Batman: The Dark Knight videogame shrouded in shadows
“It’s a puzzle worthy of The Riddler: Why is there no video game based on ‘The Dark Knight’?” opens the article by Derrick J. Lang of the Associated Press, exploring the oddity of the abscence of a videogame companion to this summer’s huge blockbuster, The Dark Knight.
The answer, at first, seems obvious: The Dark Knight is not your typical action or, for that matter, Batman movie - it simply does not lend itself well to a videogame translation. Social commentary and phenomenal performances abound in the flick, and videogames are notoriously blunt instruments when it comes to telling a story, especially a story with such subtle undertones.
Director Christopher Nolan, I thought, might feel strongly about a virtual beat-em-up running alongside his opus, a game that couldn’t possibly capture the magic of the film and dumbed down its gameplay to mere gadgetry and fisticuff thrills.
Clearly this isn’t the case: like most blockbusters, The Dark Knight is subject to all the marketing trappings and cash-grab cross-promotions one can think of. Fast-food chains hawking Bat-burgers and, according to the article, “action figures, bobbleheads and T-shirts” all produced in mass quantity and freakish efficiency in order to run along side the hype wave the movie carries with it. There is nothing sacred.
So there goes that hypothesis.
And let us not forget that every Batman movie previously released, to my recollection, has had an accompanying videogame, including the most recent Nolan-directed Batman Begins. I can remember playing the SNES version of Batman Returns, the game based on the Tim Burton directed movie of the same name, and punching and kicking my way through rocket-launching penguins; no more ridiculous, really, then the movie itself.
Which brings me to another point: quality isn’t necessarily an issue when it comes to releasing videogames based on movies. If you have any measure of knowledge of the videogame industry, you’re familiar with the common notion that games based on movies are notoriously awful.
Videogames are hard work, and a decidedly different medium altogether than films, such that fitting one with the other is like shoehorning an elephant’s foot into a slipper. They take time to make right, more time than shooting a movie, and once the game gets underway the developers have little time to meet the movie release deadline.
Yet, these shovel-ware pieces of doo-doo frequently accompany movies with barely even mediocre chances of box-office success. Lang asserts that financial success or the prospects of financial success are determinate of green-lighting or canning a game. Well, of course. But The Dark Knight was practically guaranteed a good haul from theatres, and is now clearly a record-breaking financial success.
That said, the most reliable piece of evidence is that the videogame for Batman Begins undersold well below expectations, and there’s nothing more predictive of future performance than past performance. The vested interests probably got the willies.
The Dark Knight was, in fact, in development, under monolith publisher EA and being developed by the capable Pandemic Studios. Gary Oldman, the actor who plays Commissioner Gordon, stated that he saw the game in action himself, and that the goal was for a very realistically animated Batman set in a world that feels like it “doesn’t stop and start”.
The ambitions of Pandemic may very well have been the stumbling block halting development on an otherwise quicky catch-and-release game. Oldman’s comment strikes me as though the game were aiming for something more ambitious than a level-by-level and therefore contained and predictable design, something akin to an open-world sandbox with its myriad of development challenges. Pandemic’s own well received Mercenaries videogame (and its impending sequel due for Xbox 360) are known for just that type of gameplay.
So with a game that’s predicted to do mediocre if not poor sales, coupled with a developer not willing to settle for or compromise their reputation on a game that stinks, we can illuminate the shadows shrouding the mystery of The Dark Knight videogame.
It’s not very often that a comic-book based movie is both a critical darling and box-office smash, and with expectations as high as they are, maybe it’s best for everyone that The Dark Knight videogame stays in its Batcave.
peachey @ August 9, 2008