Last week I wore one of my favorite t-shirts to work. A post on Instagram with a bit of commentary about why the shirt exists made me think back a bit more to those days at Monolith, and so for a bit of gaming history today, I’d like to present a little bit about Gotham City Impostors, the last true Monolith game.
To understand Gotham City Impostors (GCI for most of this entry), we have to go back a couple of years before its release, to around 2010. F.E.A.R. 2 was pretty well wrapped up, and most of that team was looking for something new to work on. A good chunk of the team would ultimately be moved over to help push Snowblind’s Lord of the Rings: The War In The North over the finish line, but a small core group, many of whom had worked together since the No One Lives Forever days, stayed together to come up with Monolith’s Next Big Shooter. While they worked on that, in order to provide WB Games with something releasable, they came up with the concept for GCI.
One of the other things that’s important to keep in mind is that right around this time, small team-based shooters such as Team Fortress 2 were huge. This was also within a couple years of Nolan’s The Dark Knight hitting theaters, and despite the disappointment of our internal Batman game concept being cancelled (elements of it would eventually form the seeds of Shadows of Mordor), a lot of people within the studio were still excited to do something related to Batman, and the idea of a team-based shooter based around the impostor idea shown in The Dark Knight proved popular around the studio.
There were a lot of internal playtests for this game. As far back as the F.E.A.R. days (and probably well before), the core dev team would spend at least a bit of time almost every afternoon playing multiplayer against each other, then chatting about what was fun, what went wrong, and what to improve. In a lot of ways, GCI was a step back to an earlier time in Monolith development, when a game didn’t need a 100+ person team to get made.
And then the layoffs hit in November 2011. If you look at the credits for GCI on Mobygames, you’ll notice that for a lot of the key developers, this was their last game they made at Monolith. Some have credits on Shadows of Mordor, but weren’t necessarily at the studio anymore (like me). Just like that, the core team that had been responsible for Blood, N.O.L.F., and F.E.A.R. was forcibly disbanded.
Obviously, the studio rebounded well with Shadows of Mordor, seems to be continuing along in a successful direction, and I wish continued success for all of my friends who are still there. GCI went free-to-play within a year of launch, and is still available for download on Steam. It’s still fun too, if you can find a group to play with. Somehow there’s still an active TDM community online in early 2020. Maybe I’ll get a session running at BYOC this week.