The History of Indiana Jones Games

June 30th, 2023 will mark the release of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Harrison Ford’s fifth and likely final time donning the legendary whip and fedora of Indiana Jones. I doubt he’s got another $300 million blockbuster in him. Regardless of where the Indiana Jones franchise goes from here, it’s already made its mark on history. Indiana Jones was a landmark for summer blockbusters, became a pop culture icon overnight, and we probably wouldn’t have franchises like Uncharted or Tomb Raider without good ol’ Indy to serve as inspiration.

The franchise has plenty to make it worthy of awesome video games. It’s got a rich sense of adventure, it’s got fascinating lore tied into real-life history, and it’s got copious amount of Nazi punching. And since when has more Nazi punching ever been a bad thing?

Indiana Jones has a much rockier history in video games than the many franchises it inspired. Uncharted games, for example, are critically acclaimed across the board. Indiana Jones games, however, run the gamut from the best in their genre to being downright awful. Indy’s gaming history is rocky history. But it’s still a history that deserves to be told. There’s a lot to cover, so put on your fedora and grab your trusty bullwhip as I take you through Indiana Jones’ long videogame history.

Unless specified otherwise, these games are not available on modern platforms in any way, so you will have to resort to buying used copies or emulation if you want to play them.

Raiders of the Lost Ark (Atari 2600)

Indy’s first video game adventure is, appropriately enough, an adaptation of the very first Indiana Jones movie. It’s a game that has to be judged within the context of when it was released. Movie tie-in games were a very new thing back when this game came out in November of 1982. It debuted within a month of the infamous Atari E.T game that’s unfairly blamed for the Video Game Crash of 1983. And while Raiders is nowhere near as bad as the notorious pit-jumping alien game, it’s equally as cryptic. Raiders of the Lost Ark endeavors to be more than a simple arcade game, and the results are impressive for the time, though it’s probably a poor fit for the Atari 2600. This is a time when a game having a definitive ending is rare, let alone puzzles and an interconnected overworld.

Can you imagine playing a game with two controllers at the same time? Because that’s what you have to do with Raiders, with the second controller devoted to managing Indy’s inventory. And if the controls are this archaic, then the actual puzzles are infinitely more so. It’s got invisible passageways, destructible walls with no indication they can be destroyed, items with no obvious function that you can barely even tell what they are, and an ankh that functions as a grappling hook. Atari’s Raiders of the Lost Ark is very impressive for its day, but it’s a game that should be marveled at from a distance.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: The Arcade Game

Indiana Jones’ second movie adaptation takes the form of the series’ first and only Arcade game. Developed and published by Atari once again, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a simple, yet gratifying arcade game. It has all of the movie’s core elements split across four action scenes. Indy must travel through the caves, rescuing children and battling cultists, embark on a thrilling minecart chase, steal the Sankara Stones, and have a climactic battle with Mola Ram on the bridge. It recreates the movie very well, and it looks and sounds amazing for a 1985 arcade game. It also has a buttload of digitized speech, a rarity for the time. The speech sounds awful but I love it regardless. 

Personally, I’m more familiar with the Nintendo Entertainment System version, which is a very different and much worse game. It’s still clearly based on the Arcade game, but massive changes have been made to its structure. It’s a much longer and more intricate game, which is appreciated. But almost all of the stages are frustrating mazes, and the arcade game’s pseudo-3D perspective doesn’t look right here. There’s a new weapon inventory that’s frustrating to navigate, and Indy now has a jump command. A jump command that is very glitchy and has Indy fall downward if used incorrectly. A lot of arcade games received wonderful structural changes on NES, and this is an instance where it didn’t really work out.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

For the game adaptation of Indy’s third movie, LucasArts threw us all a curveball. What could be better than one movie tie-in game? Two movie tie-in games, released at the exact same time and in completely different genres. It’s something that’s practically unheard of, even back then. And the gulf in quality of these two games is a good piece of evidence as to why this is never done.

