Today, we’re lucky to live in a time in which you can play what is arguably the best Indiana Jones video game ever made: Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. To be clear, it’s not the first instant classic Indiana Jones video game, but when did Indiana Jones games become incredible? There’s a good argument for the 1992 game, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, but the truth is, one 1985 game had to get us to the point where the whip-cracking adventures of our favorite scruffy archaeologist seemed viable and, crucially, playable.
That game was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which was released in 1985, one year after the film of the same name was in theaters. The Temple of Doom was developed by Atari Games and released, at first, exclusively as an arcade game. This was the third Indiana Jones game overall, following an at-home Atari version of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1982, and an original home computer adventure in 1984 called Indiana Jones and the Lost Kingdom. But those games might as well not exist relative to the history of Indy games. True, there’s always some novelty in navigating a stick figure with a hat and a whip, but the nostalgia around the first two Indy games is only dimly felt, and likely connected to novelty and not actual enjoyable memories of gameplay.
