Board 8 > So how did we go from having terrible Batman games to Arkham City?

(+) Yeah! (+)

There is like no in between. I just completed Arkham City for the third time. This game is too good

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Before that, Arkham Asylum was about as good. Before that...er, they were mostly average, but never really *terrible*. Batman and Robin for the SNES is awesome

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yeah, arkham asylum is the game that broke the trend. still pretty impressive given how bad licensed games tend to be

From: DeathChicken | #002
but never really *terrible*.

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Batman Forever was an exception to the rule

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They weren't even terrible, they were the defining standard of awful. The worst kind of game imaginable. There was bad games, there was terrible games and then there were batman games.

I remember Gotham City Racer in particular being on the level of Superman 64, I think it was mostly Playstation-era stuff that were especially bad, seemed to be the generation for the lazy cash in.

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Most companies acquire comic book/movie/cartoon licenses and just half ass games to make a quick buck (LJN.)

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From: DeathChicken | #002
Batman and Robin for the SNES is awesome

This guy

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Batman (NES)
Adventures of Batman & Robin (SNES)
Batman Arkham Asylum
Batman Arkham City


only good batman games

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Rocksteady.

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I thought Batman on NES was pretty good (though extremely difficult,) but Batman Forever was terrible. I don't think I ever got passed the third level.

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From: SHINE GET 64 | #010
Batman (NES)
Adventures of Batman & Robin (Genesis)
Adventures of Batman & Robin (SNES)
Batman Arkham Asylum
Batman Arkham City


only good batman games

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Return of the Joker on NES is also good, though inferior to Batman NES. I think both were made by Sunsoft which explains their quality (and their good music)

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To answer this question you have to broaden the scope to comic hero games in general. Your spiderman games, your hulk games. Most of them were B-level games, not AAA games. The general attitude of companies like Activision is that quality didn't really matter, and there's evidence to back that up. Spiderman 3 was an atrocious game, Spiderman: Web of Shadows and Ultimate Spiderman were pretty good games. Spiderman 3 completely murdered Ultimate and Web of Shadows in sales, because it rode the hype of the Spiderman movie. With numbers like these, why ever take the effort to make an Ultimate/Web of Shadows level game, when you can just produce garbage like Spiderman 3 and make tons of money?

But to use gamerankings terminology, the quality bar Activision was playing with was between a 65-ranked game and a 75-80-ranked game. (Or in the case of, say, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, an 85-ranked game). Eidos asked themselves "what if we cranked the quality way higher; maybe Activision is wrong and quality actually DOES matter to sales, but only if we give enough money to make a 90-95 ranked game". So...they spent a crapton of money on developing Arkham Asylum (which ended up with a 92) and it...sold very well. So they got even more money to make Arkham City (which got a 95).

And that is basically what happened; it was a business gamble that paid off big. The moral of this business story is that for comic book games, they'll sell about the same if they're anywhere in the range from "bad" to "pretty good". You have to get them into the "ridiculously awesome" range before quality actually starts to matter from a sales standpoint.

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