‘The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City,’ a new DC-licensed augmented reality board game, puzzle book, escape room, and immersive mystery adventure – with over 45 minutes of live-action and animated mobile game content - brings Harley Quinn back to the asylum as a re-licensed doctor on a mission to uncover the anti-hero villain, Anarchy.
It’s a jet-black box, roughly one foot tall and one foot wide, covered in crooked “Ha Ha”s. You lift the lid. The underside reads, “Property of Arkham Asylum. Patient Files A-Z;” the contents, underneath a spray-painted paper that read “Panic in Gotham City”, includes GCPD evidence bags (filled with who knows what), police reports, building commission maps, Arkham emergency protocols, psychiatric hospital notes, and a Gotham Times newspaper with the headline “Hope for a Safer City: Arrests Surge as GCPD Launches War on Street Crime.”
There’s also a small present wrapped in green ribbon. Its contents? Unknown…for now.
The massive package is Animal Repair Shop and Infinite Rabbit Holes’ first of many augmented reality board games to come. The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City, now available for purchase, is a DC-licensed board game, puzzle book, escape room, immersive mystery, and AR adventure all rolled into one. The game, which follows Harley Quinn as a re-licensed doctor at Arkham during her mission to uncover mysteries behind the anti-hero villain called “Anarchy,” includes over 100 game pieces, artifacts, exclusive collectibles, and over 45 minutes (in total) of live-action and animated mobile game content.
Created in partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products, Panic in Gotham City is the first of three games in The Arkham Asylum Files series. You can see it in action here. Animal Repair Shop’s chief creative officer Alex Lieu and members of the Infinite Rabbit Holes team will also be at San Diego Comic-Con Friday, July 21 to discuss augmented reality and the impact and longevity of the Batman universe.
“Innovative storytelling and animation have really been in all of our blood for a long time,” says Lieu, whose team handled production of the entire game and animated all its AR and cut-scene content. “AR, VR, traditional movies, books, whatever the medium, ultimately, the goal and the power of storytelling doesn't change. Good stories aren't about technology. They are about people. We see technology as a means to an end to move people emotionally. And, for people who are creating entertainment, that's all our jobs.”
The Arkham Asylum Files is a 20-year dream realized for Lieu and his team. For nearly 3 decades, staring from the kick-off of his career, Lieu has been at the forefront of utilizing technology for innovative storytelling; he began as an art director at Disney, and was one of the founding members of Disney Online (including Disney.com, e-commerce initiatives, online gaming, and more), spending a lot of time translating stories like The Lion King to an online storybook experience, or animating cells into Flash and vectorizing them so that they could run on the web.
“Our team actually learned Flash from the creators,” remembers Lieu. “That's how far our animation background goes… back to 1995.”
Lieu went on to found 3 Pin Media, serving clients like Microsoft, Warner Brothers, Boeing, ESPN, Nickelodeon, ABC and Disney. The company created world-renowned augmented reality games (back then, known as ARGs), beginning with one for the launch of Halo 2 in 2004.
Essentially, the idea of ARGs back then was to use the world as a game board and hide clues and websites in murals, movie posters, or concert T-shirts, and have GPS locations that people go to and pick up packages known as “geocaches” and “unlock content online,” explains Lieu. “Think of story-based worldwide scavenger hunts.”
After 3 Pin merged with 42 Entertainment in early 2006, Lieu, continuing with the company as chief creative officer, embarked on a big concept album ARG in 2007 for Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, as well as a 2008 ARG for Christopher and Jonathan Nolan called, Why So Serious?, which would serve as the inspiration for The Arkham Asylum Files. Why So Serious? told the story between the ending of Batman Begins and the beginning of The Dark Knight. It was not only 42 Entertainment’s most famous ARG, but it was the largest ever created, even to this day.
“We had over 7 million active players and it lasted for a year and a half,” says Lieu. “We hosted live events where people were campaigning for Harvey Dent to become District Attorney. We actually sent people voter registration cards and had an online vote, which we didn’t rig. We had the Joker sending people to bakeries to pick up packages. They’d be slid a cake with icing that spelled out ‘Call Me Now’ with a phone number and the people would call it and suddenly the cake would start ringing. You’d reach in and pull out a Gotham City evidence bag.”
He continues, “We were even writing full issues of The Gotham Times and printing hundreds of thousands of them. If you think of the script for The Dark Knight being somewhere around 350 pages or so, our script for this ARG was 1,800 pages of deep, integral content.”
But as successful as these global gameplays were, Lieu dreamed of an even more inclusive game format, where players wouldn’t be limited by means of travel.
“Only a few dozen people at a time can actually have that experience around the world, so when augmented reality and mobile gaming came on the scene, we realized the possibility to integrate people into the story wherever they are,” says Lieu. “What if we took all the puzzles, the narrative, these physical pieces of artifacts, and instead of spreading them all over the world and people playing over message boards, we bring it all together in a mysterious box? Groups of friends could gather around the table and, instead of your phone being the distraction, you’d use it as a tool to communicate and play and solve things.”
