Suicide Squad Fans Just Got The Coolest News Ever
DC fans, rejoice: That venerable team of dastardly antiheroes, the Suicide Squad, are on their way to a gaming console near you.
In a surprise announcement via Twitter, game developer Rocksteady Studios has announced that a new game based on the team, simply titled Suicide Squad, is in the works. The tweet indicated that more details will be revealed at the DC FanDome convention, the 24-hour online fan event that kicks off on August 22.
It's safe to say that virtually nobody in the gaming community saw this coming, although Rocksteady has been rumored for years to be at work on a DC title involving Superman. It's unclear whether the development of the Suicide Squad game, which has apparently been a top-secret undertaking, has added any fuel to those rumors — but as you can see from the teaser image above, it sure looks like Supes will be factoring into its story. Having last dipped into the DC well with 2015's Arkham Knight, the final entry in the hugely successful Arkham trilogy, Rocksteady couldn't have picked a more scintillating time to make the announcement.
This, of course, is because Guardians of the Galaxy mastermind James Gunn is hard at work on the feature film The Suicide Squad, a soft reboot of the 2016 film that divided the heck out of fans and drew mortar shells from critics. Also, we're mere weeks away from the release of Square Enix's Marvel's Avengers, which has been all fans of superhero games have been talking about in recent months ... until now. Nice move, Rocksteady.
The announcement comes loaded with questions. Will Suicide Squad take place in the same universe as the Arkham games? Will it be a strictly next-gen title, or will PlayStation and Xbox One owners be able to get in on the presumably team-based, blood-soaked fun? Will publisher WB Interactive make the same mistake it did with 2017's Middle-earth: Shadow of War by cramming it full of the microtransactions that had players of that game in open revolt after its release? It looks like we'll have to wait until August 22 to find out.
Rocksteady might have let slip a hint about Suicide Squad's story
While Rocksteady has refrained from divulging any details whatsoever about the new game, we do have a few tiny clues as to what its story might be.
First, that teaser image. Upon first glance, it seems like the Squad is going to be tangling with the Man of Steel in their new game. This notion could possibly be corroborated — or, more likely, simply be the predominating idea at present — by a leak that happened in April 2020, when an intrepid Twitterer came across some concept art depicting Big Blue in the portfolio of Joël Dos Reis Viegas, a onetime artist at WB Montreal.
However, the character in the teaser pic for Rocksteady's Suicide Squad game ... might not be Superman. DC fans likely already know where we're going with this, but check out the purplish color scheme and the weird texture of the skin on the character's face. We could be looking at the villain Bizarro, the "mirror image" Superman who has at times taken on an antihero role. Sure, the image was tweeted with the caption "target locked" — but it could be that the Squad won't be trying to take down Supes at all. Instead, they may be "targeting" Bizarro for membership in their merry club.
As to what the Squad's prime objective could be in the game, there's perhaps a solid clue to be found in the form of some sneakily suspicious domain registrations traced back to Rocksteady. GamesRadar, one of the only outlets to float the idea that the developer was working on a Suicide Squad game, located these domains in June 2020. The first of those, registered on June 16, was simply SuicideSquadGame.com. That seems pretty clear cut, but it might have been a diversion; game developers register all kinds of domains for all kinds of purposes all the time. The second, though, registered the very next day, is just a tad more explicit: SuicideSquadKillTheJusticeLeague.com.
Yep, that made our jaws hit the floor, too.
Could the new game be based on the Justice League vs. Suicide Squad series?
If indeed the new game will see the Suicide Squad on a mission to take down the mighty Justice League, there would be recent precedence in the pages of DC Comics. In 2017, the publisher gave us Justice League vs. Suicide Squad, a six-issue limited series in which the antihero team is forced to go on the offense when the do-gooder group becomes aware of its existence. Justice League vs. Suicide Squad saw the two units eventually forced to partner up to deal with Amanda Waller's original Suicide Squad team — led by Maxwell Lord and including Doctor Polaris, Johnny Sorrow, Emerald Empress, and Lobo.
Since development on the game is likely to have begun around the same time (or even before) the miniseries was published, it's doubtful that it will use that specific storyline. Still, the game's developers certainly could have taken inspiration from it — and if the Justice League are actually featured as the "villains" of the game, we can think of nothing more likely to make DC fans lose their minds.
We'll see how it all shakes out at DC FanDome — which, with its presentations on Wonder Woman 1984 and the long-awaited Snyder Cut of Justice League, was already shaping up to be pretty darned interesting before this announcement. We'll be bringing you all the news fit to report on the Suicide Squad game, and all of the other goodies to come out of the event, with Flash-like speed.