Months before Batman: Arkham City was announced, its entire setting was already hidden inside Batman: Arkham Asylum — behind a wall that no one was supposed to blow up.
The Secret
Deep inside Warden Quincy Sharp’s office in Arkham Asylum, behind a seemingly ordinary wall, lie the full architectural expansion plans for Arkham City — the massive open-world prison that would become the setting of the 2011 sequel. The blueprints were sitting there from day one, in the 2009 game, waiting to be found.
How to Find It
- Reach the Warden’s Office in the Administration building.
- Use Batman’s Explosive Gel on a specific section of the wall — one that gives no visual indication it can be destroyed.
- Detonate it to reveal a hidden room containing the plans for Arkham City drawn up by Warden Sharp.
Why It Went Undiscovered at Launch
The wall looks completely identical to every other wall in the room. There’s no crumbling texture, no visual cue, no audio hint. When the game launched in 2009, no one found it. It was only discovered months later when Rocksteady themselves confirmed its existence after the reveal of Arkham City — and players went back to find it.
The Implications
The discovery revealed that Rocksteady had planned the sequel before the first game even shipped — and had the confidence to hide its entire premise as a secret in the predecessor. Warden Sharp’s political plans to convert Gotham’s slums into a walled criminal containment zone were already fully realized in hidden blueprints while players were still fighting through Arkham Island.
Batman: Arkham Asylum won numerous Game of the Year awards in 2009. Its sequel, Arkham City, was announced in late 2009 — shortly after players finally found what had been hidden in the walls all along.
No crumbling texture, no audio cue, nothing. Just a wall that looks like every other wall in the room. I’ve replayed Arkham Asylum several times and I still feel like I need the guide to find it reliably. Perfect camouflage.
The fact that the blueprints were already there in 2009 while Rocksteady was actively developing Arkham City means players were walking past the next game’s entire premise without knowing it. That’s wild.
Rocksteady sat on this secret for six months, watching forum threads, waiting for someone to find it. That level of patience from a dev team is almost unheard of. The announcement after six months of silence is almost as good as the secret itself.