Although Raiders of the Lost Ark was in many ways an homage to older adventure serials, its incredible success turned it into something of a genre codifier.
Even today, Indiana Jones remains a metric by which we measure relic-seeking, tomb-raiding adventures in uncharted lands.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the movies have inspired not just other licenses, but also a ton of official spin-offs, adaptations, and brand new adventures across all media. Which, of course, includes video games.
Over more than forty years since that original movie, there’s been about twenty different games about classic and brand new adventures of the intrepid archaeologist.
We won’t talk about all of them, but instead shed some spotlight on a few games from different areas of gaming, because it’s thematically appropriate and shows how far gaming in general, and Indiana Jones games in particular have evolved between 1982 and 2024.
Grab your fedora bearing the dust of a hundred tombs, get a trusty bullwhip, and let’s go exploring…
- Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982)
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1985)
- Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992)
- Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (1999)
- Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb (2003)
- Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (2008)
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
- Nothing quite like a proper, pulpy adventure
The four ages of Indiana Jones games
Ancient times (the 1980s)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1982)
The first Indiana Jones game came out just over a year after the original movie. It even has the distinction of being the first direct video game adaptation of a movie, as opposed to a movie tie-in with a different plot.
RotLA launched for Atari 2600 and required two controllers, one for selecting or dropping items, and one for moving Indiana and telling him to use the selected object.
The game is set in Cairo in 1936, so unfortunately it didn’t allow you to relive the iconic scene from the beginning of the movie, but does feature several familiar locations, including the Map Room.
As one might expect, nowadays the game not only doesn’t look good, but to an extent is hard to read at all, which makes sense, it was 1982, and the infamous E.T. video game was right around the corner. Truly an artifact of a simpler, retro time.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1985)
Three years later, and a year after the corresponding movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom launched for several platforms, but the original version was for Atari arcades.
It looked way, way better than Raiders, used an eight-directional joystick, featured difficulty levels, and even had voice clips for Indy and Mola Ram. Quite a technical leap in three short years.
The game adapted several sequences from the movie: rescuing children, the famous mine cart chase, and the escape across the bridge.
It wasn’t very long, of course, but completing it required several runs of increasing difficulty, so there were plenty of opportunities to lose too many lives and toss a coin into the arcade to keep playing. To sweeten the pot, after the final scene there was even a potentially endless challenge round.
The middle ages (the 1990s)
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992)
The Fate of Atlantis wasn’t the first Indiana Jones with an original story — this title goes to Indiana Jones in the Lost Kingdom — but it has been long considered one of the very best Indiana Jones games in general, still ranking high even well into the modern era.
It was released in 1992 in two versions: a point-and-click adventure game and an action game, but it’s the former that got the warmest reception.
It takes place in 1939, just ahead of the outbreak of World War II, and begins with Indiana unwittingly aiding a Nazi scientist acquire a valuable artifact of mystical significance.
What follows is a dash against time across several locations, and the game’s title already tells you what it’s really going to be about.
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine (1999)
A lot of “firsts” on this list. Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, released in 1999 for PC, was the first 3D game in the franchise. It got ported over to Nintendo 64 a year later, and to Game Boy Color in Spring 2001.
It was an action-adventure game with a third-person perspective camera and a story campaign divided into 17 missions.
It featured a decent diversity to gameplay, with combat, vehicle, and platforming sections mixed in various ways.
The Infernal Machine’s story takes place in 1947 and involves Indy getting hired by a friend from the CIA to investigate Soviets digging around in the ruins of Babylon. Ditching the pre-WW2 setting in favor of the early Cold War was a great choice, putting Indy in a fresh, previously unexplored context.
Renaissance (the 2000s)
Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb (2003)
Emperor’s Tomb came just four years after the Infernal Machine, but despite its overt similarities, including the 3D, TPP gameplay, it wasn’t a sequel. Instead, it was set in 1935 and served as something of a loose prequel to the Temple of Doom.
The journey takes Indiana all over the map, including Ceylon, Prague, and Hong Kong, and involves a wild span of history and mythology.
Emperor’s Tomb was fairly heavy on combat, which involved not just the whip and good, old-fashioned fisticuffs, but also improvised weapons and firearms, quite skillfully mimicking Indy’s haphazard fighting style.
The game launched in 2003 for PC, Xbox and PS2, but in the 2010s returned to the market thanks to GOG and Steam rereleases.
Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (2008)
Lego games and franchise adaptations go hand in hand. Traveller’s Tales first gave us Lego Star Wars, and then, in 2008 took on the task of turning Indiana Jones into cute, family-friendly blocks.
And it went very well! It was a great homage to the three original films, full of good-natured humor and very good at turning familiar scenes into slightly goofy, co-op friendly levels.
In 2009 the studio revisited the franchise with Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues to include Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and adapt the first trilogy slightly differently than in t
he previous game.
The core gameplay, however, remained the same, and if you know one Lego video game adaptation, you know them all.
Here and now
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Finally, we come to the final weeks of 2024, and the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on December 9th for PC and Xbox Series X/S, with a slightly delayed PS5 release.
It gained popularity and approval quite quickly, largely thanks to its first-person perspective action bearing a lot of resemblance to immersive sim games, as well as the incredible performance of Troy Baker doing a fantastic Harrison Ford impression.
By all accounts, The Great Circle does a great job adapting the movies. It’s quite good at balancing the stakes and humor of the source material, captures Indy’s improvisational fighting style, and adds a good number of puzzles a good, pulpy archaeologist would be expected to solve.
The series took forty years to get here, but it was very much worth the wait.
Nothing quite like a proper, pulpy adventure
This concludes out brief journey through the ages, tracing the history of Indiana Jones games. It was a long road, from a bunch of chunky, yet colorful pixels to environments so realistic and lavish only the latest lighting technology can do them justice.
One thing remains true, however: the charm and appeal of Indiana Jones and his mystical adventures around the world is an endless source of inspiration and entertainment.
If you’d like to be taken on these adventures, hop on over to our marketplace. There are quite a few great deals on Indiana Jones-themed games, and no giant boulders rolling down on your head if you claim them.