Gun-toting wannabes and your best friend, Joker: Looking back at the weirdest Batman games ever

Tim Burton’s 1989 movie kicked off the modern understanding of Batman as a blockbuster franchise, understandably drawing in a couple of different video game adaptations in the process. With all due respect to the Commodore 64 and Amiga version, which was developed by Ocean—and which had some lovely, juicy pixel art of the batted man himself—the obvious winner from this first crop of Batman games is Sunsoft’s version for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Aesthetically triumphant—that soundtrack!—Batman most thoroughly distinguishes itself through its play, being one of the first games to ever try to bring the Dark Knight’s focus on mobility to the forefront. It’s brutally hard, sure—but when you successfully execute a series of wall jumps to traverse the Joker’s latest set of industrial death traps, you’ll come close to feeling like the Caped Crusader himself. (A sequel, 1991's Return Of The Joker—no relation to the later Batman Beyond movie—ditched some of the intensity of the gameplay, but kept the focus on making Batman look and sound his best.) Honestly, the weirdest thing about this one is that it’s so damn good—it would take Batman games decades to hit these heights again.

Anyone who tells you that has the worst car action out of any of the Batman games clearly hasn’t played this 2001 PlayStation title, which reimagines Gotham City as a foggy hellscape of bland polygons through which Bruce Wayne is endlessly condemned to drive. (It’s hard not to draw parallels between Gotham City Racer and the infamous Superman 64.) Based (very loosely) on the beloved New Batman Adventures animated series, the game gets a few marks for being, as far as we can tell, one of the first games to ever present a 3D version of Gotham for players to aimlessly putter their way through. But it loses some fairly serious points for execution—because nothing truly captures the white-knuckle thrills of Batman careening his way through the night, racing death at every turn, like hitting a loading screen halfway while you’re blasting down the road.

Batman games tend to have a fairly easy time with the Dark Knight’s combat acumen—his skills as “The World’s Greatest Detective,” not so much. Maybe they’re just scared to follow in the brightly animated footsteps of this game, and its companion title, Toxic Chill, from The Learning Company in 2003. Heavy on cryptograms, logical puzzles, and other brainteasers, and light on breaking bones, the games actually have some charm to them, especially in the sporadically animated cutscenes depicting Two-Face and Penguin’s evil plot to … steal Faberge eggs? A shockingly rare cerebral outing for the Dynamic Duo—featuring a Batman who we’re pretty sure wouldn’t by a pun involving some high school-level Spanish.

Six years before Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum performed a near-miracle by creating a modern, faithful, and incredibly fun original interpretation of Batman—beholden to no one particular piece of source material, but reverential to the wider Bat canon as a whole—a team at Kemco attempted to do something similar with the GameCube’s Batman: Dark Tomorrow. Given that, almost two decades later, the game now features on any number of “worst games of all times!!!” lists, it’s fairly safe to say they didn’t succeed. That being said, Dark Tomorrow isn’t as abysmal as its reputation might suggest, mostly being burdened with the hardware of its era, and a camera that seems almost perversely determined not to show you what Batman is up to. (We know the guy’s a master of stealth, but still.) (Also: The decision to make you handcuff every goon you beat up, since Batman doesn’t kill dudes, is maybe a little silly.) Even so, we can’t help but admire its weird ambition. Or maybe we’ve just got a weak spot for any Batman video game that manages to get the true oddball villains, like The Ventriloquist, into the mix.

Quite possibly the one entry on this list that Batman himself would hate the most—by, like, a lot!—Monolith Productions’ 2012 online shooter dares to ask the big questions. Namely: What if those Batman-cosplaying doofuses in hockey pads from the beginning of decided to get some guns, get some friends, and rampage around Gotham City playing Call Of Duty with a pack of Joker wannabes? The wildest thing about Gotham City Imposters (which went offline permanently a few years back) is that it actually looks like a pretty fun game, once you manage to swallow the entirety of its ludicrous premise. (There’s nothing wrong, on the face of things, with a much goofier take on CoD.) But as far as adaptations that completely and utterly miss the point of their source material, it’s pretty hard to bat/beat.

The most fascinating thing about this stab at the Batman mythos from Telltale—famous for their Walking Dead narrative adventure games (and, uh … collapsing in a pile of )—is its willingness to play fast and loose with Gotham canon in order to keep players guessing. The result is a much darker sort of Batman story, even by the franchise’s standards, where the Joker can end up as your best friend, and Bruce’s own decision to take up the cape and cowl is painted in a far more negative, potentially destructive light. After all, if the idea is that your choices matter, then some of those choices have to be bad—as weird as it is to have that idea applied to someone with Batman’s typical air of total infallibility.