14 DAY TRIAL // Batman: Arkham Asylum 2 will be Mark Hamill's last rendition of The Joker's voice, according to his latest interview with IGN. He was suspicious at first about making a sequel to last year's Batman: Arkham Asylum, as he thought it could not be topped, but developer Rocksteady managed to convince him that the new installment would let him end his appearances as The Joker on an even higher note.
The British developer had had the same trouble the first time around with Hamill, as he himself declared in the interview, “When they said, 'We want you to come back [to the role of The Joker] and do Arkham,' I said the same; 'I left on a high note, I don't think we could ever top that.' But they said, 'We got Paul Dini,' who was my favorite ever Joker writer, 'and Kevin Conroy,' who I love. This was a real reunion and a very pleasant experience. So of course I relented, but I had no idea it would have the impact it did.”
He denied that his initial reluctance had anything to do with him holding out for a bigger salary. He stated that he really wanted this second game to be good. He declared himself a huge comic-book fan and Batman as his favorite graphic-novel series. The role as The Joker's voice that he landed in the critically acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series was his dream job and made him very protective of it, hence his unwillingness to reprise it unless in low-quality contexts. At the end, he assured the interviewer that his talks with Rocksteady indicated that the next Arkham Asylum would be very good indeed.
Batman: Arkham Asylum 2 was announced as a surprise sequel at the 2009 Spike Video Game Awards. Unfortunately, neither a release date has been announced by Warner Brothers, the publisher of the title, nor the platforms for which it will be available, but it's safe to assume the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and the PC will surely be on the list.