The Graphic Adventure

The first of these two games is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure. It is, as the name implies, a point-and-click adventure game, developed internally by LucasArts themselves. For nearly any other franchise, this would be a bizarre choice of genre. But for Indiana Jones, I think it works great. LucasArts used to specialize in adventure games back when the powers that be deemed it a viable genre. So it only makes sense that they’d make a game that plays to their strengths as a company.

The Graphic Adventure does an admirable job of recreating the movie while avoiding a lot of the usual weaknesses of point-and-click adventure games. There are actually multiple solutions to most puzzles and an in-game scoring system of “Indy Quotient Points” encouraging the player to seek out more esoteric solutions to problems. Most point-and-click adventure games have no replay value. There’s usually nothing more to discover once you know all the puzzle solutions, but that’s not the case here. I’m not normally an adventure game guy, but I won’t deny that this sounds pretty sick.

It’s also the first game on this list that actually has a Steam release. So that’s nice.

The Action Game

I’m not sure though what cruel twist of fate LucasArts released two Last Crusade games at the same time. But the cruelest twist of fate was them outsourcing the second game to Tiertex, a developer of awful arcade ports, licensed shovelware, and very little else. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Action Game, is definitely an action game. And that’s about the nicest thing I can say about it. It’s just very flaccid in comparison to LucasArts’ own affair.

This game debuted on various PC formats back in 1989, but it was only several years after the movie that they finally started to port it to home consoles. Of the whopping 12 consoles this game released on, the 1992 Sega Genesis version is the one I’m most familiar with, from a video I saw in the “AVGN clone” era of YouTube videogame coverage. They said the game was programmed by Nazis, and I struggle to disagree. It’s not that no positive changes were made from the PC original. There are actual stage bosses now. But now every stage is full to bursting with cheap instant death traps. For example, when you beat the boss of stage 3, fireballs rain down from the ceiling and kill you. The Genesis version is a cheap, miserable slog.

The other version I want to highlight is the NES version, released in late 1993 and published by Ubisoft of all companies. It’s a more-or-less straight port of the Game Boy version, emphasis on less. The devs did the bare minimum needed to get the game running, with it still being largely monochromatic. The NES version is a miserable port of an already awful game, and it’s a monument to laziness that something this half-baked was one of the NES’ final releases.

The “OTHER” Action Game

Remember when I said there were two Last Crusade games? I lied. There were actually THREE. Three Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade games. The THIRD Last Crusade game was an NES exclusive, developed by Software Creations, published by Taito, and released in 1991. I cannot begin to fathom the sort of backroom deals that led to three completely different videogames based on the exact same movie launching at around the same time. Unlike the PC versions, they didn’t even have the dignity of naming this one differently. This means that there are two NES games with the exact name of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade“. I don’t think there’s another comparable situation to this in the entire history of video games. At least not on home consoles.

TAITO’s Last Crusade is weird. It’s one of those situations where every stage is its own completely different gameplay type. Rather than do one gameplay style well, it does a bunch of them kinda awkwardly. There’s janky brawling, an obnoxious maze level, a nigh-impossible motorcycle chase, and a sliding tile puzzle of all things. Is there anyone on this earth that even likes sliding tile puzzles? If there is somebody like that, I bet they’re even older than the grail knight.

The presentation is at least on point. There’s a lot of highly detailed cinematics between stages, and the in-game graphics aren’t half bad either. But the real highlight of this game is the music, courtesy of legendary chiptune composer Tim Follin. The music is the best aspect of Taito’s Last Crusade by a country mile. The actual game I struggle to recommend, but I absolutely do recommend listening to its soundtrack.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is an important game in Indy’s video game history for a number of reasons. It’s Indy’s first video game not to be based on a movie, following Indy as he discovers Atlantis and attempts to prevent the Nazis from exploiting it for their own ends. It marks the point where the games truly started to feel like cinematic experiences. And of all the Indiana Jones games, it’s the best of the lot, without question.

