Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure

About Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure (1989) is Lucasfilm Games' SCUMM adventure released alongside the film, with an "Indy Quotient" score that rewards finding alternative solutions, and Lucasfilm's best-selling game at the time.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure in Depth

The plot follows and expands on the film. Back at his college after recovering the Cross of Coronado, Indiana Jones is approached by businessman Walter Donovan about the Holy Grail and the disappearance of Indy's father. He travels to Venice and the catacombs, meets archaeologist Elsa Schneider, finds his father held in Brunwald Castle after negotiating its maze of corridors and guards, and loses the Grail Diary when Elsa's double role is revealed. Father and son pass through Berlin to retrieve it, with a brief meeting with Adolf Hitler, then flee by Zeppelin or biplane, pursued by Nazi planes over Europe, towards the Valley of the Crescent Moon. Some elements of the film, including the Brotherhood of the Grail, Sallah, the Venice boat chase and the desert battle, appear only as small hidden references.

It added a flexible point system, the IQ or "Indy Quotient", similar to Sierra's but kept across restarts and restores, and the game can be completed in several ways. The maximum IQ of 800 can only be reached by finding alternative solutions, such as fighting a guard instead of avoiding him, which gave adventure games new replay value, though some fights, such as the one with the Zeppelin attendant, are very hard.

Making Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure

Lucasfilm Games released the game in May 1989, simultaneously with the film, for DOS, Amiga, Atari ST and Mac, later adding a VGA PC version and an FM Towns CD-ROM version with 256-colour graphics and CD audio. Its primitive dialogue system, in which Talk sometimes let the player choose between lines, was fully developed in The Secret of Monkey Island and used in every later LucasArts adventure except Loom. It was well received: Computer and Video Games gave the PC version 91%, calling it "a brilliant film tie-in and a superlative game in its own right", Dragon gave it five stars, Computer Gaming World praised its cinematic qualities and well-designed puzzles, and Game Informer later gave it nine out of ten. Hal Barwood called it a "sizeable hit"; with over 250,000 copies sold, it was Lucasfilm's best-selling game at the time. In 1991 PC Format put it among the 50 best computer games of all time, saying Indy was recreated on the monitor as impressively as on the big screen.