citywide uprising alongside Batman’s meticulous investigations? You’ll know chaos is at its peak when the city is filled with sounds of emergency vehicles screaming, infernos raging, and security alarms ringing just blocks away. In all, we approached the design of ambient city


noise with four degrees of audible chaos to transport players fully into the ever-evolving and always- grinding, grimy world of Gotham.


A STORY BEHIND EVERY DOOR One of our favorite groups of sounds to design was for more intimate settings, like the hallways of the crowded apartment blocks that players will investigate as Batman. Gotham is a populated place, and we knew environments like housing complexes should feel like they are teeming with life even if you’re not confronted with multiple NPC character models within the halls. We saw every door Batman passes as an opportunity to stoke realism with lively sounds that bleed past the thin veil of privacy of cheap apartment walls. As players traverse Gotham’s residential hallways as


Bruce Wayne in disguise, a quick tilt of the head toward any door will award eavesdroppers with aural glimpses into the lives of Gothamites, from the sounds of arguing couples and crying babies to someone losing a messy battle with their booze. These little vignettes were an indulgence allowed by our early creative involvement, which gave us time and space to chase a heightened spatial realism as a base for the signature Arkham gameplay players expect.


RIGOROUS REALISM The realism we pursued in Arkham Shadow’s sounds extends to the treatments of many interactables and destroyables that players will encounter throughout the game. On smaller scale productions, sound design often leans into brash and cartoonish sound effects to get a point across, but our early involvement in this AAA development cycle granted us the luxury to fine-tune more gritty and realistic effects. Arkham Shadow is host to some of our favorite sounds


we’ve ever created, largely because this game challenged us to approach our sound design in new and unusual ways. These aren’t just the sounds of glass shattering and wooden crates disintegrating — they’re shatters and splinters as only Gotham could create. Our drive for immersion meant not only getting textural


sounds just right, but also tooling how these sounds uniquely reflect Gotham when interacted with. For various objects that can get thrown, we had to get both the material sound just right as well as the sound of how that material expresses motion when mid Gotham air. Some sounds


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took over a week of toying with resonance and collisions using tools like Corpus in Ableton, which allowed us to imbue the audio with physical modeling characteristics — yet the ultimate satisfaction made every minute of those battles well spent.


REFLECTING “ARKHAM” AT ITS CORE It’s a super daunting task to step into a franchise as storied as “Batman: Arkham.” Every creative decision rides on meeting the high expectations of players of the core games and doing justice to the legacy of Batman overall. After all, we hope gamers will come to see Arkham Shadow as more than just an offshoot, but as a core entry in the game series. As sound designers, it can easy to get caught up in the


idea of putting your own stamp on a new game through reinvention, but there’s an incredible challenge and reward in preserving what people already know and love about what’s come before. As lifelong fans, it was easy to set aside selfish


ambitions and focus on honoring the fundamental aspects of Arkham and Batman’s signature sounds because the franchise has long left its stamp on us, and we hope other fans sense the immense respect behind our gritty, grimy Gotham sound design.


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