Fate of Atlantis is a direct sequel to Last Crusade, both in that it takes place one year afterward and continues Indy’s neverending battle against Nazi Germany, but also in that it’s another adventure game in the same vein of LucasArts own Last Crusade tie-in, carrying forward its unique mechanics, while adding plenty of its own. New to the formula is a choice of three different routes through the game, each having its own unique locations, items, and obstacles. The Wits Path offers the usual moon-logic puzzles one would expect from a game in this genre, the Fist Path offers an abundance of action setpieces and fistfights, and the Team Path pairs Indy up with one Sophia Hapgood and forces them to solve puzzles together. Throw all this together with full voice acting and you have a real winner of a game.

There are not enough positives I can say about Fate of Atlantis. It received near-unanimous praise at the time of its release, sold over a million units, and in 2011, Adventure Gamers named it the 11th-best adventure game ever. And it’s only six dollars on Steam, which is a steal.

What Could Have Been: The Phoenix That Couldn’t Fly

It is sadly here, where we go through the only canceled Indiana Jones game, at least the only one worth mentioning. That being Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix. It would have been a sequel to Fate of Atlantis, and it was canceled for stupid reasons. 

Iron Phoenix was to be set in the aftermath of World War II, focusing on Indy battling Nazis once again, as they attempt to recover the Philosopher’s Stone and resurrect Adolf Hitler. The game had a fairly rocky development in general from what I’ve read, with chaotic leadership changes, an experiment in outsourcing development that didn’t pan out, and being forced to develop a cutting-edge art style all while being stymied with technical limitations every step of the way.

An overview of some of the game’s character sprites.

The straw that broke the camel’s back and drove the game to cancellation was the team’s discovery, a whopping 15 months into development, that their game could not be sold in Germany. Germany, understandably, has a lot of restrictions on the use of Nazi imagery, and videogames were just unfairly singled out for censorship in general over there, see also German Half-Life having killed NPCs sit down and shake their head instead of dying and changing all the HECU Marines into robots.

Germany has a “social adequacy” clause that permits depictions of Nazis in art, but until 2018, video games were considered “toys” in a legal sense, and thus were not protected under the social adequacy clause, so any game with Nazi imagery before that point would be banned on sight regardless of context. And if it took until 2019 for Germans to finally play Wolfenstein uncensored, then the odds of Iron Phoenix coming out there in the mid-’90s were as likely as an Indiana Jones x Nathan Drake crossover would be. As Germany was the biggest market for adventure games, and it was too late in development to alter or censor the story, LucasArts scrapped the whole thing. It was later adapted into a four-issue comic book miniseries courtesy of Dark Horse Comics, so all that hard work didn’t go entirely to waste.

Much has been written on Iron Pheonix, and there are too many juicy details to include here. Here’s an in-depth retrospective from the International House of Mojo if you’d like to read more about it.

No screenshots of this game are known to exist. This piece of concept art is one of the few things to survive the death march that was this game’s development.

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

Before we entirely leave the space of movie adaptations, we must first take a small, but weird detour. We’ve seen Indiana Jones as an adult, and we’ll see him as an old man in Dial of Destiny. Whoever wanted to see him as a teenager? 

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was a show that gave us just that, focusing on a 93-year-old Indiana Jones recounting the stories of his youth, as he befriended, inspired, battled, and or made love with every major historical figure of the late 19th to early 20th century. And he still beat up a ton of Germans. This show is largely forgotten, but it still managed to snag a duology of video game tie-ins.

