10 Creators Who Killed Video Game Characters So They Could Move On

10. The Joker - Arkham City

A slight novelty this entry, as Rocksteady were more interested in having the game's players move on rather than themselves. Their Arkham series of Batman games were enjoying unprecedented levels of success but, with that, came a near-obsessive level of scrutiny that surrounded them and their place in the wider DC Universe.

Despite being a few years before the MCU pioneered the idea that everything attached to a fictional property could be in someway interconnected, Batman fans piled into message boards with theories about these new games being direct ties to assorted comic arcs and the current animated series. Principally because Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy were both reprising their voice roles as the Joker and Batman respectively.

Determined to tell their own tale though, and drive a wedge between the games and the assorted other Bat-mediums you could get at the Bat-time, the decision to do something drastic was taken. Kill the Joker. From there nobody would confuse the games with the animated series, and Rocksteady could instead plow their own narrative trench into the rich lore of the Dark Knight.