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Retro spotlight: Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures

The Indiana Jones version of the Super Star Wars games, except the entire trilogy is in one place instead of spread out over three games.

January 06, 2025

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

As has been said elsewhere (but also by me), Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn’t the first action game in the series, not by a longshot. It’s the first truly great one, however, with its predecessors ranging from outright bad to pretty good. One of the action games that falls somewhere in the middle is 1994’s Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures for the SNES. Developed by Factor 5 and LucasArts with publishing duties handled by the latter and JVC Musical Industries, Greatest Adventures is a combination of two things. First, it’s a video game adaptation presented in the style of LucasArts’ and JVC’s Super Star Wars trilogy of games, which is to say, with real emphasis on the video game portion of things, not a shot-by-shot recreation.

Rather than three separate games like with that series, however, Greatest Adventures is pluralized for a reason. You’ll go through Super Star Wars-style levels based on all three of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, and the Last Crusade. There are 28 levels, with one-third of those split among the three movies each, and, like with the Super Star Wars games, there’s a combination of side-scrolling action platforming and vehicular levels that rely on the SNES’ Mode 7 capabilities.

Greatest Adventures not only utilizes the same engine as the Super Star Wars games, but it’s pretty obvious that Factor 5 and LucasArts saw utility in reusing assets where possible. And why not? Harrison Ford plays a character in both Star Wars and in Indiana Jones, so why not use the Han Solo character model and animations for Indiana Jones, only now in a hat and with a different jacket? Yes, a whip animation had to be made from scratch, since Han Solo wasn’t wielding one of those, but they have Indiana Jones and Han Solo drawing a pistol and firing it the exact same way in Super Star Wars and Greatest Adventures — that second arm behind the back in a very specific and memorable way — and the roll move both characters do is the same, as well.

A screenshot of the title screen of Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures, with the Indiana Jones font/logo above, art of Indy staring out at the screen in the center, and all of it made to look like it's on an old-timey map, in terms of the grime/weathering/coloring of it all. There's a small, chibi Indy sprite used to show whether you're on "Start" or "Password" or "Options"

While an engine and some assets are shared like this, they’re also two very different experiences. Both action platformers, sure, but while the Super Star Wars trio leans more on the action side, Indy has got more of the platforming. It’s not that the former lacks platforming challenges, because anyone who has played them has probably died more from those than from any of the fighting, but it’s that you’re doing more punching and whipping and occasional shooting in Greatest Adventures, rather than incessant violence. It’s way more action and violence than the movies being adapted, yes, but it’s a step below what the Super Star Wars games produced in their own interpretation of that series’ films.

This is to leave a bit more room for utilizing the whip as a whip and not just as a weapon — there are gaps to swing across, you know — and also just because, with the slower pace of punching and whipping and guns that don’t fire homing missiles or ion blasts or plasma waves out of them, there are fewer enemies to rid yourself of, as well. Still, this is the Indiana Jones version of those games, and it was probably the right call to condense the three movies into a single title — swashbuckling blockbuster action movies they may be, but Star Wars certainly is the winner when it comes to outlandish and memorable set pieces and creatures and such. This isn’t a discussion of which films are “better,” but an understanding that there was just a lot more to pull from in terms of accurate-ish and interesting recreations of the movies, in action video game form, from the Star Wars films.

Throw in that it was already 1994 when Greatest Adventures first released — the Playstation and Saturn would hit North American shelves the next year, which also happened to be when Great Adventures came out in Europe — and it’s easy to see why LucasArts and Co. didn’t commit to doing an entire other trilogy. Super Star Wars had released in 1992, and the concluding game, Return of the Jedi, came out a week after Greatest Adventures.

Not to harp on this comparison too much, but, like with Super Star Wars, you’re not playing Greatest Adventures because you want a shot-for-shot recreation of the movies you love. You’re looking for a very video game-y adaptation of them that emphasizes action and platforming, that does a, for the time and the hardware, admirable job of at least recreating the stories of these movies. Just like Chewbacca didn’t actually go through and shoot every alien creature in the cantina in Mos Eisley before meeting up with Han Solo in Star Wars as he does in Super Star Wars, Indiana Jones is going to fight a whole bunch of arachnids and dodge way more spikes and fight way more people trying to stop him on his way to the idol in the cave in Peru than we see him do on the big screen in Raiders.