The game simply called The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was a 1993 release for the NES, developed by Chris Gray Enterprises and published by Jaleco. Of the four Indiana Jones games released for the platform, this is definitely the best, effectively by default. Temple of Doom crumpled under the weight of its own ambition, Last Crusade was a lazy port, and the other Last Crusade juggled a half dozen different gameplay styles and did them all poorly. Here, Indy goes through side-scrolling stages, collecting treasure and fighting against the German war machine. This is as simple as it gets, but hey, as long as it works. It’s a perfectly solid game, it looks great (as to be expected for such a late release on the NES), and it comes recommended.

Instruments of Chaos Starring Young Indiana Jones

The same cannot be said of the other Young Indiana Jones game, sadly. Instruments of Chaos Starring Young Indiana Jones was a 1994 Sega Genesis release courtesy of developer Brian A Rice Inc. (Why do both of these games come from a developer that is just named after some guy?) and published by Sega of America. Instruments of Chaos follows Indiana Jones on a globetrotting adventure as he stops the German army from acquiring advanced weaponry. 

It’s clear as day that the presentation was the main focus when it came to developing this game. All of the various locales are richly detailed and immediately distinct, and the music isn’t bad either. But the actual gameplay is completely miserable. Each level is very frustratingly designed, and rather than balance things properly, they simply give Indy a ton of health. Cheap enemy placement abounds, like in the first Tibet stage, where fish jump out of the frozen lake at the exact time to knock you in for a cheap instant death. 

It’s probably also got the worst implementation of Indiana Jones’ iconic whip. Maybe the worst implementation of a whip in any game. Rather than swing in a fixed arc, the whip dynamically coils around the screen as Indy swings. I’m assuming this was done to make it look more realistic and impressive. But the whip is nearly useless in practice because it’s impossible to determine where its hitbox even is. And even if it does connect, it does basically nothing. This is not the sort of game where you feel like a badass for playing it. This feels like a game where you stumble around like a drunk and yet still somehow manage to win.

Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures

1994 would also see the release of a much better Indiana Jones platformer. Sega fans got the miserable Instruments of Chaos, while those with a Super Nintendo got Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures instead. Sega does what Nintendon’t my butt.

Does anyone here remember Super Star Wars? It was a trilogy of games adapting the original trilogy of Star Wars movies. And they’re Super Star Wars because there were on the Super Nintendo and for absolutely no other reason. Greatest Adventures is basically a spiritual successor to that, but attempting to adapt all three Indiana Jones movies at once. It’s buttery smooth 2D platforming with a variety of Mode-7 vehicle stages. Developer Factor 5 (who would later go on to great success with the Star Wars Rogue Squadron games), delivered us a 16-bit hidden gem.

If you want a 2D Indiana Jones platformer, this is absolutely the one to get. It looks and sounds beautiful, it’s a meaty adventure, and it’s the best representation of the movies in game form. It’s great that Indy’s sole Super Nintendo outing was such a masterpiece.

Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine

The fifth generation of consoles was a time of immense change. Franchises, and entire companies, lived or died based on how well they could transition to 3D graphics. How well would the mighty Indiana Jones fare in the third dimension of gaming? Not the best, to say the least. 

Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine takes place in 1947, marking the first time that Indy would move from punching Nazis to punching Communists. And if that makes your eye twitch with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull flashbacks, you’ve seen nothing yet. If you wince at the mere implication that aliens exist, then Infernal Machine is heretical by comparison. In Infernal Machine, Indy gets magic powers, battles supernatural beings and ancient machines, teams up with a rock monster, and travels to an alien dimension to gun down an evil god named Marduk that wants to conquer Earth. I wonder if Dial of Destiny will be as batshit insane as this game is.

I can’t speak to the PC original, but I can say that, at least on Nintendo 64 (the sole home console port the game received), it’s kinda a mess. Released in 2000 by a returning Factor 5, Infernal Machine is a technical showpiece. It looks incredible for the N64, and it’s even fully voice-acted thanks to Factor 5’s advanced data compression techniques. But the actual gameplay leaves much to be desired. The idea is very solid, I can give them that. As Indy inspired the likes of Nathan Drake, for Infernal Machine, LucasArts would, in turn, draw inspiration from another iconic spelunking adventurer in gaming. And her name rhymes with Tara Scoffed.

