Thinking about putting this together got me thinking… By the time Tim Burton’s Batman came along in June 1989, it was already a pop-culture phenomenon, and throughout that summer the bandwagon just kept picking up speed. It even got a name, Batmania! If the media hype beforehand was nothing short of insane, then the whole world became a madhouse with the inundation of merchandise that quickly followed, and Batman on everything! It was even on a Prince album! The thing is, it was pretty much instantaneous, rather than the slow and steady spread of contemporary crazes like leg warmers, hacky sacks and BMX bikes. It was more than just the mass marketing of associated stuff for kids we’d seen around loads of films by now too, like Star Wars figures and duvet covers; this thing was absolutely everywhere! What I said I was thinking about, though, was more out of nowhere equivalents, and sticking with the eighties, I came up with two – Band Aid / Live Aid and Halley’s Comet!

Okay, Halley’s Comet coming out of nowhere is a bit of a stretch, given it’s been visiting every seventy-five years or so for millennia, and its 1986 appearance ended up being a bit of a damp-squib when the stars didn’t really align as well as they could have, but all the same, everyone went nuts about it for months prior! By the end of 1985 it was being referenced everywhere – on TV, in the news, in magazines, and you were learning about it at school, and the shelves of WHSmith were full of books about it, just in time for Christmas! Which was exactly a year after Band Aid had done something similar, when Bob Geldof and Midge Ure had created a charity supergroup, stacked with the biggest names from pop music’s finest hour in 1984, raising $24 million globally from the single Do They Know It’s Christmas in aid of famine relief in Ethiopia. We’d then get the US version, We Are The World, and on the 13th July 1985 there was Live Aid, a once-in-a-lifetime star-studded multi-venue benefit concert attended by 72,000 at Wembley Stadium in London and 89,000 at the John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, and broadcast live to almost two billion people around the world. Of which I was one and can vividly remember every second of that wonderful Saturday!

I got a Batman t-shirt as well! Such a nerd at seventeen, although I did get a good few years wear out of it! The Prince soundtrack is cool to this day though, as is the movie responsible for all these shenanigans, which would go on break all kinds of box office records, including fastest film to make $100 million, although Warner Bros. would go on to claim it actually lost them money despite finishing at over $400 million, which was the fifth highest grossing ever at the time! They weren’t the only ones strangely down on it either – indeed, director, Tim Burton, reckoned it was just “okay but it was more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie.” Which I guess is true but I think it’s great all the same! The haunting, dark exuberance of its Art Deco-inspired Gotham City is the perfect backdrop to Michael Keaton’s Dark Knight, fusing his own origin story with that of The Joker’s, played by Jack Nicholson, which leads to him holding both the city and photo-journalist and Bruce Wayne love interest, Vicki Vale – played by Kim Basinger – to ransom with his deadly chemicals. It’s got all the Batman tropes and outlandish set-pieces and general fan service you could hope for, and the same goes for what Tim Burton typically does, resulting in a stunning and perfectly mindless couple of hours of blockbuster super-heroism!

Before we get onto the game, here’s a fun personal fact. The film was mostly shot at Pinewood Studios near London but if I go down the road from my house, where I’m currently typing away, to where I turn back on myself on one of my 10km running routes, I can just see the two towers of the Little Barford Power Station, beyond the occasionally quaint market town of St Neots, right on the Bedfordshire-Cambridgeshire border. And that was (one of!) the Axis Chemicals factory in the film, where Jack Napier becomes The Joker after Batman sends him down into a big nasty vat of chemicals, which is also the first level of our game, so let’s head over there now! Batman: The Movie, or just plain old Batman, came out at a weird time for me back in September 1989 because I was just weeks from jumping from ZX Spectrum to Atari ST, and as much as the 3D bits we’ll get to in a sec were a showcase for the new 16-bit generation, so were Defender of the Crown and Xenon, and as much as I wanted it when the gushing reviews hit, in the end it just never happened! I did play a fair bit of the Spectrum version too though, so I guess it wasn’t quite as new and exciting when the ST arrived. I’ve really tried to get a copy since though… Several times! Disks just aren’t always what they used to be anymore, unfortunately, but at the last time of trying back in the Autumn of 2023, I did seem to finally come up trumps with both of them intact, and that’s kind of how we ended up here now!

