The heroes of Justice League are pretty well represented in the Injustice games. But there was a time when they were set to get a third-person brawler of their own.
Given a working name of Justice League Arcade, the game would be part of a broader strategy by Warner Bros to promote DC heroes. It would tie into the planned release of a movie being helmed by George Miller, which was originally set to film in Australia.
Double Helix was brought on to develop the tie-in game, and they created some playable demos and prototypes of a third-person brawler that would work in the Justice League universe.
Some of the cancelled project’s history is covered by Unseen64, which covers the formation of Double Helix themselves, the basic mechanics and movesets, initial plot, and what Double Helix hoped to achieve.
Ultimately, the problem with the project ended up being the film. George Miller’s Justice League movie found itself stuck in pre-production hell, having been impacted by the writers’ strike, script rewrites, and a shifting of the movie sets from Australia’s Fox Studios to Canada.
When Miller’s film was eventually cancelled in 2009, Warner Bros killed Justice League Arcade shortly thereafter. Double Helix was able to reuse code from the game, however, to create a Green Lantern tie-in game that released in 2011 alongside the Ryan Reynolds superhero film.
A lot of the Green Lantern‘s game reused or reworked concepts from Justice League game, like the progression system. It’s a neat end to the story: Warner Bros maintained faith in the studio, despite what happened to the film.
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