Yo’ Indy, jump over that big ass ramp!

The Perils of Age

In all seriousness, at the time of this game’s release, “Tomb Raider but starring Indiana Jones” was the literal perfect formula they could have chosen. If I made this game, I’d have done the exact same thing. But as the classic Tomb Raider games have aged about as gracefully as Walter Donovan did at the end of Last Crusade, Infernal Machine is similarly archaic and sluggish to play nowadays. The levels are frustrating mazes with key items and objectives hidden in corners or obscured by darkness. The N64 port is especially bad with poor performance and buggy physics that make the platforming completely infuriating. 

The last thing I’ll say about Infernal Machine is that it’s something of a treasure of its own. You could only play the N64 Infernal Machine by renting it from Blockbuster or buying it directly from LucasArts. If you lived in Europe, then that version bounced across multiple publishers and got repeatedly delayed before getting canceled outright. As a result of this baffling distribution strategy, used copies hover around $100. Infernal Machine is also available on Steam, which is probably the way it should be played nowadays.

Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb

Of all the games here, this was the only one I didn’t know about before writing this article. Is it an undiscovered gem, or did it deserve to be forgotten and consigned to the sands of time? Indy’s sole 6th-generation outing comes to us from The Collective, of Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure “fame”. 

Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb continues in the same vein as Infernal Machine. It’s a cautious, deliberate action-adventure game with lots of platforming and exploration of exotic locales. New to Emperor’s Tomb is an increased focus on close-quarters combat, with Indy battling Nazis, ghosts, stone statues, magic Chinese kung-fu experts, and giant dragons with a variety of improvised melee weapons. Know from that description that this is only slightly less crazy than Infernal Machine. 

As usual with LucasArts games, the presentation is top-notch. The game still looks great in HD, it hasn’t aged a day in terms of presentation. The gameplay has some minor annoyances, with no mid-level checkpoints and many turret sections, straight from the 2000’s design playbook. But overall, Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb is worth your time.

Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb is available now on Steam. And in a first for this franchise, it’s actually available on a modern console. Console, as in singular. Emperor’s Tomb is a backward-compatible game on Xbox One and Series X/S, available for $9.99 from the Xbox Live Marketplace. It is also playable from an original disc if you still own one.

Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings

If a video game franchise didn’t fall flat on its ass in the transition to 3D graphics, there’s a good chance it fell flat on its ass in the transition to the HD era. And for Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, falling flat on its ass describes the game perfectly. Staff of Kings had a long and messy development. And as Matt McMuscles hasn’t done a Staff of Kings episode yet, it falls on me to briefly explain how this game turned pear-shaped. Cue his theme song.

Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings entered development in 2004, targeting then-next-gen hardware in the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. But back then, if you were a family-friendly third-party release worth your salt, you had to make a version for last-gen hardware as well. So LucasArts commissioned Behaviour Interactive of Dead by Daylight fame, then known as A2M (they changed their name for a very good reason), to make versions of Staff of Kings for the Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2 and Wii, while Amaze Entertainment was tasked with farting out a PlayStation Portable release.

Slated for a 2007 release, Staff of Kings was meant to use cutting-edge technology and an ambitious new physics engine. Said physics engine was incredibly buggy and difficult to work with, but this was just the beginning of Staff of Kings’ troubles. Production on Lucasarts’ own version stalled significantly, and due to a combination of staff turnover and leadership changes, the siphoning of the dev team to work on Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and the release of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune sapping the team’s morale, the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Staff of Kings were both canceled. But the last-gen versions would still release, limping onto store shelves in June of 2009. And they probably shouldn’t have.

The PS3 and 360 versions of Staff of Kings were left out in the cold.

