic animated series set in 2039 in which scrappy teenager Terry McGinnis inherited the mantle from the retired billionaire.
2000’s Return of the Joker for Nintendo 64, PlayStation, and Game Boy Color is an adaptation of the direct-to-video movie of the same name, a controversial film that was heavily censored for its disturbing portrayal of child brainwashing and violence, which is a bit rich considering Batman has spent decades recruiting traumatized orphans to break people’s bones on his behalf.
The game is less interesting than the movie’s reputation suggests, a barebones, entirely unremarkable polygonal beat-’em-up that barely takes advantage of Terry’s futuristic tech and only superficially scratches the surface of the extremely schway TV show it adapted. Released at the end of a console generation with exciting new hardware already on the market, Return of the Joker’s existence registered as a mere twip on the radar that still remains the only dedicated Batman Beyond game we’ve ever gotten.
Return of the Joker was the first Batman game published by Ubisoft, which started its stewardship of the IP rights on a bad foot and promptly made it worse with a follow-up, Gotham City Racer. One persistent tension throughout the history of Batman games is the balance between superhero action and driving segments, two very different gaming rhythms welded uneasily together. A game built entirely on the driving half of that equation had been tried before and hadn’t worked then either, and whatever refinements 3D vehicular combat had undergone in the intervening years weren’t enough to make Gotham City Racer an enjoyable experience. The Sega CD at least had Paul Dini, Bruce Timm, and the anime studio that made Akira behind it.
Gotham City Racer and Ubisoft’s subsequent titles would all work within the stylings of The New Batman Adventures, the revamped animated series. First came Batman: Vengeance, a third-person action-adventure game for PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox in 2001. Batman’s brand of high-tech sneak-aroundery plays like a chubby guy in hockey pads compared to Solid Snake and Sam Fisher, but Ubisoft Montreal created an ambitious game that tries to encompass every aspect of Batman’s extremely weird job, but without anything to really pull you through it.
What it did offer was a faithful translation of the animated series into 3D, complete with an original story and great performances from the all-star voice cast that helped give it a premium, classic BTAS feel. Even the side-scrolling Game Boy Advance version punches above its weight in visuals and variety, from platforming and shmup sections to solving overhead sokoban dungeons.
Instead of refining the raw potential of the Vengeance approach, Ubisoft swerved back into familiar territory with the bog-standard beat-’em-up Batman: The Rise of Sin Tzu. The gameplay is rather retrograde for 2003, a bland button-mashing brawler. The most notable aspect of the gameplay is that it’s our first opportunity to kick some butts as Nightwing, though the relatively low polygon count did a disservice to the former Robin’s notorious physique.
The real draw of Rise of Sin Tzu is the titular villain, a new character heavily hyped as the second coming of Harley Quinn. Voiced by the late Cary-Hiryoki Togawa, Sin Tzu was a master planner and military strategist who engineered an Arkham outbreak to weaken Gotham’s fabled Dark Knight before beating him in single combat. He’s essentially Bane mixed with Big Boss, but despite his cool golden skin and the yin-yang plastered to his forehead like a Pog, the Gary Stu known as Sin Tzu has retreated into obscurity after the poor reception to his debut game. Outside of rare cameos he’s been trapped on sixth-generation consoles for the last twenty years.
Sin Tzu would be Ubisoft’s final Batman title, but the promised Batman renaissance was still a few years away. In the meantime, there was one more game to close out this extremely disappointing era: Kemco’s cautionary tale Batman: Dark Tomorrow.
On paper, Dark Tomorrow seemed promising: a 3D Batman game based on the comic book ideal of the character, unburdened by movies or TV and relying on the excellent comics of the era for flavor, showcasing lesser-known characters like Cassandra Cain’s Batgirl for the first and basically only time.
Scott Peterson, a longtime writer and editor of DC’s Batman books, was tapped to write the story, a serviceably cinematic tale involving Ra’s Al Ghul threatening to flood the world’s coastlines while Batman is busy rescuing Jim Gordon from the bedlam of Arkham Asylum. Squint and the concept kind of resembles Rocksteady’s revolutionary game that was still six years away, though the execution was anything but.
Dark Tomorrow’s problems started at the top. The project was led by a would-be film producer who had never shipped a game before, and he prioritized the CGI cutscenes and overall presentation above all else. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra recorded a full symphonic score, while the worthless enemy AI was programmed through a Game Boy Advance emulator by a team with mostly handheld experience.
What began as a sprawling, urban open world ala Spider-Man 2 instead became a linear, laborious trek through colorless warehouses, docks, factories, and sewers before schlepping through Arkham. Fixed camera angles give a nauseating effect, mocking the very notion of a 180-degree rule and making combat borderline impossible. On the rare occasion the Dark Knight knocks someone down, he has to handcuff every single enemy with a vibe-shattering mandatory cutscene you’ll watch a thousand times.
The game has multiple endings, all but one of which results in the death of Batman or an apocalyptic global flood. Even if you defeat Ra’s al Ghul, millions will be unalived unless you’ve solved a puzzle the game never hints at, using an ability you’ve had no reason to touch the entire time.
If you want a summary of Batman games in 2003, “Dark Tomorrow” just about covers it. The character was a punchline post-Schumacher, the DCAU was winding down, and the games’ performance over the last decade ranged from aggressively mid to utterly atrocious. The comic books were cooking, but things looked bleak on the Bat-front as far as pop culture and gaming were concerned. Something had to give and something would. In the immortal words of Aaron Eckhart: the night is darkest before dawn. And after a very dark night, the gates of Arkham Asylum were getting ready to open…
Our exploration of the history of Batman video games has already dived into the era of Tim Burton’s gothic movies, and tomorrow’s chapter will examine how the Arkham series changed superhero games forever.
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