Indiana Jones and the digital legacy: digging into Indy’s best gaming adventures
With a new Indiana Jones game – Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – out this month, we hunt for the franchise’s best video game moments, from point-and-click masterpieces to a guest appearance on Fortnite.
“Bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless,” says evil archaeologist Belloq in 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. He’s talking about a cheap pocket watch: a description that could be levelled at some of the Indiana Jones video games that have appeared over the past 43 years. A few were cash-ins hoping to ride the slipstream of one of the most profitable entertainment franchises of all time.
Others, however, are genuine buried treasure. After a couple of false starts – including Atari’s well-received 1982 Lost Ark adaption, which almost ended up entombed in actual sand after the infamous video game crash of the following year – George Lucas’ game studio released Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure (1989) to coincide with the third movie.
Using the branching dialogue options that would make his later interactive venture The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) a smash, Last Crusade was a retelling of the film that gave players the option to interrogate the Donovan and Schneider characters. It also featured action in the shape of biplane chases, dungeon-crawling around Brunwald Castle and even a brush with Hitler (as happens on the big screen). Completists might enjoy the inclusion of Henry Jones’s grail diary as a real-life instruction manual of sorts.
Three years later and possibly released to coincide with the spin-off TV series, Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992), Lucasfilm Games perfected their point-and-click formula with Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. An original story set in 1939, it sees Indy join forces with fellow archaeologist Sophia Hapgood to stop the Nazis from plundering the legendary submerged kingdom.
It’s an adventure that takes players from Greece to Monte Carlo and Algiers as they try to find Plato’s Hermocrates by collecting mystical stones. Adventurers can experience a ‘Team’, ‘Wits’ or ‘Fists’ approach to the game and enjoy graphics that were cutting-edge at the time (the Minoan civilisation artwork in some of the backgrounds will delight any history buffs).
Atlantis would go on to collect several game-of-the-year awards and is today recognised as one of the great interactive adventures. It’s even become buried treasure itself: the entire game is included as an Easter egg in 2009’s Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings on Nintendo DS.
For those who prefer the brawls and booby-traps of the franchise over the history lecture scenes, Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventure (1994) on SNES puts the archaeologist firmly into action mode. In this platformer which comes off as equal parts Castlevania (1986) and Super Mario Land (1989), Indy jumps, rolls and whips his way through levels, swinging across pits and riding mine carts with all the aplomb you’d expect of the films. Players can even duel with the horrifying, fast-ageing corpse from the guess-the-grail scene at the end of Last Crusade.
Greatest Adventures had the potential to push interactive Indy in a new high-octane direction, but it marked the beginning of a fallow period in the character’s video game history. A planned sequel, Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix, was set to focus on neo-Nazis attempting to resurrect Hitler using the Philosopher’s Stone, but was thought too problematic to market in Germany and abandoned.
As George Lucas focused on his new Star Wars trilogy and Steven Spielberg explored darker historical conflict in Schindler’s List (1993), Amistad (1997) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), new big-screen and interactive adventures for Indy seemed unlikely. But rumours of a fourth film began to circulate after the millennium, and the archaeologist was resurrected for seventh-generation platforms in Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (2008). Like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull of the same year, this adventure ditched the Nazi references for less political action that was as playable as it was rich in detail: Indy freezing if he gets too near snakes, boulder traps, hieroglyphic puzzles that must be decoded by Indy’s dad. A swathe of other characters from the movies make appearances, from telepathic Thuggee cult members to Marian Ravenwood’s Capuchin monkey sidekick.
And finally, despite Indy’s continued attempts to stop priceless artefacts being appropriated, Dr Jones became a collectible item himself in 2017 when he appeared as a character skin in Fortnite Battle Royal, complete with pistol, expedition bag and yellow raft.
At 15 years in the making, new first-person action-adventure Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is released on PC and Xbox in time for Christmas, and may give the intrepid archaeologist his most lavish solo outing to date. Its plot centres on our hero investigating a theft in the Vatican, and travelling around the world to punch fascists in Shanghai, Egypt, Thailand and the Himalayas.
Will it mark the crowning jewel in Indy’s interactive adventures? Very possibly. But Fortnite made Dr Jones available to over 650 million players, a fact future game historians might note as his most in-character achievement to date. After all, the platform describes itself a place where players can “create and play with friends for free”. Perhaps that’s the 2024 version of “It belongs in a museum”?