This Game Should Have Drowned in the Red Sea

The Wii version, which went from a throwaway side-game to the main skew, is literal torture. The Wii had a problem with developers forcing motion controls when they weren’t wanted or helpful. Staff of Kings is on a whole different level when it comes to this. It’s like the staff at Behaviour were ordered at gunpoint to make a game that used buttons as little as possible. And even the way they’re implemented is hopelessly backward and confusing.

For instance, one sequence has you drive a motorcycle. Anyone familiar with Mario Kart Wii would expect you to hold the Wii Remote sideways and tilt it to steer. But in Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, you hold both the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk sideways and tilt them like you would if you were actually driving a motorcycle in real life. And this literal design is how the game controls nearly at all times. When flying a plane, you hold the Wii Remote vertically in free space like a pilot’s joystick. To fight, you have to literally throw punches with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. And the list goes on. But even if the game controlled perfectly, we would still have to contend with an incomprehensible story. 

It’s not all bad for the Wii version. The game looks great for the console, and it even includes Fate of Atlantis as an unlockable bonus. And it’s rather telling when the critical consensus is to buy this for Fate of Atlantis and ignore the main game.

Bizarrely enough, it’s Amaze Entertainment’s PSP version that comes out on top, fixing all the story inconsistencies and controlling like an actual videogame. No version of this game is amazing, but the PSP version is the one to get.

Lego Indiana Jones

Indy’s final proper console games were a duology of Lego games. Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures, and Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues, were released in 2008 and 2009 respectively. I’m just going to lump these together as one entry. Because they’re Lego games, the endless spawn of Traveller’s Tales, black goat of the forest with a thousand minifigs. 

I’m confident that people that are even casually familiar with video games know about the Lego series. Lord knows I played the crap out of Lego Star Wars as a kid. And it is unquestionably kids that are the target audience for these games. Traveller’s Tales unique formula of 2D platforming and comedy provides years of family fun.

The keyword being formula. The Lego games are kinda like the situation with Telltale, in that it’s effectively the same game every time, just with a new IP. It is a good game, unquestionably. The main thing separating both games is that The Adventure Continues has levels based on Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. These games look appealing, they’re very respectful of the IP, and they will more than satisfy fans of the franchise. But at the same time, they’re very different from nearly every game on this list, which is a great accomplishment considering the number of genres Indiana Jones games have spanned.

Both The Original Adventures and The Adventure Continues are available on Steam. Like Emperor’s Tomb, The Original Adventure and The Adventure Continues are backwards compatible titles for both Xbox One and Series X/S consoles.

The Future of Indiana Jones

Well. That is it. Every Indiana Jones game is covered. All the big ones at least. There is some miscellaneous weirdness that I either couldn’t find enough to talk about or that wasn’t worth talking about. A few text adventures. Various flash and mobile games. Some Facebook multiplayer garbage. And whatever the hell Indiana Jones and his Desktop Adventures is. 

But the true question is, what is to come for Indiana Jones in the future? At least in terms of gaming, that question is already answered. Bethesda, of all companies, posted a teaser trailer in 2021, subsequently revealing that they obtained the video game rights to the IP, and that a new Indiana Jones game was currently in production by MachineGames, developers of Wolfenstein: The New Order and The New Colossus. MachineGames themselves confirmed that they’re developing the game partly because it was an excuse to make another game where the player would get to mow down Nazis.

We still know very little about this game. We don’t know its genre or what the story will revolve around, and its name is still a placeholder. I don’t tend to get excited about games that haven’t shown off live gameplay, and Indiana Jones and the Blank of the Blankety-Blank is still months away from even a CGI trailer. Still, I’m reasonably confident that MachineGames will deliver a satisfactory title that brings Indy back to the glory days of LucasArts. In the meantime, titles like Greatest Adventures, Emperor’s Tomb, and The Fate of Atlantis, should more than satisfy that Indy craving until his next adventure is ready for us all.

The future looks bright for Indiana Jones.