Forbes Innovation Games WB Has Been Trying To Make A ‘Suicide Squad’ Game For 13 Years, And This Is Where We Landed Paul Tassi Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. News and opinion about video games, television, movies and the internet. Following Feb 26, 2023, 08:29am EST | Press play to listen to this article! Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Suicide Squad WB As everyone tries to figure out what on earth to make of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League , a game that just headlined PlayStation’s State of Play, it may be useful to dive into its history a little bit. In one form or another, WB and DC have been trying to make a Suicide Squad video since 2010, well before the bad Suicide Squad movie came out, and eons before the good Suicide Squad movie came out. A Suicide Squad game was actually announced all the way back in 2010 by Geoff Johns, and he was still talking about it in 2012, saying that cool stuff could be done with the concept of heroes that could actually die. The Arkham games started teasing this idea eventually, as Arkham Origins had Amanda Waller recruiting Deathstroke, and later in Origins Blackgate, Deadshot and Bronze Tiger join with Bane being mentioned as a possibility. But that old iteration of the game was reportedly cancelled back in 2016, according to Jason Schreier. Waller in Origins WB MORE FOR YOU $100M Magic: Why Bruno Mars And Other Stars Are Ditching Their Managers Crypto Now Primed For A Massive Fed Bombshell That Could Play Havoc With The Price Of Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB, XRP, Cardano, Dogecoin, Polygon And Solana ‘K-Pop Dreaming’ Explores K-Pop History And Korean American Identity So, what happened next was that some time between 2016 and 2020 when Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was announced, the decision was made to try again. And you may now understand why the current game is what it is, a live service looter shooter, because Destiny 2 was released in 2017 at the height of that craze it helped start. Borderlands 3 was released in 2019 and was a huge success. Perhaps the game that could have been the biggest cautionary tale of them all, Marvel’s Avengers, wasn’t released until August 2020, literally the same month that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was announced. And by then, it was already well into development, no doubt. That’s the theory here, that AAA game cycles take so long now, that a game that might have seemed like a good idea five years ago may no longer be as effective by the time it’s actually released. In the five years since Destiny 2, we’ve seen essentially almost all comers in the live service looter genre struggle hard, if not fail outright, and Avengers specifically showed just how poorly this concept works with superheroes in particular. The problem with Avengers was that in order to retain some unique sense of character kits that were distinctive from one another, loot essentially didn’t matter. Suicide’s Squad’s answer to this is apparently to do the opposite, to make combat more similar across the characters by giving everyone access to guns, whether that makes sense for the likes of King Shark and Captain Boomerang or not. Again, we are all pre-judging Suicide Squad based on the footage we’ve seen, but that’s all we have to go on ahead of the game’s release this May. One of the problems with the game may be that DC literally has been trying to make it for thirteen years, but across two iterations now, the concept just seems dated now that it’s arrived. Follow me on Twitter , YouTube , Facebook and Instagram . Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls . Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy . Paul Tassi Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.