Rather surprisingly it turns out that Batman: Arkham Asylum could have easily revolved around a rhythm based combat system (so very thankful that was not the case).
Other interesting nuggets of information released regarding the games development are:
- “For some of the motion-capture scenes of Harley Quinn, we actually use one of the male producers!”
- “Some of the SFX for the air-con vents are recordings of the audio director’s fridge at home.”
- “Three cans of whipped cream are used to create the sound effects of spraying the explosive gel.”
- “When you first enter the penitentiary and are confronted with the wall of sound from the room full of lunatics, this is a recording of the entire development team!”
- “Titan Ivy consists of 44,674 polygons.”
- “Six Rocksteady babies were born during the development of Batman: Arkham Asylum.”
- “The Rocksteady hacky-sack team managed 72 keepie ups between them. (Is this a world record?)”
- “The Rocksteady team consists of 14 different nationalities.”
- “The word ‘Joker’ is said 384 times in the game.”
- “Nine members of the team support Arsenal Football Club, the most supported sports team in the company.”
- “There are 4,556 AI navigation nodes on Arkham Island.”
- “Combat went through three distinct revisions – the first one being a full rhythm action game! The second one was prototyped in 2D, which popped up whenever you got into a fight, and involved colored circles bashing into each other. This actually formed the basis of the final system.”
- “We experimented with hundreds of control systems, right up until first submission.”
- “The pictures you can find scattered around the floor of the asylum are of different members of the development team mostly from various team jollies!”
- “The top of the Arkham Mansion Clock tower is 145 meters above sea level.”
- “The main Intensive treatment lobby map was checked into perforce 883 times.”
- “There are 314 breakable TVs on Arkham Island.”
- “Over 14,000 post it notes were used on the schedule board by the production team to manage the scheduling of the game.”
- “There were 174,405 separate art, code, design, audio and animation check-ins to make Batman: Arkham Asylum.”
My favourite is the first, mentioning that some of the motion capture scenes of Harley Quinn were actually done by male producers. That’ll teach all the pre-pubescent young boys to get excited over a video game character.