In 2016, with some friends from Disney, Lieu and Susan Bonds formed Animal Repair Shop, the parent studio for the new AR immersion brand Infinite Rabbit Holes and began developing The Arkham Asylum Files.
“Our CEO Susan Bonds is actually an Imagineer at Disney and was the lead creative on the Indiana Jones ride,” shares Lieu. “Our lead interaction and game designer, Michael Borys, and our visual lead, Johnny Rodriguez, all worked with me at Disney Online. We have a tight-knit group of people who have worked with each other for the last 15 to 25 years and have seen AR struggle for a time. We waited until it was more mature, until everyone could have access, then we made our move, creating this genre we call ‘mixed reality adventure.’”
In addition to the more physical aspects of The Arkham Asylum Files: Panic in Gotham City, like building a 3D model of Gotham City or going through case files, players can use their phones to scan over their city model and watch breaking news appear on the jumbotron, see monkeys running wild through the parks, and view helicopters descending upon the latest criminal activity in Gotham. And as players make their way through case files and police reports, one puzzle centers around an inkblot psych test with instructions to “find blot number one and scan it.” Once scanned with a mobile phone, the blot morphs into a watercolor animation.
This blot test actually inspired the watercolor 3DCG animation style used for the game’s cut scenes, all of which are cleverly woven into each puzzle and discovered artifact throughout the game.
“When we met with Warner Bros. and DC, who loved the art direction, we explained we wanted to do something that was unique to this game and Arkham Asylum but didn't get confused with comic books or existing animated shows or any of the live-action that's out there,” notes Lieu. “At the end of the game’s first of seven chapters, you see this big, burning anarchy symbol, and you tap it on your phone. The screen bleeds full screen and it goes into an animation, and you learn why Anarchy did this. Then it cuts over to Harley driving her car, pulling up to Arkham Asylum, and saying, ‘Haven’t you heard? I'm back at Arkham. But not as a patient, silly. I'm a doctor again.’”
Harley makes her way through the building and pulls out a file with Anarchy’s real name. Suddenly, the player is back to sorting through files of their own, following Harley’s lead.
“If you look at every single piece of the game - the building, Joker cards, everything - our internal production team did all the artwork,” says Lieu. “Our art director, who I've known since I was 11, was like, ‘We're not using any stock art, we're not using any of the style guide stuff. We want to create everything from scratch and make it uniquely ours.’ From a production standpoint, it definitely wasn't the cheapest option. But it makes it really special. And it’s still very Batman, still very Gotham City, and pays homage to different forms of animation that have been used for these stories in the past.”
The colorful, watery, bleeding aesthetic really works for a game whose story seeps through every crevice of these puzzles. It’s also reminiscent of Animal Repair Shop’s website, which was developed at the same time as the game’s artwork.
“The truth of it is, we build experiences that we want to play,” shares Lieu. “We love the Batman universe for a lot of different reasons. One is that there's a lot of depth to the characters, and a rich universe of villains. Even though we all want to play Batman, he’s too specific and singular of a role. You do interface with Batman, but it’s Harley you walk through this with, guided by the Joker, who presents you with the files in this third person view of, ‘If you want to know what's really going on in Gotham City and at Arkham, you’ve got to play by my rules.’ A lot of us can relate most to Harley, who is stuck in the middle of justice and chaos, which is more true to the human experience, and that's what the best animations and graphic novels are about.”
Lieu and the rest of the team at Animal Repair Shop have a lot more plans for mobile AR in the future, including games that incorporate the still-in-development tech of AR in headsets. Though they can’t say much about their plans, it is certain that the team intends to further explore the DCU, and not just in the next two Arkham Asylum games.
“When we made a demo for The Arkham Asylum Files a few years ago and took it to Warner Bros., they loved the idea so much that they gave us license to not only Batman, but the entire DC universe,” notes Lieu. “And they really had very few notes while we worked with them during the game’s development.”
Animal Repair Shop is also working with “Batman and Robin Eternal” comic artist and writer Tim Seeley on a comic book that explains the game’s prequel story of how Harley got back into Arkham as a therapist. Seeley wrote the final drafts of the comic book, and then Lieu and his team worked with DC artists to produce it. A sneak peek of the comic will be revealed at this month’s SDCC during Infinite Rabbit Holes’ panel, with Lieu, Bonds, Borys, and Seeley all in attendance.
“That's the depth of our storytelling,” says Lieu. “The more mediums we can incorporate into the experience, the better. If you hold up your phone and see a two-foot dinosaur on your table, you’d think, ‘Of course. I've got a supercomputer in my hand. That’s why that’s there.’ But if you build a model of Gotham City and it suddenly comes to life, there's something that's happening in your head that’s a totally different experience. Or when you're holding an inkblot and, as you're holding it and turning it, you're watching it bleed. It's a visceral experience. And I can talk about how cool it is until I’m blue in the face, but you’re not going to believe me until you play it for yourself.”
He concludes, “And, maybe in the not-too-distant future from today, we can have our very realistic looking live-action animated Joker walk into your room and sit down across the table and have a conversation. That's sort of the goal.”
The final two parts of The Arkham Asylum Files game series will launch next year. Titles have yet to be announced.
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
