Batman Dark Tomorrow - What Happened?

[Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to another episode of what happened the world's greatest detective show that well i i mean we're pretty up there no well i'm just saying that it's solid i mean anyway we have a wild one locked and loaded today folks this confusing tale of dual development added and then cancelled console ports delays miscommunication broken promises and dead parents da i mean yeah dead parents so strap on your utility belt and grab whatever bat branded items you have on hand it's time to find out what happened to batman dark tomorrow one of if not possibly the worst batman game ever made between 1997 and 2005 cinematic adaptations of the cape crusaders exploits suddenly stopped coming out with little to no reason as to why no one [Music] to take up the slack dc comics made sure to sign off on as many batman games as humanly possible in that same 8-year time frame almost 10 different titles were released on various platforms mostly revolving around the dini verse one of these games was batman beyond return of the joker a monotonous button masher which released on both the ps1 and n64 with neither of them being very good at all it was published by ubisoft during their wilder days when they put out games that weren't just you know this a phenomenon which you can learn about in this video here now batman beyond was actually developed by chemco japan best known for publishing not developing that was gremlin graphics the top gear series then what was something they did develop why die katana ports and these shockingly prolific bugs bunny crazy castle games of course so it's pretty evident that kemko was kinda all over the place now the interesting thing about this era of video games and particularly licensed video games is that it was very much a free-for-all anybody could license batman for anything even if someone else had the rights to him so if you're making games based on the cartoons like ubisoft was that wouldn't stop kemko from putting bats into other games as long as it was based on a different version of the character so that's exactly what they did in 2001 a big shiny press release went out announcing kemko were publishing and developing a brand new ambitious batman game subtitled dark tomorrow and it was going to be an exclusive for the almighty game of cube the original intent was for a fully open world gotham where batman could get behind the wheel of the batmobile the batwing the bath boat or the bat segway and fight it out with various criminals from his rogues gallery okay so i have successfully fulfilled the requirement of using the term rogue's gallery in a batman video the story of dark tomorrow was handled by scott peterson fresh off his run on batman gotham adventures and who then moved up into the batman liaison office for dc at that time basically whenever a company would want to use the character for video games about bubble bath or contraceptives scott would often need to oversee it now in terms of the nitty-gritty the programming and design and whatnot well that's a bit of a mystery that we're going to clear up as there has been some misinformation out there a studio by the name of hot gen often gets credited as the main studio which really isn't accurate they were a late addition to the project and were something more of a support studio for chemco who were indeed the ones behind the programming and design of dark tomorrow hot gen were based in the uk and if you haven't heard of them what's wrong with you they're behind some of the biggest licenses of the day tony hawk's pro skater 3 indiana jones and even star wars for game boy handheld systems of course honestly for them to have to suddenly step up and assist in a sprawling batman console game was a big big change but they had to start somewhere the main thing that they were hired to do was to port the gamecube code over to the xbox wait what this is because in march of 2002 despite being initially announced as a gamecube exclusive kemko then walked that back by adding both xbox and ps2 versions into the mix which i'm sure made certain cube warriors very happy the game's final release day was also announced december 2002 mark your calendar calendar man dark tomorrow's coming now the reasoning behind this change is not confirmed but it's assumed that the strong sales base that the ps2 had already built plus the early success of the xbox made kemco feel that adding more skus was the best way for the game to see success as they viewed the license as their big ticket into western markets now that's a bit weird but going back on previous exclusive announcements is not unfounded in the video game industry just ask capcom yeah re4 jokes people but you know what's even weirder batman dark tomorrow was directed by one of the creators of final fantasy yes kenji tarata the writer of fantasies one two and three these ones bounce between various companies in the 1990s most notably he worked on the sega cd classic dark wizard god this box art is just burned into my mind for some reason i didn't even own a second cd before finally arriving at kemco come the turn of the century so yeah that is a bit weird now even though scott peterson is credited as the main writer terrata also has a story credit but it's not exactly clear what the extent of his involvement truly was as of the airing of this video mr tarata has yet to return my emails but do you know who did return my emails well that would be dave vout who worked on the game during his time at hot gen and who can certainly dispel some of the gloomy clouds behind dark tomorrow where do i start i mean no disrespect to the team or the management by the way they're very nice people and very respectful however kemko had a producer and he built a team spread across the world way before it became common to do so there was a team in la london as well as us germany and japan multiple locations music was being recorded in london in downtime by the royal philharmonic so the game had great cutscenes and production value but no gameplay basically i think yuki was making a movie and seeing his imdb it makes sense the basic things like the in-game camera just hadn't been addressed ah so yuki takafumi this was his first video game producing role and it seemingly was his last video game producing role and yeah if you take a quick look at his imdb it's stuffed to the gills with various tv and movie credits so it's pretty clear where his aspirations actually laid now as stated before hot gen's main role here was to pour batman dark tomorrow over to the xbox and in the sixth generation that process usually started when the main version in this case the gamecube was in beta or at least alpha dave told me that when they were hired dark tomorrow was barely even that kemko was struggling with a lot of aspects of the game that's probably due to the fact that they realized they simply didn't have the time or experience to make a fully open world batman adventure with multiple vehicles a reality it's most likely they started scaling everything back and mixing and matching various pieces of the game into a giant gotham-sized jigsaw puzzle this was the version that hotgen was presented with after they had signed on to the project the rooftops became a clunky platforming section the open streets of gotham turned into one of the biggest most confusing areas of the game then there's the sewers arkham all of it was repurposed into their own separate levels