Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was a natural fit for Wolfenstein developer MachineGames, not because they're both first-person action games, but because they both prominently feature Nazis as a punching bag for the player character, a tried and true crowd pleaser.
We caught up with MachineGames creative director Axel Torvenius ahead of this year's BAFTA Games Awards, and we had to ask him if there was an intentionality behind taking on a game where Nazis are the bad guys after making Wolfenstein games for more than a decade. Torvenius declined to say, but he did admit the project was a "very natural fit" for the studio.
"I think that obviously there is a common enemy. There's a red thread throughout the games that we made so far, that has a common enemy," says Torvenius.
"I don't know – it just happened to be that with the legacy of the other type of games that we've been doing, we had that type of enemies, and it felt very natural to be in the same space with Indiana Jones in terms of the main enemy lineup. So, I don't know. I don't know if we're destined for it, but that's just how it's been carved out for us, at the moment, at least."
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was one of my favorite games of 2024, which was yet another jam-packed year for great games, and whether or not MachineGames made it specifically to let players punch more Nazis, I'm glad it exists. I also would not be the slightest bit upset to see MachineGames make more games about punching Nazis. I'm just saying, it's not too late to make a movie adaptation of the 2009 Quentin Tarantino flick Inglourious Basterds.
