Monolith Productions’ closure last year remains one of the hardest gut punches the Western games industry has seen recently. From iconic shooters like FEAR to the inventive Shadow of Mordor & Shadow of War, the studio always excelled, no matter the genre. Now, unearthed materials allegedly recovered from a discarded HDD used at the studio have revealed work done on a non-Arkham Batman game for Warner Bros.
MrTalida, a renowned “video game enthusiast and archivist,” shared their findings via Bluesky on 13th January. Moreover, an Internet Archive upload was made available for anyone curious about the unmade project. Needless to say, those files should only be accessed at your own risk.
According to the user, the materials go back as far as April 2009 and up to January 2010. It all seemingly belongs to a game that never came close to being anywhere near done. The info and videos mostly deal with isolated gameplay ideas, audio systems, concept art, and development schedules.
There are, however, fragments which present an aesthetic closer (if not the same) to Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies. If we also take the time frame into account, we can theorize this could’ve been a tie-in of sorts, or at least a title which existed outside of the continuity started by Rocksteady’s Arkham Asylum in 2009.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen footage of Monolith’s cancelled Batman game. In 2024, more substantial clips of an advanced build of the game popped up online. However, this new batch of materials gives us a closer look at the studio’s overall plans, as well as the iconic tank-like “tumbler” Batmobile from the Nolan movies.
Eventually, the project was scrapped and gave way to what became Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, a refreshing take on the Lord of the Rings IP that borrowed more than a few tricks from Rocksteady’s Batman playbook, so in the end, the studio’s slightly different approach to the Dark Knight survived… kind of.