A screenshot of a cutscene from Greatest Adventures, which is a static image from the film Raiders of the Lost Ark placed into the game. Indiana Jones, dressed in his professor's suit and wearing glasses, is speaking with Dr. Marcus Brody at the university where he works. The text reads, "A French archaeologist is helping them. His name is René Belloq."

While there are 28 stages, there are more shorter ones mixed in than you find in the Super Star Wars games — Greatest Adventures is longer than they are, but not by as much as the level count suggests (Super Star Wars had 15 levels, Empire had 22, Jedi 19). Running from the boulder trap is an entire level unto itself, for instance, and while it goes on in-game for longer than in Raiders, it’s also pretty short all told. There’s no backup battery in the cartridge, so you’ll have to use passwords if you decide to stop playing to pick it back up later. If you know what you’re doing, you can complete the whole thing in under two hours, but it’ll take time and repetition for you to get to that point. Again: this is a game made out of platforming designed to kill you.

Indy can punch by default, but you can pick up a whip upgrade pretty regularly, and use that both for fighting and platforming. You’ll sometimes find a pistol to wield, and it has unlimited bullets and the ability to be fired in eight directions, but as said, guns aren’t quite as necessary in Greatest Adventures than in the cousins to this game. Especially since the whip has loads of range, and you should be familiar with its use given you don’t always have a gun, anyway.

A screenshot of Indiana Jones in the first level of Greatest Adventures, using his whip. The whip is mostly overhead, right after the motion of using it, as it launches itself forward and in front of Jones.

Factor 5 worked with LucasArts to develop the game, which was their first joint effort in what would end up being a lengthy partnership. Their relationship with LucasArts was so strong, in fact, that the Germany-based developer ended up opening a branch in the United States to make their partnership easier to deal with during a time of much slower internet speeds than what we’ve got today. The relationship all began in the early days of Factor 5, as well, when they were still developing titles for the Amiga. As co-founder Julian Eggebrecht told IGN back in 1998:

In '89, I worked for Softgold/Rainbow Arts as a producer and met the whole gang. In those days Softgold was the distributor of LucasFilm Games in Germany and we translated their games into German. So in '89, I visited the [Skywalker] Ranch because of localization issues. That was like a dream -- I just finished high-school and a few months later I get the job and found myself on the Skywalker Ranch. Wow! (laughs) And that's where I met a young, ambitious producer who had just started -- he slept in the same house and even lent me some money. His name was Kalani Streicher.

Kalani is half German and half Hawaiian. He had just started at Lucas and eventually produced the whole Super Star Wars series for the Super NES. After that, he was partly responsible for the X-Wing series for PCs. Years later, in '92, we were at the CES [Consumer Electronics Show] and bumped into him. After he told me that I still owed him $30 (laughs), Kalani asked us to step into the LucasArts booth and told us that he had played Turrican on the Super NES. He said that it was "pretty nice" and that it would be cool if we made some more games. Then he turned around and said, "here are six projects, pick one, which game do you want to make?" (laughs)

Kalani, as said, was the producer for the Super Star Wars series, so it should be no surprise that one of the six options shown to Eggrebrecht was what would become Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures. This project, as well as a couple on the Playstation, led to Factor 5 eventually making what they’re probably known best for in terms of their relationship with LucasArts: the Rogue Squadron games.

Factor 5 would take another shot at Indiana Jones, as well, though, it wasn’t an original effort. Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine was a 3D action-adventure game released for Windows in 1999, developed by LucasArts. It was criticized for its controls and for its obvious debts to Tomb Raider — Factor 5 couldn’t do anything about the latter, but for the first part, they reworked the control scheme for a Nintendo 64 port of the game. It’s the superior version, owing to the decision to translate the keyboard controls into ones inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Nintendo’s classic action-adventure title on the system which was made with the N64’s pad in mind. That, and the use of the Expansion Pak to achieve higher resolution textures and improved graphics helped the game on the visual side, as well — no surprise there, considering Factor 5 is the reason the Expansion Pak existed for commercial use in the first place.

Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures isn’t a must-play by any means, but if you’re into Indy and the Super Star Wars games, it’s certainly worth a look just to see how the series was translated to this style of game. It’s not available anywhere, though, at least not officially, and there’s probably far less of a chance it ever sees the light of day again than the Super Star Wars game that inspired it. Still, if nothing else, it marks the true beginning of the relationship between Factor 5 and LucasArts, which proved fruitful for both parties for a decade, as well as for those who had an N64 or GameCube in that stretch.

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