20 Ridiculous Reasons Video Games Were Cancelled
19. The Developers Chose The Wrong Engine - Batman: The Dark Knight
It made all the sense in the world to develop a game based on Christopher Nolan's hit Batman movie The Dark Knight, and indeed, Pandemic Studios began making the game before Nolan's film had even started shooting.
Rather than a linear movie tie-in, it was intended to be an ambitious open-world game - the first of its kind featuring the Caped Crusader, in fact - with the film's central cast all locked in to lend their voices.
The big issue was Pandemic's insistence that they use their own bespoke engine for open-world games, Odin. This wasn't decided until many assets for the game had already been created, and importing them into Odin was a technical nightmare.
In turn this caused huge delays, all while EA pushed for the game to release by December 2008, in time for the movie's home video release.
By October of that year, it was painfully clear the game wouldn't be ready, and so EA pulled the plug.
While there's obviously a vested interest here in releasing a movie tie-in in timely fashion, the operating issue was the commitment to using a problematic in-house engine rather than a more popular industry mainstay.