Nana nana nana nana, nana nana nana nana. Here we have the entrance into computer games of a character iconic enough that he needs very few recognisable elements to make a game his – his appearance, a couple of setting details, and a bleepy version of that theme tune will do. He doesn’t even have any inconvenient inherent powers that have to be represented. He just practiced. He’s Batman. Ripe for slotting into whatever you like. And even above his wider cultural staying power, that versatility explains how he is the focus of #1 games from 1986 right through to 2015, something unmatched by any other character we’ll encounter. Sabreman appears in 2015, but only on a compilation through his original games as a retro curiosity, not the main draw.
Sabreman is an appropriate mention because Batman’s versatility, in this first appearance, means putting him into Knight Lore. More even than Fairlight, Batman the game is directly based on Ultimate’s isometric 3D platformer template. But the differences are palpable too. The first is in how it looks. Knight Lore had walls represented by just a few patches of brickwork amidst the space so as not to be too busy. Alien 8 (and Fairlight) had simple geometric patterns. In designing Batman, Jon Ritman, Bernie Drummond and Guy Stevens lower the height of rooms and then go all in with dense, complicated pixel art. The effect is to make the crepuscular batacombs a remarkably evocative place. They switch it up for some rooms too, nicely co-ordinating with white as the dominant colour for brightly lit tech-led rooms. Their visual flair and imagination is on full display, even if it hasn’t quite reached the level it would a year later with the ornate world of Head Over Heels, which was also the sort of game to one-up Alien 8’s cartoon mouse-Dalek with a Prince Charles Dalek.
On the topic of their later work, it was quite a moment of discovery to read in one Batman review that they originally planned for the player to control both Batman and Robin but decided it couldn’t work and instead made rescuing Robin the aim of the game. There is the genesis of Head Over Heels right there, coming up with a way to play two characters. Batman even has its own lesser version of the moment when Head and Heels are eventually united to join as one, in that you have to search and reunite Batman with his Batboots, Batbag and so on. It’s far from the same kind of emotional revelation, but it does something similarly big in gameplay terms, since Batman can’t jump without the boots or pick stuff up without the bag.
That’s where the other big difference to Knight Lore comes in. On your way to the boots, you will inevitably see doors which are up out of reach without their jump ability, and they are enticing challenges to be returned to with new abilities. The map is laid out for a complicated criss-crossing path, opened up in stages as Batman’s abilities grow. And rather than just ‘find Key A to unlock door A’, the changes make for bigger transformations to the way you can approach familiar rooms, giving new options on many more levels. This approach has the potential to be over-complicated, but it’s clever and recognisably modern in a way that goes beyond its predecessors. Batman is, in the current parlance for this still popular genre named after its key texts, a Metroidvania. A Metroidvania released at least a month before Metroid. In 3D! Remarkably, the game debut of Batman is not even the most significant thing about Batman.
