Monolith’s Canceled Batman Game Revealed With Open World Gameplay Footage and Nemesis System

Batman Begins screenshot

Images and gameplay footage from Monolith Productions’ canceled Batman game have surfaced online. Details of the project, which was internally called Project Apollo, were uploaded on the Internet Archive in 2022, before being dug up by X/Twitter user Dageekydude this week.

The contents of the Internet Archive upload include four video files, each showing different aspects of the game including prototype combat footage, game menus, skill trees, and some good old open-world free roam.

The prototype footage includes assets based on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy, featuring the Batsuit worn by Christian Bale in the films. Gotham City and the Batmobile also bear a striking resemblance to the aesthetic of those films, as does the general design language of the UI. It looks like a movie tie-in game from the mid-2000s, but the final product would have looked much more polished, as is usual in game development.

Like Rocksteady's Arkham games, players would have used gliding, vehicles and gadgets like the grappling hook to traverse the city. It would have included other familiar elements from the Arkham games such as a detective mode and stealth sections. In one gameplay clip, the player throws a smoke grenade into a room full of henchmen and then switches to detective mode to knock them out.

The footage also shows many dynamic open-world activities, called “Ambient Crime”, happening across the city, which Batman could intercept by listening to emergency distress calls. It would have included a linear, leveling-based progression system as well. Like the Arkham and Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, it would have included mini-games for solving cases during missions.

The project was in development in the early 2010s, which morphed into Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor as Warner Bros. was unsure about two concurrent Batman video game franchises in the market.

Related: Batman Beyond Concept Art From Cancelled Film Has Some Serious Spider-Verse Vibes

Monolith is currently working on a Wonder Woman video game, which will also feature the Nemesis system. As for Batman, Rocksteady recently released Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which was panned by critics and players. The future of Batman in video games is unclear, although Kevin Conroy's Dark Knight of the Arkhamverse is expected to return in future DLCs.