now while this is certainly a messy way of doing things it was absolutely the right call because if chemco did try to brute force the original open world design they'd still be developing it today or more likely it would have been canceled altogether under the hood or a cowl i i should say there are even more problems buried deep within the code and it's here where i'll let mr vout deliver another doozy i was taken straight to the kemco offices and walked into a meeting odd thing with the culture there was that everyone had to buy into an idea so each idea took more than an hour to get everyone to agree to this turned into me acting as a gameplay designer to get the gamecube version finished so we could then start the xbox version meanwhile our team was investigating the game code which was done in japanese which didn't help but they soon discovered that all the ai in the game was actually running in a gba emulator it turned out the dark tomorrow team had been the gba team and as the culture was to not let people go they've been moved on to gamecube and for some reason it made sense to them to make a gba emulator and build the core game in that i suspect maybe they had started a gba version and that's what they had been moved from so that explains probably why much of dark tomorrow plays like this [Music] so uh obviously there was a disconnect between chemco and dc and along with the rush production schedule it all led to one of if not the game's most infamous moment there are two possible endings players can earn in darkman tomorrow bat one bad and one just slightly less bad all it takes is for a player to miss an easily missable button in the final area and then they are locked out of getting the best ending the problem was that you were given absolutely zero indication or hint that this was even a thing the lack of any sort of text message or dialogue letting you know how important this button is wasn't implemented in time before the game's gold master went out for the gamecube and xbox or you know they just forgot it all together wait wait wait hold on wait uh wait yeah there it is what happened to the ps2 version well by the time hot gen was hired it no longer even existed with kemko having dropped it all together at some point in 2002 the only thing we can assume here is that since the gamecube and xbox were pretty similar in terms of power and such it would be then the fastest easiest thing to just focus on those two consoles rather than continue to struggle with the ps double ballin and even if they did want to push it the development teams were already stretched pretty thin as it was since neither company was particularly large in terms of manpower thus on a cold dreary night in gotham the ps2 port left the theater a little bit early and was met with a sudden and violent end in the alleys of crime alley it's clear that kemko was out of their depth here and to cement that we need to swing back around with scott peterson who detailed a particular instance of culture clash on the comics on consoles podcast he recalled that early on in the game's life a physical meeting took place between kemko and dc with a translator to hash out the game kemko started outlining their ideas for a particular moment that would occur when batman sneaks into arkham asylum to distract the guards batman whips out a boombox and starts playing salsa music and and the guards get distracted so distracted by the dancing that he's able to sneak past them so did we have some idea that there was perhaps a bit of a train wreck on the way i think it's safe to say we knew pretty early on that there wasn't a complete and total sympatico vulcan mind meld going on and a complete total train wreck is what followed after a delay from december 2002 to march 2003 most likely due to the fact that the game just really actually needed the extra time dark tomorrow lurched onto the gamecube and xbox with a wet dank bat fart aside from a comic book promotion with dc the game didn't really have much of a marketing campaign mostly because according to dave vout kemko had burned through most of their money on the actual development this isn't surprising what with the cg cutscenes the phil harmonic orchestra multiple studios it all amounted to a costly misfire for the company so without the luxury of a robust marketing strategy they would just have to rely on word of mouth which oh reviews for dark tomorrow were pretty savage and were spread fairly equally across critics and most anyone with a pulse and a head i guess in fact if you look it up bats is only a few narrow points above superman 64's review average so it's definitely the low point for bruce wayne well except for maybe yeah then just a few short years after this debacle chemco's us branch was completely shut down to save costs right after chicago enforcer and rogue ops failed to generate much of well anything in the sales charts their main japanese branch not to be outdone was also forced to drastically pivot this pivoting resulted in them abandoning console gaming just cold turkey and completely transitioned to japanese only mobile games nowadays they routinely pump out several of these and a deluge of dlc every single month like clockwork with titles such as alphadiagenesis crystal ortho and of course ass divine it's actually kinda crazy that only two short years later ea and eurocom were able to capitalize on the dark knights rebounding cinematic popularity where their adaptation of batman begins before some other mildly successful batman games came out later on i don't really remember what they were so if you think about it from a different perspective kemko was way way ahead of their time with dark tomorrow what with using tons of gadgets a mature storyline and diving deep into the bowels of arkham asylum but wait no it's actually the reverse of that they weren't ahead of the now they just messed up what happened to hot gen you ask well they lingered on until about 2014 amazingly with their only post batman game of note being star wars republic squadron which if you don't remember you'll be forgiven because it released exclusively on this thing make no mistake dark tomorrow was a beautiful disaster a developer publisher who had aspirations of greatness were given one of the most mainstream globally recognized characters of all time but were ill-equipped to deliver on their vision even with help and wound up delivering one of the worst most infamous comic book video games in history as for our friend dave vout well he's doing just fine a deep silver dam buster so good on him and it's with this final thought of his that we'll leave on hot gen were desperate to get on with the port so there was a lot of pressure on me to do what i could with very little time and then move on so i did and it broke my heart to leave it like that we got the game finished eventually no one is proud of it but it got finished and that was harder than it looked but why do we fall bruce so that we can learn to pick ourselves up if you know of any other horrendously horrible superhero hack jobs let me know in the comments below or over on my twitter if you want to directly nominate a subject of your choosing then back grapple over to the flophouse vip patreon and become a big boss to put forward what we'll be tackling next thanks for watching stay tuned until next week same what happened time same what happened [Music] channel [Music] [Music] y'all [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 303,825

