Batman: The Movie | Code Like It's 198x

Ocean had already made two Batman games when Tim Burton’s film arrived in 1989, and neither was based on a film. The first was Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond’s isometric Batman of 1986, with its tubby hero; the second was Batman: The Caped Crusader (1988), developed for Ocean by Special FX. Batman: The Movie was the one that followed a film scene by scene, from Jack Napier’s fall into a vat of acid to the Joker’s last stand on the roof of Gotham’s cathedral. CRASH’s reviewer called it “a brill and varied humdinger of a film tie-in”. By Christmas it was number one, Commodore was selling it in the box with the Amiga 500, and CRASH’s readers later voted it the best game of 1989.

Fast facts

Publisher: Ocean Software; developed in-house.
Based on: Batman (1989), directed by Tim Burton, with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson.
Released: autumn 1989; reviewed in the October and November 1989 magazines.
Machines: ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Amiga, Atari ST and the IBM PC; later on cartridge for Amstrad’s CPC Plus and GX4000.
Price: £9.99 on Spectrum cassette, £14.99 on disk; £24.99 on the Amiga.
Reception: CRASH 93%; Your Sinclair 91%; ZZAP!64 96% and a Gold Medal (C64), 97% (Amiga); Amstrad Action Rave; The One 82% (Amiga).
Charts: Gallup’s Christmas number one for 1989, on the all-formats chart and the C64 and Amiga charts.
Award: Best Overall Game of 1989 in the CRASH Readers’ Awards.

A third licence

Ocean’s co-founder Jon Woods later told how the company came back to Batman. He recalled that Ocean had a relationship with Warner Bros in London from licensing The Neverending Story, and that when he mentioned another Batman game, the reply was “What about Batman the Movie?” Gary Bracey, who ran Ocean’s software development, remembered that this time the company had full access: “We went to Pinewood and walked down Gotham City… I could just go and walk around the sets and see Tim Burton and Michael Keaton as they were making the film.”

Bracey described the design as the method Ocean had used on Platoon and RoboCop: several different games in one, each built around a scene from the film. “Within the main game we wanted to feature the Batmobile, the Batplane, and so on, so we came up with these sections.”

Five scenes from the film

The game has five sections, loaded in stages on cassette machines.

Axis Chemicals. Batman chases Jack Napier through a chemical works of about sixty screens, CRASH and ZZAP! both reported, past gunmen, grenade throwers, dripping acid and jets of gas. His weapons are an endless supply of Batarangs and a Batrope, which he fires upwards or diagonally to haul himself up a level or swing across a gap. Swinging into a gunman knocks him over. At the end Napier goes into the vat of acid and comes out as the Joker.
The Batmobile. Batman drives back to the Batcave against the clock, through traffic, with the Joker’s van on his tail. The car is too fast to steer round corners, so when an arrow says turn, the player fires a cable at a lamp post and swings the car round it. Miss a turning three times and the road is blocked.
The Batcave. A one-minute puzzle, which The One likened to the board game Mastermind. The Joker has poisoned household products in combinations, and Batman must work out which three are contaminated from how many of his guesses the computer says are right.
The Batwing. The Joker’s parade carries balloons full of Smilex gas. Batman flies along the street cutting their mooring lines so the balloons float away harmlessly, without flying into them.
The cathedral. A last platform level, about a hundred screens this time, with crumbling floors, bomb-throwing henchmen and rats that cannot be killed. At the top the Joker waits for his helicopter.

Your energy is shown as a portrait of Batman that turns, bit by bit, into the Joker. On the 16-bit versions that pair of portraits was drawn by Bill Harbison, who recalled finding pictures of Keaton and Nicholson in a magazine and drawing them one afternoon: “Gary saw them and said he wanted them in the game.”

Who made it

Each version had its own team, all at Ocean.

ZX Spectrum: programmed by Mike Lamb, with graphics by Dawn Drake, according to CRASH’s review header.
Commodore 64: Zach Townsend and Andrew Sleigh, whom ZZAP!’s reviewer thanked for turning the film into “a game that’s great to look at, and brilliant to play”. Matthew Cannon wrote the music, which ZZAP!’s readers voted fourth in their C64 music chart in August 1990.
Amiga and Atari ST: the artist John Palmer recalled a larger team than he had worked with before, with Mike Lamb, Jon O’Brien and Allan Shortt programming, graphics by Palmer, Dawn Drake and Bill Harbison, and sound and music by Jonathan Dunn and Matthew Cannon. Palmer denied the story that the pictures of the Joker and Batman had been scanned in: “I drew these directly in Deluxe Paint with a mouse.” The same ZZAP! readers’ chart put Dunn’s Amiga soundtrack at number one.

The 8-bit and 16-bit games share the five-section plan but look and play differently. The Amiga’s Batmobile and Batwing sections race into the screen in 3D perspective, where on the Commodore 64 the street scrolls sideways; and ZZAP! found the Amiga’s first level tougher, with more acid drops, steam jets and criminals who aimed at the player.

