Batman: Arkham Asylum owes its existence to a failed The Dark Knight game.
When the Dark Knight came out, it blew everyone away, because it exceeded everyone’s expectations of what storytelling combined with the Batman franchise could really do. So it was only natural for studios to cash in on the enormous success that was the Dark Knight and thus they tried to make a Dark Knight game. Of course the game wasn’t ready in time and as such the failure of the game led to an enormous 100-million dollar loss for EA, the closing of Pandemic Stusiod and the loss of several jobs. However EA’s loss was Eidos gain, because they pretty much had a free reign on how to handle the next Batman game. So Eidos handed the game’s development over to a small independent British developer that had only made one game which had just one decent game to their credit (Urban Chaos: Riot Response). And the rest as they say was history.
