Gun-toting wannabes and your best friend, Joker: Looking back at the weirdest Batman games ever

As one of the most successful comic book characters of all time—and one whose power set is a tad easier to confine to a video game than his old pal Superman’s—Batman long ago became one of the most prolific video game heroes ever. The crown jewels in his gaming accomplishments are, of course, Rocksteady Studios’ Arkham games, starting with 2009's Batman: Arkham Asylum. More than any other entry in Bruce Wayne’s long history as a gaming protagonist, the Arkham games capture the feeling of being Batman: The gadgets, the bad guys, and the thrill of being a nigh-invincible badass (provided you don’t stand right in front of any assault rifle-packing thugs and dare them to perforate you, at least).

The Arkham games got a pseudo-sequel of sorts just recently, in the form of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment’s strange multiplayer title Gotham Knights. (You can read our full review here.) But it’s not like this is the first time that a Batman game (or Dead Batman game, as the case may be) has gotten a little strange. In … honor? … of Gotham Knights’ release, we’ve scanned back through the archives and compiled this list: Six of the strangest games to ever feature the Caped Crusader, and, occasionally, his best friend and partner in crimefighting: The Joker!

Batman (1989)

Tim Burton’s 1989 movie kicked off the modern understanding of Batman as a blockbuster franchise, understandably drawing in a couple of different video game adaptations in the process. With all due respect to the Commodore 64 and Amiga version, which was developed by Ocean—and which had some lovely, juicy pixel art of the batted man himself—the obvious winner from this first crop of Batman games is Sunsoft’s version for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Aesthetically triumphant—that soundtrack!—Batman most thoroughly distinguishes itself through its play, being one of the first games to ever try to bring the Dark Knight’s focus on mobility to the forefront. It’s brutally hard, sure—but when you successfully execute a series of wall jumps to traverse the Joker’s latest set of industrial death traps, you’ll come close to feeling like the Caped Crusader himself. (A sequel, 1991's Return Of The Joker—no relation to the later Batman Beyond movie—ditched some of the intensity of the gameplay, but kept the focus on making Batman look and sound his best.) Honestly, the weirdest thing about this one is that it’s so damn good—it would take Batman games decades to hit these heights again.