See The Unfinished Wii Version Of Arkham Asylum

Red Fly worked on several Wii prototypes that never got developed into full games including a version of Arkham Asylum

Flash back to 2009. There arguably hadn’t been a good licensed superhero game in a long, long time. Then Batman: Arkham Asylum is released and it redefines what a superhero game could be. It came out on the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, as well as PC just a little later. But it completely skipped the most popular console at the time, Nintendo’s Wii, which was still dominating the marketplace 3 years into its launch. In December of that year, it broke the single-month sales record for console sales in the U.S., so it was still red hot.

So why was no Wii version of Arkham Asylum ever released? Could it be that the Wii, which was admittedly significantly less powerful than either the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 just couldn’t handle the tech of the game? Many other games managed to make some sort of port for the Wii because the system was so popular it seemed crazy not to.

Well in fact, a Wii version of Batman: Arkham Asylum was at least in the very early stages of development. It never really got past the prototype stage though. Red Fly Studio, who developed the Wii version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, had several prototypes for the system in development that never saw the light of day. This included Devil May Cry, Star Wars: X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, a new version of Dig Dug, and Arkham Asylum. Since unearthing footage of games that never came to be is all the rage these days, you can check out a sampling of all these. We are of course most interested in what Arkham Asylum might have looked like on the Wii though, so you can check that out right here below:

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It would have be interesting to see if the Wii version of Arkham Asylum would have successfully taken advantage of the system’s unique motion control scheme (or if it would have been just an unplayable mess). Check out the prototypes of the other games at Nintendo Everything.