With its newly acquired Volition collection – which contains everything from game builds to, seemingly, office floorplans – The Strong National Museum of Play can knit together the moth-eaten scraps of the Saints Row developer's 30-year history, illuminating forgotten details about forgotten games, including a Batman stealth title that never saw the light of day.
As I watched The Strong's director of digital preservation Andrew Borman boot up the unreleased demo in front of me this week, I couldn't understand what I was seeing, at first. A video of the demo (which you can watch below) made its way online last year, but, supposedly Volition wasn't able to save a playable version after parent company Embracer abruptly shut it down in 2023.
"So here is a playable version of Batman," Borman told me.
The quick demo – whose files were last touched on September 29, 2003 – was created approximately around the same time Volition's idea for a British open-world heist game called Underground was officially canceled. Though Underground was in production for a year, Volition staff told Game Informer in 2011 the game about being "a lowlife thief" didn't resonate with its marketing team, who felt the new GTA 3 pulverized it.
"If you walk by a car, you have to be able to hijack the car and drive," Volition co-founder Mike Kulas said to Game Informer.
It seems that, at some point, Volition began wondering if Underground's bones – sneaking, tiptoeing, strategizing your way to glory – might look better on the World's Greatest Detective Batman; the footage that exists of Underground online is nearly a perfect copy of Volition's Batman demo, except, instead of a Hitman-looking Brit with a sole patch pirouetting down from the ceiling, the demo features a miraculously buff Batman with his eyes turned to slits.
The playable version I saw looked remarkable for a game from the PS2 era – the smoky Gotham rooftop it's set in seemed ghostly and wet, and the 3AM tension of the setting was nearly thick enough to hide how dumb Batman looked while hucking his Batarang.
Like the primordial soup for Batman: Arkham – and, let's remember, Rocksteady's transformative games didn't start coming out until 2009 – Volition's Batman demo gave the Caped Crusader an arsenal of clever tools to work with, including binoculars, grenades, a grappling hook, and slots for more. He even had to proficiently pick locks by solving puzzles – similar to those found in 2015 game Arkham Knight's remote hacking ability.
Though, the demo's enemies don't seem easily impressed by any of it. After Borman guides Batman up a utility box to take a security guard down from above, the superhero's pleather cape glowing faintly under the night sky, it becomes impossible to Batarang the guy from such a big distance. So Borman hops down right next to him – an action that shows off Batman's surely anatomically incorrect array of back muscles – and beams him in the head without any protest.
Hey, listen, I said it was like a primordial Batman: Arkham installment. And it appeared imperfect – even with a clean shot to the back of a guard's head, Borman's Batarang flew around with the unpredictability of a fruit fly before ultimately connecting with someone's skull.
But "it's a pretty cool little prototype," Borman tells me, "and not one that they ever announced, because it didn't get picked up." It's only disappointing that Volition was so ahead of its time.
