By Last year, Bethesda and MachineGames presented an exceptional new entry in the realm of Indiana Jones with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the inaugural console game for the franchise since Lego Indiana Jones 2 in 2009. Some gamers may recall, however, that before the Lego titles, there existed a few desktop Indiana Jones point-and-click graphic adventure games, one of which was created in a frantic 9-month timeframe.
Ron Gilbert, the mind behind the enduring adventure game series Monkey Island, discussed with Retro Gamer magazine how he and his team were abruptly assigned to create an Indiana Jones game. “The Indiana Jones rights had been given to another party, and they weren’t delivering,” he clarified. “They weren’t actually developing the game.”
Lucasfilm Games – which would later transform into LucasArts before reverting back to Lucasfilm Games – transferred the rights to Gilbert and two other individuals skilled in adventure games, Noah Falstein and David Fox.
An unnamed studio had seemingly been holding onto the rights for years, failing to produce a game, until Lucasfilm lost their patience and terminated the agreement.
“Lucasfilm reclaimed the rights,” Gilbert recounted, “and David Fox, Noah Falstein and I had nine months to complete the entire game – from start to finish.”
This nine-month crunch resulted in the 1989 release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure. A digital rendition and expansion of the film of the same name, the game received a positive response upon its release.
Shortly after its success, Lucasfilm Games launched the first chapter of Gilbert’s Monkey Island series in 1990, with its most recent installment released in 2022, distributed by Devolver Digital.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a significant departure from the 1989 point-and-click adventure. The latest title for the IP, a MachineGames-style shooter adventure, garnered favorable reviews all around and received several nominations and accolades. It successfully b