As you may have heard here and there, the new Batman game, Batman: Arkham Asylum, is doing some damn fine business. A reviewer darling and rumblings of Game of the Year all over the place, Batman: Arkham Asylum even came close to knocking the Wii Fit of the top spot in Australia in its week of release and has sold copies in the millions all ready.

But I'm not going to tell you about the game, an official TAGS review (tm) is on the way to tell you all that. I want you to know what Batman Arkham Asylum means for Batman, the DC universe and licensed games in general.

Batman, he might seem cool, but remember, he kept a boy wearing tights in a cave

Batman has had a lot of exposure over the last few years thanks to one very good movie and one outstanding movie that protrayed the character in exactly the right way. The way fans wanted, the way critics wanted and the way average movie punters apparently wanted given the astronomic box office. But the Bat media machine has been pretty active pumping out games, toys and other novelties over the last twenty years. The comics? Okay, I might ruin my chances of every showing my face at the comic shop again, but the comics are terrible and have been for a long time.

Even bright sparks in the Batman comic history like Frank Miller's Dark Knight or Tim Sale and Jeph Loeb's The Long Halloween don't stand up in the long term to some of the truly great works of comicdom, seemingly hamstrung by the fact people can't write original and interesting Batman stories any more.

But look at Batman: Arkham Asylum, this is a mega license done right in a few seemingly simple steps:

1. Keep the spirit but do something new. Arkham Asylum isn't like the comics, cartoons or movies, its a new game focused interpretation of Batman that doesn't use previous incarnations as a crunch.
2. It pays buckets of fan service but keeps it subtle. Non Batman nuts were probably more than happy to wander past the various Riddler clues, particularly the ones that represented various elements of Bat's rogues gallery such as Penguin's Umbrella. But for Batman acolytes like me each riddle uncovered was a sweet treat to relish over in the extras menu.
3. Gameplay thats accessible and button mashy to draw in non gamer Bat fans but deep enough to sate more familiar gamers.

As comics slowly die a print media death and recent experiments in online comics have been, well, crap, there's a pretty good chance characters like Batman and Spiderman could evolve into video game characters with their prescence reinforced with episodic content and expansions. Games could become the medium that saved super heroes in the 21st century.

Food for thought.