The Batman Arkham series is the run of games that finally made a Batman video game feel like being Batman, and it did so by building three systems that the rest of the industry has been borrowing ever since: FreeFlow combat, which chains strikes, counters and gadget throws across a room full of thugs without ever cutting away; predator encounters, which turn a room of armed men into a stealth puzzle solved from the gargoyles above; and Detective Mode, which reads a crime scene the way the character in the comics would. Rocksteady Studios, founded in London in December 2004 by Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker, was an unproven developer with one game to its name when Eidos handed it the Batman licence in 2007. Batman: Arkham Asylum arrived in August 2009, written by Paul Dini and voiced by Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill in the roles they had defined on Batman: The Animated Series, and it reset expectations for what a licensed superhero game could be. Warner Bros. acquired the studio in February 2010, and the series became one of the company's defining properties.
Batman: Arkham City followed in 2011, trading the single asylum for a walled-off prison district and a far larger cast of rogues. Warner Bros. Games Montreal took over for the 2013 prequel Batman: Arkham Origins, set on a Christmas Eve early in Batman's career, with the handheld companion Arkham Origins Blackgate developed by Armature Studio as a 2.5D Metroidvania. Rocksteady returned to close the story with Batman: Arkham Knight in 2015, opening the whole of Gotham City for the first time and putting a fully drivable Batmobile at the centre of the design, so that pursuit, combat and puzzle solving all ran through the same machine. The studio then explored the world from inside the cowl with Batman: Arkham VR in 2016. Taken together the games form one continuous arc, from a single night inside an asylum to a citywide war, and each entry stands up on its own terms. The Arkham titles we currently stock are gathered below, so you can pick up wherever you left off.
