Gotham City Impostors

» see gothamcityimpostors.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2012 I was twenty-eight and working full time, and the only shooters I had ever cared about were the Counter-Strike sessions in Ankara internet cafes a decade earlier. Gotham City Impostors was a console-first download game built around unlock progression, which is roughly the opposite arrangement. A PC version did exist. It shipped on Games for Windows Live, and that detail decides most of what follows.

Monolith Productions made it, which is an odd sentence to write on its own. This was the studio behind No One Lives Forever and F.E.A.R., handed the Batman license and told to build a twelve-player arena shooter in which Batman never appears. Both teams are civilians in fancy dress: amateur vigilantes in homemade cowls against people who have been drinking a home-brewed Joker formula. You picked a body type and a face, then fought over Gotham with roller skates and a glider rig.

It launched on 7 February 2012 on PlayStation 3 and Windows, a day later on Xbox 360. The reviews had it down as a competent thing nobody had asked for. GameSpot gave it 7.5 out of 10 and complained about the matchmaking. Metacritic settled at 72 on PS3 and 65 on PC. By the end of August the Windows edition had been lifted off Games for Windows Live and put back out free to play on Steam, and that is the version most people mean when they name the game.

After that the updates stopped. The last content shipped in 2012, and the game then sat on three storefronts for nine years while the infrastructure underneath it was dismantled one piece at a time by people who were not thinking about it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the delisting schedule ~

Four platforms and four separate deaths, not one of them announced. On 31 August 2012 the Games for Windows Live build was replaced by the free Steam client, and on 25 July 2014 the PlayStation 3 servers went dark, because GameSpy had closed that May and GameSpy was what ran the matchmaking. The Steam listing came off on 26 August 2021. The last buyable copy anywhere went when Microsoft closed the Xbox 360 Marketplace on 29 July 2024.

Delisted Games, which tracks this sort of thing for a living, now lists the game's availability as None and puts the Steam removal down to player counts. Their figure is under 500 concurrent since late 2014. For a mode that seats twelve, that is enough to fill about forty matches on Earth at any given moment, and it held at roughly that level for seven years before anybody at Warner Bros. thought to press the button.

~ who closed the lights ~

No one at Warner Bros. or Monolith said anything on the day. MMO Fallout noticed the store page had gone on the afternoon of 26 August 2021 and wrote that an official announcement was expected within a few days. None came.

The peer-to-peer architecture that made the matchmaking mediocre in 2012 is the reason a small number of people are still playing. Anyone who had already added the free version to a Steam library kept it, and the sessions run between players rather than on hardware Warner Bros. pays for. A community project called GCI:F4E has since handed the client to people who never owned it. The publisher's last act on this game was to close the door to new arrivals.

Monolith did not outlive it by much. On 25 February 2025 Warner Bros. Games dissolved the studio and canceled its Wonder Woman game. Kirkland, Washington, 25 October 1994 to 25 February 2025.

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