What the magazines said

On the Spectrum, CRASH gave it 93% in November 1989. One reviewer thought the pixel Joker was a match for Jack Nicholson’s performance, and that the game was “probably better than the film!”; the other found it hard to get past the first level. Your Sinclair’s Matt Bielby gave it 91%, praising the platform sections and wishing the driving and flying ones had more to them: “It’s very faithful to the film, and very well done, but again the gameplay is just so simple.” Sinclair User’s verdict was “Sure to be a monster hit!”, though its reviewer grumbled that behind the gameplay there were “just five games of the film”.

ZZAP! gave the Commodore 64 version a Gold Medal and 96%, calling it “one of the year’s best C64 games”, and the Amiga version 97%. Its reviewers wrote that until then Ocean had “failed to produce a massive, state-of-the-art 16-bit game. Now they have”, and that the Amiga game was “really an Amiga game and not just a conversion”. The One was less sure: its 82% review of the Amiga version thought only three of the five sections really worthwhile. Amiga Format found the platform sections “functional rather than stunning” but the street scenes “extremely Batmospheric”. Amstrad Action made the CPC version a Rave, with 93% for staying power: “Yes, a hyped game can be THAT good!”

Not everyone at Ocean agreed. Mike Lamb later called it “a big licence but only an average game on the Amiga and ST – one warehouse section too many in my opinion.”

The Batman Pack and the charts

Commodore launched a new Amiga 500 bundle around the game at the 1989 PC Show. The Batman Pack put Batman: The Movie in the box with Ocean’s The New Zealand Story, Deluxe Paint II and F/A-18 Interceptor, and Amiga Format reported that it was the first time a major game had been bundled with a computer and released in the shops at the same time. A Commodore salesman told the press the company hoped to sell 100,000 packs over Christmas; Commodore UK’s managing director, Steve Franklin, gave Amiga Format his own estimate of 60,000 to 70,000 Amiga 500s. Jon Woods later said that Commodore allowed the bundle, and that if Ocean had asked Warner Bros or DC Comics, “they’d never have allowed it”.

The game sold on every format. Sinclair User’s Spectrum chart had it entering at number four in November 1989 and at number one the next month, and ACE named it the number one on the Amstrad charts in early 1990. ZZAP! reported that, according to Gallup, it was the Christmas number one on the Commodore 64 chart, the Amiga chart and the all-formats chart. Asked for the best game of 1989, CRASH‘s Nick Roberts answered “Batman! Oh god! Everyone’s going to say that!!” He was right about the readers: in April 1990 CRASH announced that they had voted it Best Overall Game of 1989 in the magazine’s Readers’ Awards, a category that, the magazine noted, Ocean had dominated for the second year running.

Later releases

The IBM PC version followed in 1990. Ocean put the game on cartridge for Amstrad’s CPC Plus and GX4000 consoles, and in October 1990 ZZAP! expected it to be among the first Ocean games on cartridge for Commodore’s C64GS. The game was later reissued at budget price on Ocean’s label The Hit Squad.

Console players had different Batman games of the film: Sunsoft made its own for the NES and the Game Boy, unrelated to Ocean’s.

Sources

Sinclair User, issue 91, October 1989, pp. 12–14: Spectrum review (“Sure to be a monster hit!”, “five games of the film”) and map.
Sinclair User, issue 92, November 1989, and issue 93, December 1989: Spectrum charts (new at number four, then number one).
CRASH, issue 70, November 1989: Spectrum review, 93% (Mike Lamb and Dawn Drake; sixty and hundred-screen levels; the five sections).
CRASH, issue 72, January 1990, p. 20: the staff’s picks of 1989.
CRASH, issue 75, April 1990: the 1989 CRASH Readers’ Awards (Best Overall Game).
Your Sinclair, issue 47, November 1989, pp. 22–23: Spectrum review by Matt Bielby, 91%.
ZZAP!64, issue 55, November 1989, from p. 9: Commodore 64 review (Gold Medal, 96%; Zach Townsend and Andrew Sleigh) and Amiga review (97%).
ZZAP!64, issue 64, August 1990: readers’ music charts (Matthew Cannon, C64; Jonathan Dunn, Amiga).
ZZAP!64, issue 65, September 1990: Gallup’s Christmas number one.
ZZAP!64, issue 66, October 1990: Ocean’s plans for the C64GS.
The One, issue 14, November 1989, pp. 97–98: Amiga review by Ciarán Brennan, 82%; the ST version and the coming PC version.
Amiga Format, issue 4, November 1989: news of the Batman Pack; issue 5, December 1989, p. 38: review, and the PC Show launch with Steve Franklin’s estimate.
Amstrad Action, issue 51, December 1989, pp. 47–49: CPC review, Rave.
ACE, issue 29, February 1990: chart competition (Amstrad number one).
PC Master (Greece), issue 14, December 1990: review of the PC version.
CPC Attack, issue 5, October 1992: mail-order listing of the cartridge, and the Hit Squad re-release in the budget chart.
Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013), pp. 52–58 (Jon Woods and Gary Bracey on the licence, the sets and the Batman Pack), p. 176 (Mike Lamb), pp. 195–196 (John Palmer), p. 219 (Bill Harbison). Recollections, told decades later.
Wikipedia, “Batman (1989 video game)” (web, secondary): the MSX version, and Sunsoft’s separate NES game. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(1989_video_game)