Superheroes and video games have always gone hand-in-hand. The allure of assuming the role of your favorite comic book characters has enraptured players’ hearts, minds, and wallets since the days of the original NES, even if the games themselves proved to be average at best.
The 2000s was a bit of a golden period for superhero games. The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Treyarch’s Spider-Man 2, and X-Men Legends each brought their respective characters to life in their best virtual outings yet. At the close of the decade, however, one game would surpass every one of these great games, changing the subgenre forever.
Fifteen years ago today, Rocksteady Studios, an obscure London-based developer, would permanently elevate the comic video game with the release of Batman: Arkham Asylum. This seminal work perfectly captured everything that makes DC Comics’ Dark Knight so darn cool while creating the modern template for properly adapting larger-than-life characters to the medium of video games.
Batman: Arkham Asylum tells the story of a brutal night for the Caped Crusader. After capturing the Joker once again, Batman brings his arch-nemesis to the city’s high-security prison. But what starts as a fairly routine night turns out to be an elaborate trap set up by the city’s Clown Prince. Instead of terrorizing the city, the Joker locks Batman in Arkham Asylum and kidnaps Commissioner Gordon to sow disorder within the Gotham City Police Department. Locked in a high-security prison with dozens of villains who hate his guts, Batman must find a way to stop the Joker, and if he’s lucky escape with his life.
Penned by Paul Dini, the mind behind the 1992 animated series (as well as the excellent Batman: Caped Crusader on Prime Video), Arkham Asylum is a masterful Batman story that still holds up. It’s a comic book twist on classic action films like Lethal Weapon, showing a Batman on the backfoot doing his best to overcome impossible odds.
It uses this fun narrative conceit to pit players against a great collection of Batman villains, including Scarecrow, Solomon Grundy, Poison Ivy, The Riddler, and Harley Quinn. The performances bring it all home. Most of the cast of Batman: The Animated Series returned to reprise their roles, including Mark Hamill as The Joker and the late-great Kevin Conroy as Batman. Arkham Asylum feels like a PG-13 take on the classic cartoon, a revelation at the time of release.
Most surprisingly, Rocksteady also managed to nail Arkham Asylum’s gameplay. There were some decent Batman games in the past, including 2001’s Batman: Vengeance and 2005’s Batman Begins. But none of them let players engage with every aspect of what it means to be Batman. Each of Arkham Asylum’s gameplay pillars, stealth, combat, and gadgetry, added to the fantasy. When gunned and outnumbered, players carefully sneaked around and used the environment to instill fear in Arkham Asylum’s cabal of convicts. At any time, players could employ Batman’s extensive collection of Bat-tools like explosive gel and iconic grappling hook to even the odds.
Perhaps the most influential element was Arkham Asylum’s free-flow combat, a rhythm-based combo system that incorporated counters and gadgets into a seamless dance of brutality. It’s a mechanic that has become its most important contribution to the medium and remains a standard in the action-adventure genre some 15 years later.
As a total package, few games, aside from maybe From Software’s Demon Souls, have been as influential on the modern landscape of video games as Arkham Asylum. The game wasn’t on many people’s radars leading up to its August 2009 release, but a pre-release demo, reviews, and word of mouth immediately put Rocksteady on the map. This wasn’t another licensed cash grab. This was the definitive Batman experience and a glowing example of what’s possible when developers have a deep care for bringing iconic IPs to life.
Arkham Asylum is the template for most successful licensed games of the last decade and a half, including The Avengers game, 2015’s Mad Max, Monolith’s Shadow Of Mordor series, and even 2023’s Hogwarts Legacy. The game most indebted to Rocksteady’s classic is Insomniac’s Spider-Man series. The PlayStation exclusive owes most of what it gets right to the Batman Arkham trilogy, from its combat and stealth sections to its reverence of the source material.
Though Arkham Asylum has been overshadowed by its equally groundbreaking sequels, its lasting impact on the industry is indelible. It elevated the gaming’s superhero genre in the same way Marvel’s Cinematic Universe did in film, and its ripple effects can still be felt today.
