It is very, very strange that there are so few excellent Indiana Jones games. The characters and fantasy-20th-century that make up Henry Jones Jr’s world are uniquely suited to the tropes and traditions of game design. This isn’t to say that Indy hasn’t had some success in the medium. The arcade game of Temple of Doom is a memorably colorful quarter-muncher (though, the less said of its home ports, the better,) JVC’s Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures on Super Nintendo is the best platformer that studio produced, and Lucasarts’ point-and-click adventures, an adaptation of The Last Crusade and an original story called Fate of Atlantis, are rightfully beloved for both their branching stories and their taxing logic puzzles. The rest of Indy’s gaming oeuvre, however, ranges from tolerably mediocre, like Traveler’s Tales’ Lego Indiana Jones, to plain bad, like Windows/N64’s Infernal Machine. (Infernal Machine is especially notable because it’s the only game in the franchise that falls into the genre most-suited to Indiana Jones, the Tomb Raider-styled 3D platformer. Tomb Raider has always been modeled on Indiana Jones’ particular brand of archaeological adventuring. Raider’s spiritual successor, Uncharted, is even more explicitly inspired by Jones, right down to the sarcastic male lead of dubious morality with a heart of gold.) It’s true that officially licensed videogames have something of a history when it comes to sucking, but given Indiana Jones’ Lucasfilms/Lucasarts pedigree, you’d expect the franchise to have at least as good a track record as Star Wars. (By my calculations, you get one good Star Wars game for every three terrible ones. Luckily, that equates to a lot of good Star Wars games.)
Today, the pertinent question is not why are there not more good Indiana Jones games, but why aren’t there more Indiana Jones games period?
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