Eidos kicks the hype engine for Batman: Arkham Asylum into overdrive, preparing a massive marketing campaign for what they are predicting will be one of the stand-out titles of the year.
Eidos' head of UK marketing Jon Brooke doesn't mince words. Speaking to MCV, Brooke extolled Batman's many virtues in a bombastic fashion sure to leave his fellow marketing professionals sweating, shaking, and reaching for a cigarette.
"It's as close to perfect as we've ever come, it looks amazing, plays beautifully and has a rich twisting storyline with enormous replayability. I'm confident enough to say that it will set a new benchmark for licensed games and it's going to establish itself as one of our best games ever."
Sure, other marketing executives have made similar comments about their games recently, including Activision Blizzard saying that Modern Warfare 2 had the potential to be the year's hottest entertainment property, but there's a big difference here. That game is Modern Warfare 2, the follow-up to a game that sold ridiculously well. This is a Batman game. The best Batman game to come out in the past decade has been Lego Batman.
I'm no marketing expert, but saying things like this could really come back to bite a person on the ass. You don't get Batman fans' hopes up like this. If you've actually got the best Batman game ever created on your hands, you hold onto it until the very last moment, letting it pop out of the shadows, flying kick the gamer in the face, backfist the guy coming up behind you, and then slink back into the shadows. That's how Batman would do it.
I remain on the more cautious side of cautiously optimistic on this one. We've seen good things, but we've seen good things before.