Batman: Dark Tomorrow released in 2003, a time in which Batman comics were at an all-time high. This didn’t stop the game from being awful.
Younger generations of video game players have been blessed with the ignorance of 2003's Batman: Dark Tomorrow. In the current state of gaming culture, those who love the Caped Crusader have the brilliant Batman: Arkham series to enjoy and the future Gotham Knights title to look forward to. But in the early 2000s, at a time when the Batman comics were at an all-time high, the video game adaptations of the World's Greatest Detective's stories were at an all-time low, and no other game is as representative of how bad this period was than Batman: Dark Tomorrow.
From a retrospective point-of-view, Batman: Dark Tomorrow was supposed to be the original Batman: Arkham game. It was originally marketed as an open-world Gotham experience with a mature storyline delivered through compelling cinematics. However, during its development, much of the original ambition surrounding the title was dialed back to the point that Batman: Dark Tomorrow was barely a functioning game at all.
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Even Batman: Dark Tomorrow's story was a complete flop. Despite having some of the best comic book source material to pull from in the early 2000s, the game instead opted to tell a story centered around a Ra's al Ghul eco-terrorism plot that will feel especially trite to modern players because of Ra's al Ghul's role in Batman: Arkham City. The game still did manage to feature characters from some better comic arcs of the time, namely Cassasndra Cain as Batgirl from Batman: No Man's Land. However, not even this could save Batman: Dark Tomorrow from transforming into the gloriously terrible cultural artifact it has become. And indeed it has become a cultural artifact, for it embodies the crazy world of game development in the early 2000s and highlights how strong the period was for Batman comic books by being a disaster in comparison to them.
Part of what made the 2000s such a special time for Batman comic books was the decade preceding it. The 90s saw Batman broken by a cunning, ruthless Bane in Knightfall, both in body and spirit; they saw the Caped Crusader lose his mind in Batman: Venom; they even saw Gotham itself ravaged by a 7.6 magnitude earthquake in Cataclysm. Needless to say, it was a dark time. But perhaps the two most important Batman comic arcs of the decade were The Long Halloween and No Man's Land. The Long Halloween put an emphasis back on the mystery aspect to the stories of the World's Greatest Detective. In contrast, No Man's Land maximized the 90s trend of descending into darkness and despair as it sees Gotham plunged into an anarchy worse than Batman: Arkham Knight's Gotham. However, No Man's Land simultaneously introduced new fan favorite characters like Cassandra Cain, showing that from the darkness of the decade could be found a new hope in the millennium to come - a fitting message for an arc released in 1999.
Indeed, the comic book arcs of the 90s culminated in the storyline that would make 2000s an amazing time for Caped Crusader, Batman: Hush. In Batman: Hush, readers can find the expansiveness of No Man's Land, the overarching mystery of The Long Halloween, and many new twists and turns for longstanding characters that come as a welcome surprise to the series. So beloved was this comic arc that Hush later reappeared in Batman: Arkham City despite supposedly meeting his demise. Considering that Batman: Dark Tomorrow was being developed at the same time Batman: Hush was being circulated from 2002 to 2003, it felt like the early 2000s were an amazing time for Batman video games to adapt newer story arcs.
Despite its fantastic source material with the 2000s Batman comics, Batman: Dark Tomorrow was doomed from the start. The title was to be developed by small studio Kemco Japan. Kemco had already developed another famously terrible Batman game, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. If the failure of that game did not serve as enough of a warning for the dumpster fire Batman: Dark Tomorrow was to become, then the studio's desire to make the title feature luxurious cinematics, complex AI enemies, and an open-world Gotham City for Batman to explore sealed its fate.
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Indeed, the intense focus Kemco put on the cinematics in Batman: Dark Tomorrow was one of the game's biggest issues during production. In YouTuber Matt McMuscles' "What Happened" video on Batman: Dark Tomorrow, he reached out to Dave Vout, a former staff member at HotGen, the studio that helped Kemco port the GameCube version of the game to the Xbox and PS2. Vout shared his opinion that the lead producer, Yuki Takafumi, seemed to want to make a Batman movie out of Batman: Dark Tomorrow, which is corroborated by the fact that Takafumi abandoned gaming after Batman: Dark Tomorrow for work in film and television. Kemco thus spent most of the project's budget on the cinematics and expended very little focus on achieving the ambitious, Batman: Arkham adjacent gameplay goals Batman: Dark Tomorrow originally had.
Though the effort put into the cinematics did pay off in terms of Batman: Dark Tomorrow's visuals (the audio and story were still bad), it came at the sacrifice of gameplay. Even after scaling down from an open-world title to a more linear, narrative-centered game, Batman: Dark Tomorrow failed to live up to any expectations for what a videogame should be. In the aforementioned Vout interview, the former HotGen employee shared that once his studio received the GameCube version of Batman: Dark Tomorrow from Nemco, it found out that the console game's AI - what was a selling point for the game when it was first announced - was programmed using a Game Boy emulator. Rather than making Batman's enemies completely defenseless, this strange development decision somehow had the opposite effect of making them so strong that even low-level enemies could beat up the Caped Crusader. What didn't help this was that practically none of the tools players had at their disposal functioned well enough to help them fight. All of Batman's gadgets work incorrectly in Batman: Dark Tomorrow, and the stealth mode that could have allowed the Caped Crusader to knock out enemies more easily didn't function because the game's camera system made it nearly impossible to see where enemies and Batman were on the screen. These gameplay issues made Batman: Dark Tomorrow feel impossible to play at points in the most anger-inducing way possible.
The production nightmare coupled with an overly ambitious studio's inability to recognize its limits ultimately resulted in Batman: Dark Tomorrow becoming the worst Batman game ever made. It is a game that, like a campy horror movie, is so bad it's good, if only for the irony. And had Nemco somehow pulled off Batman: Dark Tomorrow, the Batman: Arkham series likely would have never existed, so perhaps it is best the game ended up failing as wonderfully as it did.
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Fletcher Varnson is a writer for Screen Rant, where he covers video games. He also writes for the Georgia Voice, where he covers LGBTQ+ literature, cinema, and news, has contributed poetry to the film journal Day For Night, and has written the podcast for the Five Points Literary Journal. Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia with 5 brothers and sisters, Fletcher developed a passion for books, movies, and games and their ability to connect people with disparate dispositions from disparate backgrounds. He has a special affinity for the Super Smash Brothers series; despite this, his Yoshi is still quite terrible.