After finally hanging up his hat on the cinema, Indiana Jones embarks this Monday on a new adventure in the form of a video game, with the promise of living the story “through the eyes” of the famous archaeologist, digitally recreated from the files of his interpreter, Harrison Ford.
“We see the game as a direct sequel to ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’” the first and enormous success of the saga (1981), Jerk Gustafsson, the game’s director, said in August during a presentation to the press.
Developed for almost four years by the Swedish studio MachineGames, owned by Microsoft, “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle” allows you to embody the adventurer in the first person, “discover the world through his eyes” and “explore dark tombs while avoiding traps deadly,” explained Jerk Gustafsson.
Alternating puzzles, chases and combat scenes, The game follows the adventures of the archaeologist in 1937, from the Vatican to China and Egypt, in search of a mysterious secret power coveted by Nazi spies.
“It is without a doubt the most ambitious game we have ever made,” said Gustafsson, whose studio developed the recent episodes of the “Wolfenstein” series.
“Spielberg’s style”
Although American filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, creators of Indiana Jones, were not directly involved in the projectMachineGames had access to unpublished files from the filming of the first films thanks to a collaboration with Lucasfilm Games, the video game division of Lucasfilm, which has belonged to Disney since 2012.
“We started from scratch based on these photos so that the resemblance was as faithful as possible,” explained Axel Torvenius, creative director of the game, to AFP.
This “invaluable” help made it possible to recreate quite accurately the face of a thirty-something-year-old Harrison Ford, to whom actor Troy Baker, voice of Joel in the successful game “The Last of Us”, lends his voice.
The rest of the characters were 3D scanned from real actors, a classic procedure in the creation of modern video games.
The developers also sought to “imitate Spielberg’s style” in the staging of the cinematic sequences (without gameplay), reproducing almost shot by shot the opening sequence of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
The result is quite impressive, although some graphical errors and slight performance problems have been found in the game.
“Immense pressure”
“The pressure has been immense,” acknowledged Axel Torvenius, aware that some fans of the saga can be very demanding when it comes to touching one of the characters from their childhood. “We have no right to fail!” added Jens Andersson, the game’s designer.
This iconic pop culture hero has already had more than a dozen video game adaptations in almost 40 years, some very popular, such as the graphic adventures for PC from the early 1990s..
“I’m a big fan of those games,” confessed Jens Andersson, but “they were a product of their time and we had to do something new.”
Initially planned only for Xbox Series and PC, “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle” will finally arrive early next year on PlayStation 5, thanks to a policy change in Microsoft’s video game division regarding exclusivity.
The game will also have to overcome the relative cinematic failure of “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (2023), which, despite grossing about $384 million worldwide, generated almost half of what its predecessor achieved, “ Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (2008).