A Batmam Arkham fan has riled up the fanbase with something the fans didn’t even know they wanted.
As you may know, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has come and gone. The verdict on sales seems inconclusive, with WB Games providing no information for now. Datamined Steam sales and numbers seem low, but we can’t make concrete conclusions based on that alone. The game could have still been a hit on Xbox, and more importantly, on PlayStation.
We do know for sure that the game has garnered a lot of attention for one particular story beat; the killing of the Brainiac mind-controller Batman, point blank by Harley’s pistol. We have covered how the divisiveness over this particular story beat is driven by the connection to the Batman Arkham games, that in hindsight feels forced in, and the unexpected passing of Batman voice actor Kevin Conroy.
Some fans, insiders, influencers, and even games media, have hinted that in spite of appearances, the members of the Justice League aren’t actually dead in the game, and that Rocksteady Studios did come up with a storyline explanation that will allow them to return to the story in the course of this live service titles’ endgame.
Well, we finally have proof of this being the case, thanks to YouTuber Batman Arkham Videos. You can watch his video on it here, but we’ll summarize the main points below:
As you make your way throughout alien-infested Metropolis, you will run across different calendars, with each one showing a different month, and a specific date circled out. The calendar for December happens to be hiding close to where Batman meets his demise, and the date on this calendar has the Bat symbol on it instead of a circle.
The month of the year represents the sequential order of the message. You can convert each date to a letter, by assigning a number to each letter by alphabetical order.
When you do all this, this message appears:
H E W I L L R E T U R N
One last wrinkle to this thing. While Batman Arkham fans have gotten used to Riddler’s Trophies being spread around the franchise’s open worlds, this looks more like the work of Calendar Man.
So, as Batman Arkham Videos says, this could be referring to Batman, or Calendar Man coming back. But there’s something this YouTuber didn’t mention, either because he neglected to, or because it’s a layer of Arkham knowledge so esoteric he didn’t know about it.
Calendar Man is in all three Arkham games, but his appearance in Batman Arkham City is what interests us here. He remains incarcerated, but as Batman, you can approach him to talk. If you play the game on a particular holiday, he will tell you about a crime he committed on that day.
But, as an Easter egg, if you change the date on your platform to the date Rocksteady Studios was founded, on December 13, 2004, Calendar Man will tell Batman: “I was there at your beginning, and I will be there at your end.”
Calendar Man also appears at the ending of Batman Arkham Knight, when Bruce fakes his death. But if you think about it, we didn’t see him in any context when he was there at Batman’s beginning.
So this may have been something that Rocksteady realized could have been imbued with double and even triple meanings, and have acted on it accordingly. In fact, Rocksteady may have come up with something relating to Calendar Man as well as the Justice League, for those dedicated Suicide Squad players to discover, somewhere down the line.
