Rocksteady Studios

Rocksteady Studios was founded in London on 13 December 2004 by Jamie Walker and Sefton Hill, formerly creative director and head of production at Argonaut Games. When Argonaut shut down late that year, publisher SCi Entertainment handed the new studio, staffed mostly by former Argonaut employees, the game Roll Call, which it had been making with Argonaut, and took a 25.1% stake. After two name changes it came out in 2006 as Urban Chaos: Riot Response for PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

In spring 2007 SCi, by then renamed Eidos, secured the rights to make a Batman game and approached Rocksteady. The result was Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009), whose success led Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, part of the same group as DC Comics, to buy a majority stake in the studio in February 2010. Batman: Arkham City (2011) and Batman: Arkham Knight (2015) followed, both critically acclaimed, and in 2016 the studio tried virtual reality with Batman: Arkham VR for PlayStation VR.

In 2016 it began a multiplayer puzzle game codenamed Stones, but Warner asked it to make a multiplayer game based on DC's Suicide Squad instead. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was announced in August 2020 and was delayed several times, partly because the studio had very little experience in the genre. At the end of 2022, mid-development, Walker and Hill left Rocksteady after more than 18 years, and Nathan Burlow and Darius Sadeghian took over. The game came out in February 2024.

Rocksteady remains a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Games. From 2024 it supported Suicide Squad for a year and helped on a director's cut of Hogwarts Legacy that was later cancelled. Walker and Hill, meanwhile, founded Hundred Star Games in January 2024. The studio's latest work is development support for Traveller's Tales on Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight (2026).