For years, rumours persisted that Rocksteady, makers of the Batman Arkham series, had been working on a Superman game. It’s nonsense, a new report states.
Best known for the much-liked Batman: Arkham series of action-adventures, British developer Rocksteady has spent the past six years or so making Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League – a cooperative open-world romp based on the wayward DC Comics characters of its title.
As that game was being developed, rumours began circulating in 2020 that Rocksteady had originally pitched a Superman game to publisher Warner Bros, with the concept following a similar template to the single-player-focused Arkham titles. The story went that Warner Bros rejected the pitch, and instead gave Rocksteady the task of making a multiplayer, live-service cloaked Suicide Squad game instead.
There were even rumours that Rocksteady had worked on a Superman game for a while, and that certain assets from that abandoned project were recycled for Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League.
It’s an intriguing narrative, but has one unfortunate flaw: it’s not true.
In a new report by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier – who’s made a career out of uncovering stories developers would prefer stay buried – it’s stated quite categorically that “Rocksteady never pitched or worked on a Superman game, according to people familiar with the company’s strategy over the last decade.”
Rocksteady had indeed been working on other projects in the wake of Batman: Arkham Knight's release in 2015, but they had nothing to do with Superman – one was its 2016 Batman: Arkham VR game, while another, Schreier writes, was an “unannounced multiplayer game” not based on an existing property. Rocksteady then began work on Suicide Squad in 2017, with the studio having landed the project after another developer’s game based on the same property was scrapped.
The patient zero for the Superman rumour was James Sigfield, who in a 2020 tweet said he’d “heard from multiple sources that Rocksteady pitched a Superman game”. Sigfield has now said that his source “got the studios mixed up” and that he’d issued a tweet refuting the rumour he’d started, but this was ignored.
In fairness, Arkham Knight contained a number of easter eggs which appeared to hint that Rocksteady did indeed have a Superman game in mind as a follow-up. Then there’s likely an element of wishful thinking, as fans of the Arkham game reacted with dismay when it was announced that Rocksteady was working on a live-service experience – a genre the studio had never fraternised with before.
Rather worryingly, the reaction to Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League hasn’t been kind so far, with previews – which usually pull their punches somewhat when it comes to criticism – being unusually stinging. “We played it and didn’t like it,” read the headline to IGN’s scathing hands-on report.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is out on 2nd February for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Who knows – maybe Rocksteady will get to make a Superman game next…?
