It's become a tradition to unearth the "unofficial" post-mortem of sorts after the demise of a game studio as ex-employees frustratingly leak out all the unflattering details of the last title they worked on before they were let go. It happened when Perception, Ratbag, and Auran went downhill, and it looks like Pandemic Studios Brisbane is no exception. Some of the details to surface after EA let go of Pandemic Studios Brisbane seems almost unbelievable considering the calibre of skilled staff Pandemic had on board, but if there were any signs of trouble, they certainly were tight lipped about it all. Until it all came undone, of course.
Kotaku, with the aid of a few ex-Pandemite sources, has provided an extraordinary insight on the myriad of issues that plagued their development of the not-so-secret-anymore Dark Knight movie license. The team working on the Dark Knight, known as the Bravo team, was hit with a relatively short 18 months to develop a Batman license, had to scrap months of work when they discovered they needed to adhere to an adaptation of the movie on an even tighter deadline, worked with an inadequate game engine that wasn't suited for an open world game, and endured other technical and tool issues.
From Kotaku AU...
The real killer was having to hit the same release date as the movie. Eventually it became clear this would be impossible and the decision was made to focus on launching to coincide with the Dark Knight DVD release in December 2008. This would be the absolute deadline, as EA's rights to the Batman IP expired in December.
By September, the Dark Knight game was supposed to be in alpha. However, there were still massive problems with the game: huge glitches with the missions, the graphics, the technology. These were all issues that potentially could have been fixed, but essentially the quality just wasn't at a level it should have been at that time in the production schedule. The game had to ship just a few months later, but everyone knew it was in no state to do so.
The Dark Knight was canned.
It's also worth noting that tsumea captured the Pandemic Studios Brisbane session at the Game Connect: Asia Pacific 2007 conference which was presented by Adam Myhill (Snr. Technical Artist) and Kirk Gibbons (Art Director).
If you skip to 4:30 minutes in the third video of the session, you'll have a glimpes of what can be assumed as the Dark Knight game that Pandemic Studios Brisbane was working on. Adam describes the demonstration as a 20 million polygon, 2km x 4km big world that's lavished with shaders, and it's a scene that wouldn't look out of place in Chris Nolan's dark Batman universe.