15 Years Later, Batman: Arkham City Has The Most Unique Steam Achievement Of Any Superhero Game

Published Nov 15, 2026, 10:30 AM EST

Jared is a writer, editor, and Communications Studies graduate who loves popular nerd culture (almost anything to do with Marvel, DC, Star Wars, or The Lord of the Rings) and the interactive storytelling medium. Jared's first console was the PS1, wherein he fell for Spider-Man, Spyro the Dragon, and Crash Bandicoot.

Batman: Arkham City is a treasure of a game for countless reasons, not the least of which being that it blossomed the Batman: Arkham franchise into an open-world formula only two years after the release of the comparatively constrained Batman: Arkham Asylum. Batman: Arkham City also has the best Batman: Arkham boss fights, enriched the lore and worldbuilding of the series tenfold when it debuted Catwoman, Robin, and Nightwing as playable characters, and extrapolated on the first game’s relatively elementary combat and stealth challenges.

Because of Batman: Arkham City’s Riddler’s Revenge challenges, it’s considerably more difficult and time-consuming trying to unlock all achievements. But that’s not the only reason. In what is maybe one of the most gimmicky and unique achievements to ever grace a game on console or PC, nothing in Batman: Arkham City will take you longer when achieving 100% completion than unlocking an achievement related to Julian Gregory Day’s Calendar Man.

The Long Halloween Is Indeed Long In Batman: Arkham City

Perhaps the most painstaking achievement to earn in Batman: Arkham City is the one where you must visit Calendar Man on 12 IRL holidays. The required dates/holidays are as follows:

• New Year’s Day (January 1)
• Valentine’s Day (February 14)
• St. Patrick’s Day (March 17)
• April Fool’s Day (April 1)
• Mother’s Day (May 13*)
• Father’s Day (June 17*)
• Independence Day (July 4)
• Feast Day of St. Roch (August 16)
• Labor Day (September 3*)
• Halloween (October 31)
• Thanksgiving (November 22*)
• Christmas Day (December 25)

Due to some holidays having a different date depending on the particular calendar year, players will need to discern which dates correspond to each holiday.

The obvious struggle with this achievement is that it tasks players with literally booting up Batman: Arkham City and interacting with Calendar Man in the basement of the Solomon Wayne Courthouse on these precise dates. This isn’t hard in any ordinary sense, but it’s a tall order to ask that players check back in with the ominous character on each of these holidays.

Plus, players initially only knew which holidays they’d need to talk to him on by speaking to him on a correct one and hearing him remark or hint about the next. Thankfully, with more than a decade and a half in the rearview mirror, players who wish to unlock this achievement the way that Batman: Arkham City developer Rocksteady intended at least do not need to guess which holiday it is that they’ll need to come back on.

City Isn’t Even The Hardest Arkham Game To 100%

Of course, players who don’t have the patience or perseverance necessary to revisit Calendar Man on these holidays have a workaround that’ll literally save them a year’s worth of precious time. By simply changing your system/clock date on console or PC between each autosaved Calendar Man interaction, you’re able to briskly time-travel to each subsequent holiday and obtain the achievement in less than a fraction of the time it’d take you to earn it naturally.'

It’s certainly a bizarre achievement, one that many players may not be willing to remember to progress or manipulate their system settings in order to freely award themselves. This makes it all the more memorable, for better or worse, and Batman: Arkham City doesn’t even hold a candle to the Batman: Arkham games that followed it in terms of achievement difficulty. Batman: Arkham Knight has far more achievements, for one, and it’s literally impossible now to get 100% completion in Batman: Arkham Origins authentically now that its multiplayer servers have been shut down.

Narratively, it’s an iconic way to honor a classic Batman villain who sadly doesn’t play that big of a role in the franchise overall. Calendar Man appears en route to his thwarted gas-chamber execution at the start of Batman: Arkham Origins; otherwise, he’s only referenced or has his calendar-adorned cells featured. Therefore, this achievement in Batman: Arkham City, along with the fact that you can actually interact with Calendar Man as both Batman and Catwoman, is quite special.

Systems