What the canceled Dark Knight game would have looked like
Although it never made it to completion and publication, a video game adaptation of The black Knight was in production at the same time as the film. The sequel to Christopher Nolan in 2008 batman begins single-handedly influenced the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to expand the Best Picture Oscar category to 10 nominees. While the developers of The black Knight had no way of knowing the film’s impact in advance, the ongoing project at Pandemic Studios was additionally ambitious. However, the game never saw the light of day, and Batman: The Dark Knightas it was eventually titled, contributed greatly to Pandemic’s disbandment.
In the early 2000s, Pandemic Studios was a powerhouse in the gaming industry. The developer was responsible for releasing the original Star Wars: Battlefront games (but not battle front spin-off with a strange Jedi clone story), Destroy all humans! and its sequel, and the mercenaries series. In November 2005, months after the first destroy all humans! released, Pandemic entered into a partnership with BioWare as part of a private equity fund called Elevation Partners. Almost two years later, Pandemic and BioWare would be sold to Electronic Arts, with the impending failure of Batman: The Dark Knight supposedly a major reason why Elevation Partners jumped ship.
The history of the game’s failure and the ramifications it had for both Pandemic and EA is explored in depth by Unseen64, who posted a video on the subject on DidYouKnowGaming? Youtube channel. The effort was costly and suffered from a myriad of problems, including changes in leadership, poor communication, and impossible deadlines. Other games featuring the Caped Crusader have since been canned, such as a Batman: Gotham by Gaslight adaptation and monitoring of Arkham Knightbut the license Black Knight The game was exceptionally expensive, reaching advanced stages of development before it was shut down.
The Canceled Dark Knight Game Was Originally Slated To Be Linear
Initially, Batman: The Dark Knight (which didn’t go by that name for the first year of development) would follow in the footsteps of its predecessor. In 2005, EA released the batman begins game, which was developed by Eurocom. It received poor critical ratings, but was not a commercial success. Eurocom would continue to develop licensed games for franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean and james bond, but the responsibility of adapting Nolan’s next film has shifted to Pandemic. The main attraction of the batman begins was voice work done by all the big names in the film cast – Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman.
In the same way as the Arkham games influenced Batman cartoon cannon, The black Knight game was closely linked to the production of the film. Even before principal photography for Nolan’s sequel began, Pandemic was working on physics environments and animations for a game that would be linear like its batman begins predecessor. At these very early stages of production, Pandemic had received very few resources from Warner Bros. about what the film was going to look like, slowing down the work that could be done. Even still, the rudimentary prototypes were enough to impress Bono of U2, a member of Elevation Partners who visited Pandemic to see the progress being made.
Batman: The Dark Knight has moved to an open world
At some point in the game’s development, Pandemic’s management decided to ambitiously pivot to an open-world version of Gotham. Several years later, arkham asylumThe linearity of ‘s helped make them DC die hard, but Pandemic felt that an open-world approach suited Christopher Nolan’s vision for the story. Throughout 2007, development accelerated and it was decided that Batman: The Dark Knight would use the game engine from Pandemic’s other ongoing title, The saboteur. This engine eventually caused more development issues, dropping to extremely low framerates when Batman animations were imported, and crashing frequently when NPCs were added to the mix.
The engine’s incompatibility with NPC assets was a major setback, since Pandemic had created a dynamic NPC creation system for the game, but that wasn’t the only issue. Batman: The Dark Knight was attempting to use an advanced high dynamic range (HDR) system for its lighting. HDR has come a long way since the late 2000s, including the Xbox Series X Auto HDR technology that applies it to retro games, but Pandemic’s game-applied system didn’t work well, requiring manual reprogramming each time. time changes were made to the in-game environments.
Although the chosen engine proved useless in development, some aspects of the game were quite advanced before the cancellation. Even though the environments weren’t cooperative, the mechanics of traversal methods like the Tumbler and Batpod were nearly complete. Likewise, the game’s main missions were starting to come together, and would have closely followed the film’s story. Unseen64 mentions that Batman: The Dark Knight even included a recreation of the Joker’s bank robbery from the film’s opening sequence.
Dark Knight Game Cancellation Cost EA Millions
In October 2007, eight months before The black Knight would be released in theaters, Electronic Arts acquired Pandemic Studios (and BioWare, which is still busy in 2022, avoiding the fate of its former studio partner) and, seeing the state of the related game, ultimately pushed its release back to December 2008, where it would coincide with the film’s release on DVD and Blu-ray. The extra five months of development wasn’t enough for Pandemic to complete Batman: The Dark Knight. The failed project is estimated to have cost EA $100 million and would prompt the publisher to close Pandemic’s office in Brisbane, where Batman: The Dark Knight was under development.
The Los Angeles branch of Pandemic would follow within the year, being closed less than a month before The saboteur published. At that time, Eidos Interactive had already obtained the rights to develop a Batman game, and arkham asylum from Rocksteady Studios was on the way. Batman: Arkham changed franchise characters forever and was hugely influential to other action games, but even Rocksteady took a whole trilogy of makeovers to reach the open world with drivable vehicles that Pandemic had in mind for its game Insurmountable deadlines, an uncooperative engine, poor management, and an overambitious vision killed Pandemic Studios. The black Knight game, which could have been cutting edge had it ever completed development.
Sources: DidYouKnowGaming?/YouTube, Unseen64
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