Batman Arkham City Game Director Talks Controversial The Joker Ending

Batman: Arkham City game director Sefton Hill has told CVG that although they decided early on to go with the controversial ending to the sequel in which The Joker dies, in the end it was a decision that was "almost taboo". "We decided fairly early on , I guess. Batman is very much about the story, so we discuss the story early," he told CVG. In the game, The Joker ignores Batman's help and dies of poisoning, an ending that proved a cliffhanger into the already in development third game but has also become the most talked about aspect of the hit sequel. According to Hill, Warner Bros and DC Entertainment were fine with the killing of Batman's most iconic villain, as long as it wasn't done purely for the shock factor and that it made sense as far the story and future sequels went. "There were no dissenting voices, as long as it was done in a proper way, as long as it was clear that Batman didn't go out to kill him - that's never what Batman would do," "Joker being responsible for his own downfall because he wasn't able to resist stabbing Batman in the back was something we thought would be a nice poetic end for him." The gamble of course has worked and Batman: Arkham City has gone on to be one of the biggest hits of 2011, selling an incredible 4.6 million copies in the first week alone. Hill explains how they came up with the idea; "Right at the start we sat down and thought what story we wanted to tell. We knew we had Joker starting off sick from the previous game and we wanted to play on that idea. "Pretty early on we hit on this idea of Joker poisoning Batman and the two of them having this kind of shared goal, but with diametrically opposed world views. We felt that gave a lot of opportunity to interact in interesting ways, and I guess then we sort of knew that we wanted that story to have resonance in the universe." "You invest time in a game and this story, and you want to feel like the universe is affected by the events you play. We didn't want it to feel hollow - Joker starts off poisoned, Batman gets poisoned, where does that story go? "We knew people would be thinking, 'Obviously they're not going to kill Batman or Joker, right?' We felt killing Joker was a really striking end. It was almost taboo, like it was something we could never do. That would be interesting." Are you still playing Batman: Arkham City? What did you make of The Joker's demise the first time you played the game? Check out our full review of Batman: Arkham City HERE.