We previously detailed Indiana Jones’ history, starting with the 1981 film “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when we covered the 2003 game Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, but this time around, we want to excavate the character’s digital adventures in more detail.
The first such effort was an Atari 2600 cartridge based on “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” While the graphics were crude, the game helped the fledgling adventure genre take wing. Building on concepts introduced in the seminal Atari 2600 game Adventure, Raiders of the Lost Ark challenged players to find objects scattered throughout the environment and use them in the correct combination to uncover the Ark’s resting place. Players needed two joysticks to move Indiana Jones and manage his inventory.
It was the only Indiana Jones game released on the Atari 2600, however, and the character’s pixel-based adventures didn’t resume until 1984, when a brand new adventure called Indiana Jones in the Lost Kingdom premiered on the Commodore 64. It also was a puzzle-solving adventure, but the next entry in the series, a 1985 arcade game based on the movie “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” presented players with straight-forward action. That game was later ported to many of the most popular home computers and videogame consoles of the day, including the Apple II.
Two years later, Indiana Jones ventured into the realm of text-based adventure games — popularized by the Zork series — with Revenge of the Ancients (Apple II, PC), which eschewed graphics in favor of a deep narrative. Visuals returned in 1989 for two versions of the game based on the movie “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”: The Graphic Adventure (Macintosh, PC, others), which featured LucasArts’ renowned SCUMM gameplay engine and emphasized puzzle-solving; and The Action Game (various consoles and home computers), which dove into a side-scrolling platform adventure. A third version was published for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1991.
A New Era of Adventures
In 1992, LucasArts continued our hero’s adventures with a new game, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (PC, Macintosh, others), that was adapted into a comic book series by Dark Horse. The same year, a game based on the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV series was published for the NES; it teamed up the teenage adventurer with Poncho Villa during the Mexican Civil War. A second and final young Indy game, Instruments of Chaos, was published for the Sega Genesis two years later.
While Genesis gamers enjoyed young Indy’s exploits, Super NES owners were treated to Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures, which covered the stories of all three movies, as LEGO Indiana Jones does. 1930s-era Indiana Jones stories were revisited in 1996’s Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures (Macintosh, PC), which allowed players to launch the game in a window and experience a quick 30-minute quest.
1999 saw Indiana Jones move into the realm of 3D gaming with Infernal Machine, which used Russians as the bad guys for the first time in the series. It also brought back ally Sophia Hapgood from The Fate of Atlantis. The final Indy adventure released before LEGO Indiana Jones was 2003’s The Emperor’s Tomb, whose story led into the sequence at the beginning of “Temple of Doom.”
LucasArts is currently working on a next-generation original Indiana Jones videogame, but could the latest movie, “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” become the basis for another LEGO adventure? “We would be delighted and privileged to be asked to do something based around ‘Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,’” answers Ricks, “but as yet there are no plans.”