Rocksteady is the video game studio behind the smash hits Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City. Sefton Hill, the director of the latest Batman games, spoke with Official Playstation Magazine recently and was asked if Rocksteady would be working on a video game for The Dark Knight Rises. Unfortunately, it won’t be happening.
OPM: Have you ever been approached to do a tie-in game for The Dark Knight Rises? If not, would you like to do a game based on the grittier, more grounded nature of the Nolan films?
Hill: [Laughs] I love the films. I loved Begins and I loved Dark Knight. And it’s quite interesting because we saw Dark Knight in the middle of developing Asylum, so it was already a little too late to have any impact. Still, it was interesting to see where they were going, as opposed to where we were going.
One of the interesting things for us about the licence that we have is that we can make a game that’s designed to be a game, and that is a very different story to a film. If you’re writing a story for a film for two hours, it’s a very specific narrative. Whereas for a game we’re writing a story for 15 hours and then we’re also writing 12 side-stories in a way that you would just never do in a film.
OPM: So we shouldn’t expect a tie-in game from you next summer, then?
Hill: No, I don’t think so. I think that’s one thing you can rule out.
This news doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Video games take years to make, so if a game for The Dark Knight Rises was in the works, we would have heard something about it by now. We haven’t had a Batman game based on a movie since EA’s Batman Begins in 2005. There was supposed to be a video game based on The Dark Knight — Gary Oldman and other actors even recorded some dialogue, but the project was scrapped in the middle of development. With 6 million copies of Batman: Arkham City shipped in 2011, at least we can look forward to a sequel from Rocksteady, right?
SOURCE: OPM [via ArkhamCity.co.uk]
