In early 2009, shortly before the launch of Batman: Arkham Asylum and a year after Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, developers at Monolith were working on a Batman game that would be connected to Nolan’s films. Gameplay footage of the game, titled Project Apollo, leaked in 2024. But now, even more footage has been uncovered showing off what could have been.
On January 12, retro game archivist MrTalida uploaded once-deleted-but-now-recovered Project Apollo files that were found on an old hard drive. Included in the files, which were created between April 2009 and January 2010, are video clips of early gameplay and in-engine tests of Project Apollo, with many focused on how sound and music would work in the third-person Batman action game. It’s interesting to see how much progress the team at Monolith made on the game over those 10 months. You can find all of them on the Internet Archive.
Perhaps the biggest and coolest new information gleaned from these leaked files is gameplay footage of the Tumbler, aka Batman’s tank-like Batmobile from the Dark Knight trilogy. In the leaked footage, you can see the Tumbler driving through what appears to be a large train yard while escaping police and destroying various objects and explosive barrels. In other words, a pretty standard-looking 2010-era vehicle section, the kind that would often appear in single-player AAA games around that time.
Why the Nolan Batman game was canned
As mentioned, we saw footage from a later build of this canned Batman game in 2024, showing off combat, traversal, and more. But even before that, in 2019, Liam Robertson extensively covered this canceled project, reporting various details about the title, including the fact that the game had been in development for approximately 18 months before it was killed.
The open world of Gotham could be traversed by either gliding and utilizing the grappling hook (as established in the Arkham games) or by operating the Tumbler/Batmobile. pic.twitter.com/VZKXJBFsgP
— SpideyRanger 🇬🇭 (@Dageekydude) April 3, 2024
It was also planned to be an open-world game and would have featured a system by which randomly generated Gotham City thugs would appear to fight Batman and return, stronger and angrier, later. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Monolith would take this idea and build it into the famous Nemesis System found in 2014’s Shadow of Mordor and its 2017 sequel, Shadow of War.
As for why it was canceled, Robertson reported that publisher WB Games made it clear to Monolith that the only way the project could move forward was if the studio could get Nolan to approve it. The game was to be set in his version of the Batman universe, after all, and the studio wanted to make sure he was involved. Sadly, Nolan seemed uninterested in the game, and Monolith eventually gave up and pivoted to making Lord of the Rings games. More recently, the studio was working on a Wonder Woman project that would have utilized the Nemesis System, but sadly Monolith was shuttered by WB in February 2025.