While getting to be a superhero is every child’s (and man-child’s) dream, few games have managed to successfully recreate the experience. For every decent game like Neversoft’s Spider-Man 2, you end up with at least two or three games like Superman 64 or X-Men Origins: Wolverine. But London based developer Rocksteady Studios has bucked this trend by developing the two best superhero games ever made, Batman: Arkham Asylum and it’s follow-up, Arkham City, back to back. In a recent interview with Canadian Business, Martin Carrier and Reid Schneider, the studio heads of WB Interactive, the publisher of those games, explained why they’ve succeeded where others have failed:
Schneider compares the success of Arkham Asylum and Arkham City to Neversoft’s classic Spider-Man game for PS1, saying ” If you look at the similarities between the two, they weren’t based on movies per se. They were just taking that really rich fiction from the comic books and exploring the characters. It’s not about hitting the movie date or some arbitrary date—it was giving the game the time it needs to be successful and really just concentrating on the quality of it.”
When asked if the studio would be involved in making games based on any of the upcoming DC movies, Schneider shoots down the idea, saying “It’s really about make the game what it needs to be and forget the movies.”
I’m sure any gamer or fan who’s been duped by a bad licensed game will applaud WB Interactive’s candidness and logical, quality driven philosophy, but it’s also worth noting that while Schneider says his company won’t result to shipping sub-par games in order to cash in on the release of a movie, his company also published games based on this summer’s Green Lantern movie earlier this year, which were met with a mixed reception. Still, nobody can deny the quality of the Arkham games, and hopefully the statements made by WB Interactive in this interview means we can expect more games of their caliber and less of the movie-based drivel that fans have been subjected to since the horrific glory days of Acclaim’s comic-based games for the Genesis and Super Nintendo.
