This open-world game about Batman could predate Arkham Knight by years

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Man, Pandemic Studios was awesome. They made some of my all-time favorite games. I spent hours playing the first two Star Wars: Battlefronts, and Full Spectrum Warrior was surprisingly addictive. Mercenaries was just pure chaotic fun, and who could forget blowing stuff up in Destroy All Humans!? They even made The Saboteur, which is a bit of a hidden gem but totally worth checking out. They really left their mark on gaming, for sure.

It’s easy to forget that this studio was once on track to achieve the same success as Rocksteady Studios. They were creating an open-world action game inspired by the film The Dark Knight.

The journey begins

In 2005, a video game based on the movie Batman Begins was released for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube, with a different version available for Game Boy Advance. Developed by Eurocom, the game was decent, but didn’t become a huge hit. The developers hoped the next Batman game, assigned to the promising team at Pandemic Studios in 2006, would achieve greater success.

Work on the Batman: The Dark Knight game officially started then. The development team had Warner Bros., the studio that released the movie, fully on board. They supplied everything needed, like the script and concept designs. Plus, the game would feature the same actors from the film for both the characters’ looks and voices. In fact, it was actor Gary Oldman who first let the public know that Pandemic Studios was working on the game – we’ll share that story soon.

The game’s story would be very similar to the original movie. Batman’s main enemy would be the Joker, but Two-Face was also planned to make an appearance.

Open world Batman

The original plan for the Batman: The Dark Knight game was to make it different from the first game by letting players freely roam around a detailed Gotham City. Players would have been able to explore on foot, use Batman’s cape to glide, and drive iconic vehicles like the Batmobile and Batpod. The gameplay would have focused on completing missions based on important moments from the movie.

That’s pretty much everything we’ve learned about how Batman: The Dark Knight would have played. Based on what little information exists, it seems the game would have been similar to Batman: Arkham Knight, which came out years later.

Project timeline

Development of the Batman: The Dark Knight video game started in 2006 with Pandemic Studios’ Bravo team. Originally, the game was being built with technology for the PlayStation 2, and the team initially planned a straightforward, level-based experience. However, it gradually evolved into an open-world game. Despite the technical challenges, early progress reportedly caught the attention of singer Bono, who saw a preliminary version of the game while visiting Pandemic Studios during a U2 tour.

As the project continued, it switched to the Odin engine, which was built for seventh-generation consoles and famously used in games like The Saboteur and other open-world titles. Around this time, the team decided to make The Dark Knight an open-world game, and that’s when things started to go wrong.

As a huge fan, I was really excited about the Batman: The Dark Knight game, but development hit some major snags. Switching to a new graphics engine created a lot of problems with everything the team had already built. They worked incredibly hard to fix it, but the issues were just too big to overcome in time for the movie’s release. Thankfully, when Electronic Arts bought the company backing the game, they gave the developers some breathing room. That meant we finally got the game in December 2008, which was a relief after hearing about all the trouble they were having!

Even though the developers worked very hard, they couldn’t fix all the problems with the game. While you could technically play The Dark Knight, it had many bugs. The game’s lighting and the way Batman looked caused noticeable slowdowns.

The fall of Batman and its consequences

Gary Oldman accidentally let slip details about the in-development Batman game – including descriptions of Batman flying over Gotham and Commissioner Gordon using the Bat-Signal – which meant the game’s existence could no longer be kept secret. Despite this, Electronic Arts tried to salvage the project by increasing the development team to over 100 people. However, the game had fundamental problems that couldn’t be fixed, and EA ultimately cancelled it in October 2008.

Reports indicate that the disappointing performance of the Batman: The Dark Knight video game may have resulted in $100 million in lost revenue for Electronic Arts. This also negatively impacted Pandemic Studios, leading to the closure of their Brisbane office in February 2009. Despite finishing The Saboteur, Pandemic Studios ultimately closed down in November 2009.

Things weren’t looking great for Batman games for a while, but honestly, the issues with the previous game actually worked out for the best! EA was so worried about repeating those mistakes that they decided not to make another Batman game. And that’s when Warner Bros. stepped in – they saw an opportunity to bring Batman back and greenlit Batman: Arkham Asylum! But the story of how that game came to be? That’s a whole other adventure for another time…

In conclusion, a lot of visual assets and materials from Pandemic Studios’ Batman: The Dark Knight still exist, including a video made by the team at Unseen64 (available below).

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2025-11-02 23:33