There once was a game of a film called Robocop, and it sold a million units, in no small part thanks to a deal whereby the game included an advert for the VHS cassette of the movie, while in turn the video release included a thirty second advert for the game, which then went on to become one of the biggest-selling videos of the time. Of course, great movie and great game didn’t hurt either but either way, it established Ocean Software as not only a global player but also the master of the tie-in, and by the time the Batman license was secured a couple of years later, they had access to everything and everyone involved, and another massive hit on their hands, which in itself also wasn’t hurt by its inclusion in nearly two hundred thousand Amiga bundles! Came out everywhere else too – ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Atari ST and MS-DOS, reviewing in the 80s and 90s on everything in all the big magazines, with Zzap! awarding the Amiga version a whopping 97%! Which really makes you wonder just what happened with their Highlander, Knight Rider, Miami Vice, Street Hawk, Hudson Hawk… 

Anyway, Batman, and I’ll jump to the instruction sheet to properly set the scene, although I’m buggered if I’m including the ridiculous amount of trademark symbols in this opening blurb alone!!! I’ll give you a quick paraphrase instead… Bruce Wayne, multi-millionaire head of Wayne Foundation, is a quiet and unassuming kind of guy by day (really?) but when night falls he becomes Gotham’s favourite masked vigilante, Batman! Crusading against crime from the sickened city’s rooftops, his current objective is the elimination of Gus Grissom’s criminal empire, and in particular taking down Jack Napier, his psychotic second-in-command. I’ve seen the film dozens of times and genuinely don’t remember hearing the words “Gus Grissom” before but I guess that’s just me not paying attention. I’ll watch it again and report back if I remember! Regardless, Jack Napier is where our interest lies, particularly since the little accident that left him twisted, both physically and mentally, which doesn’t actually happen until the end of the first level so this preamble is possibly getting ahead of itself, but anyway, that’s how he ends up becoming The Joker, and now you, the Batman, need to pursue your malevolent nemesis through five different life or death scenarios, which equates to the bits of the film Ocean thought they could apply some arcade action to. And a fine formula that could be!

Having overheard Commissioner Gordon telling the Mayor about an attack on the Axis Chemical Plant by Jack Napier, we head over there first to find ourselves on the bottom left side of a sprawling maze of platforms, poisonous gas, dripping acid and a load of his goons, who are on your case with guns and hand grenades from the second the level loads! From there, you’ve got eight minutes to head across to the far top-right, where you’ll find Jack Napier and a vat of acid conveniently waiting below! The clock won’t be too much of a problem on this level at least, so you can focus on getting to grips with your Bat-rope, which shoots a grapnel device from your belt you can then reel yourself up or swing across gaps or – possibly most importantly – use to travel downwards because, unlike in the film or any of the later Arkham games you might be familiar with, Batman isn’t going to be grappling anything from a fall here, so a couple of storeys and it’s instant life lost! Your body armour is a bit crap in general, and you can also quickly find yourself stuck between a bunch of thugs, unable to do anything but watch one of the all-time great health meters gradually turn Batman’s face (that indicates full health) into The Joker’s, and when that’s fully visible, it’s another life lost! Every time you play this level is the same though, and you soon work out those pinch-points where you need to have your finger on the Batarang-trigger before things get out of hand, as well as the quickest route all the way across to the other side. It’s never what I’d call easy even when it’s familiar though, mainly because as much fun as it is to be swinging back and forth on a Bat-rope, Batman’s not necessarily as agile as you’d expect (as reflected in his weighty power-strut animation!) and you’ll lose a lot of health because of just the right side of janky platforming. You don’t really need to worry about your health once Napier is in sight above you though – one shot and down he goes with a big green splash!

