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

When negotiating for The Force Awakens, Harrison Ford allegedly insisted that he would only return to reprise the role of Space Indiana Jones if they'd agree to kill him off. Long story short, while he's very grateful for what it did for his career, he really, really hates all this nerd stuff so wanted to make sure he'd never have to do it again.

Now as anybody who saw The Rise of Skywalker can attest, these things rarely stick but nonetheless there's usually a bit of closure to be had with the lid of a casket. If you really want to bring a slice of fiction to a dignified end your best bet remains just chucking it off a cliff or, in the case of video games, having it die a slow and drawn out death as a result of both gunshot wounds and tuberculosis.

However, the reasons behind this third-person death wish aren't always narrative. Sometimes it's simply because the developers are comprehensively sick to the back arse of working on the same games with the same heroes, and they need to bury both in order to rebirth their own careers.

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.