Rating: 4.958147 out of 5

Keywords: Wha Happun, Batman Dark Tomorrow, Batman Video Games, Matt McMuscles, What Happened?, Video Game Documentaries, Batman

Id: tl5tvxs7K8w

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ContraryPython]

Fun fact: This was the first game that had Cassandra Cain in it.

Also see how there’s multiple times where Batman cuffs downed enemies in the video? That’s because it’s a thing that you must do in the game, because if you don’t, they will get back up and try to beat your ass again.

[u/Nooome111]

Okay but it’s unfair they cut the scene where Batman plays salsa music on a boom box to distract thugs

[u/TheBigVitus]

SYMPATICO VULCAN MIND MELD!

[u/The_Draigg]

Man, using a GBA emulator for enemy AI is easily one of the weirdest decisions I’ve heard on this show. And that’s saying quite a bit.

[u/LammasuRex]

I loved the TBF Machinema video of this. "I hate you Batman."

[u/JayQix]

I really don't understand the whole AI built on a GBA emulator thing. Who does that even work for a GameCube game?

[u/retrometroid]

and now Kemco does nothing but shit out bad JRPGs for mobile devices

how the uh checks notes mediocre have continued?

[u/warjoke]

Watch the gist of the gameplay experience of this game on Rerez' Just Bad Games. It's really a frustrating experience for content creators who are unfortunate enough to play this and record some footages.