Level two sees us a bit further into the movie, and having just rescued Vicki Vale from The Joker in the Flugelheim Museum, we’re racing through the streets of Gotham City in the Batmobile, avoiding both The Joker’s henchmen as well as police roadblocks. To do the latter, you need to follow directions from the “sophisticated radar” – in reality just an arrow on the screen, but you soon forget about that when you’re shooting grapple hooks at lamp posts to take a corner at maximum speed! That said, it’s so reliant on timing that you might want to slow down a bit, which possibly defeats the purpose, though you’ve got three attempts at turning left or right after you’re told to do so before you come face to face with a line of police cars, and it’s such a cool animation as you go from your regular behind the car view to seeing it automatically spin as it’s dragged around sideways! While the first level is a real looker, with great detail and some lovely colour choices to give the scene way more atmosphere than a dirty old chemical plant probably justifies, you’ve seen a platformer a thousand times before at this point, but that wouldn’t have been the case for this level! There might be loads of smoke and mirrors going on, with minimal variety in the minimally detailed (but detailed all the same) traffic and stuff flying by on either side of the road, but the whole beautifully lit Gotham backdrop – unusually prominent for this kind of thing and with this really neat parallax effect – creates an incredible illusion of depth behind crazy fast and smooth 3D scrolling, and there’s humps and stomach-churning leaps, and you’re in a perfect rendition of the Batmobile, which you get to see from all sides, and it’s just one of the 16-bit era’s most exotic sights! The controls are a bit loose but feel good, especially when you get the timing of that grapple hook, but now you’ve got that clock to properly contend with too, so it’s the classic case of Han Solo’s “fly casual” where too fast and you’re quickly losing energy and all momentum with every inevitable collision (not to mention missing those lamp posts), but too slow and you’ve got no chance because that timer is built with seconds to spare at best! This one’s a thrill ride though, and worth the asking price alone.

Oh yeah, I should mention that while I’ve been playing as nature intended with a QuickShot joystick (where the ingenuity of all the controls on a single button will never fail to impress!), I did grab screenshots from emulation using a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, and as well as feeling a bit janky, that level absolutely killed my right hand – properly clawed-up by the time I got to the end! Anyway, no such worries on level three, which finds us back in the Batcave with a sample of The Joker’s deadly Smilex compound, which will kill on contact, leaving a deathly rictus grin on the victim’s face. He’s used it to spike various everyday items, like hairspray and lipstick, which contain elements causing the compound to trigger, and it’s now up to you to work out which three items from the selection on the screen contain those elements. This level is pure Bat-puzzle, which I love the idea of to break up the action (and give my hand time to recover a bit), and I also love the idea of the puzzle, which involves selecting three of eight possible items at a time, when a display will tell you how many of those you’ve chosen correctly, so by process of elimination you need to select the exact trio of elements before the time runs out. Once again, the presentation is comparatively simple but really nice all the same and fits the overall theme, with your big Bat-hand acting as a pointer to select different objects down each side of the screen, when they’re then placed in threes in the middle. It’s perfectly accessible and intuitive, with space for seven attempts before the clock ticks down to zero, but the trouble is, that clock brings zero tension because the puzzle is generally complete within seconds, and could really have done with being expanded upon without the clock. As it is though, it’s something different but really doesn’t serve its purpose as either a standalone level or a change of pace.

We’re back on the streets of Gotham for level four, where The Joker has everyone out at midnight on the promise of free money (not that you’ll ever see anyone else!) but it’s all an evil ruse because his carnival parade soon takes a turn for the sinister, with huge balloons filled with enough of that nasty Smilex stuff for the entire population! It’s up to you to pilot your Batwing and cut through the mooring ropes of a hundred such balloons using its wings, sending them harmlessly off into the atmosphere. Miss, though, and they self-destruct, and hit the balloon itself or its base and it explodes, and all of this is once again turning Batman’s face into The Joker’s. Once again, this level is an iconic and spectacular affair, much like the second one, and is obviously re-using its 3D assets to wonderful effect, but now you’re flying with altitude to (constantly) worry about, while the clock is no less forgiving this time out. In fact, if you’ve come this far, it’s probably worth sacrificing a life once you’re past halfway because that does give the clock a generous reset, albeit only generous enough to just about get to the end! I still haven’t worked it out exactly, but you’re scoring points as you go throughout the game for shooting people and time remaining at the end of a level and stuff, which doesn’t really serve any great purpose except rewarding you with occasional bonus lives, which for me at least are critical – I can see the end but I need five lives to do it, as opposed to the original three! Anyway, also like the driving level, this one is a lot of fun and you soon develop a feel-good rhythm, although despite that timer, a hundred balloons could probably have done with being seventy-five because it does go on a bit – needing to slice that rope in just the right place with just the right bit of your plane, combined with some very cool undulations in the road that affect the relative balloon height at the last second (and often result in a fantastic spark effect!) demands a level of precision the controls are just up to the job of delivering, and that in turn demands a lot of concentration! Maybe just too much of a good thing but it’s a very good thing all the same!

The fifth and final level returns to the platforming formula of the first but this time we’ve caught up with The Joker in Gotham Cathedral for the movie’s big finale on its roof, which we need to use our Bat-rope to climb up to, once again dispatching an army of hired help with the Batarang on the way, as well as doing our best to avoid a load of deadly rats that you can’t kill and actually can’t even always avoid! This is like a more condensed, more vertical and more frustrating take on level one that really doesn’t add anything else in its own right. The platforming here is noticeably right on the very limit of what the game mechanics can handle, with your momentum frequently hindered by annoyingly positioned walls, or just not enough space to get a decent swing. Also annoying is the enemy’s ability to appear out of thin air just off-screen in front or behind you, although like the first level, you soon learn where this happens and can anticipate it with a few shots before they even appear on the screen! Not being able to practice any of these levels without playing through everything else from the start is particularly apparent here though – it’s a real slog to get here before you even think about learning the lie of the land! I reckon this level is a missed opportunity too – despite his Robocop-inspired movement, Batman looks good, as do all the other characters, all full of recognisable and authentic detail, and with some really neat touches like how his cape flows (which they clearly liked so much they gave your enemy trenchcoats to flounce along with him), but this level is just bland, which is a really stark contrast to the chemical plant from earlier. It’s this huge gothic cathedral and should have been grand and decadent like something out of Castlevania, not grey and mostly non-descript, with just the occasional random religious iconography to remind you where you are! One more moan (although I’ve still got to get to sound!) and that’s The Joker himself… Okay, it took me a couple of goes to work out, but when you eventually catch up with him, he’s making his escape on a rope ladder up to a waiting helicopter, but with a single diagonal throw of your Bat-rope, down he goes, and without too much of a spoiler, ends the game with a real whimper!

Apart from Jack Napier from earlier, The Joker might be the weakest boss in any game ever, but I suppose having come all that way it’s not the end of the world, and you are eventually rewarded with a dramatic final message by movie Batman for your efforts! Right, I think I’ve now covered most things I wanted to say as we went along, but, as said, not really sound and / or music so far, so let me quickly close with that. Firstly, going all the way back to the title screen, there’s the most horrendous music to welcome you that takes quite a while to progress from this squeaky, random set of barely melodic notes to get to anything vaguely Batman-sounding. Imagine ZX Spectrum techno and you’re in the right ballpark. Now, I’m going to avoid comparisons with the Amiga version, being the good little Atari ST owner I am, but that’s got a nice tune, and it plays throughout, rather than the choice of music or sound effects we’ve got on the ST. Actually, once you’re in-game the music is very similar and is a nice selection of generic but polished chiptunes, one for each level, albeit none of these are even vaguely Batman-themed in the slightest either! I do prefer the tactility offered by the sound effects though, and while they’re nothing spectacular, that feedback was almost a necessity in the flying stage so I knew I’d cut the rope right, and likewise, not having any engine sound or the metallic clank of that grapple hook as it connects with a lamp post in the driving stage just felt weird.

For a game I’d put in my top three favourite movie licenses (alongside Ghostbusters on the Commodore 64 and the Atari ST version of Robocop), I seem to have been very up and down on Batman: The Movie! That’s the nature of walking through part by part, I guess, where the whole is way more than the sum of those parts, thoughtfully curated as they are and, together with static, illustrated cutscenes between each one, successfully capture both the flow of the film and the essence of the source material too. And slightly anti-climactic last bit aside, they vary from well-polished with varying degrees of fun to exhilarating and among the best-looking of a generation, and they all play with a consistently decent level of challenge overall to keep you coming back, and there’s plenty of fan-service on top to give you just about all you could ask of a tie-in. And that Batmobile bit more than lives up to the hype! Which makes me very glad I jumped on the bandwagon and finally got a working copy after all these years!

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