Game review: Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis (1992)

Studio: LucasArts
Designer(s): Hal Barwood / Noah Falstein
Part of series: Indiana Jones
Release: June 26, 1992 (DOS) / August 27, 1993 (FM Towns)
St. George’s Games: Complete playthrough (4 hours 44 mins.)

Basic Overview

Despite the critical and commercial success of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, the second LucasArts games based on the franchise — and the first one to feature a (relatively) original script — would probably never have happened if not for an exclusive initiative from one particular person. The culprit was Hal Barwood, a movie veteran whose career had started with working on the special effects for George Lucas’ THX 1138 and allegedly culminated with writing and producing the epic Dragonslayer in 1981. In 1990, Hal joined the LucasArts video game department — immediately becoming the oldest and most experienced worker in its creative section — with the goal of realizing a childhood dream: transfer the artistic magic of cinema and literature into the new medium of computer game entertainment. Obviously, he was far from the only contemporary game designer to be driven by that dream, but most of the competition involved younger people, usually recent art school and tech school graduates with fairly clean slates; Barwood was one of the few who’d seriously cut his teeth on «traditional» media, and, of course, movie veterans or professional writers willing to enter a completely brand new world were scarcer than James Joyce’s teeth.

Nobody of that caliber had worked at Sierra On-Line — in fact, Barwood’s brief entry into the world of LucasArts may have been George Lucas’ single most unique contribution to the medium of adventure games, that one particular moment where the connection between fantasy / sci-fi movie-making and fantasy / sci-fi video games blazed brighter than ever before. And while my own experience with video games is insufficient to lay any serious claims as to how influential that development might truly have been, I think Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis was one of those few titles from the early 1990s, along with Gabriel Knight, which helped, for a brief fleeting moment, really create the illusion that the medium of cinema was on its way out, soon to be replaced with a new medium that would have all the advantages of cinema while putting you, the player, on top of it all. Of course, much like the «Woodstock Dream», that illusion faded away even before the start of the new millennium, but wasn’t it sweet while it lasted?..

This is not to say that Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis really turned out as good as Gabriel Knight would turn out to be the next year — nor, in fact, that it is nearly such a flawless masterpiece as it was described in some contemporary reviews. It shared certain technical limitations with its predecessor, certain substantial limitations with any LucasArts adventure game at the time, and, most importantly, it was limited for sticking a bit too close to the rigid «Indiana Jones Formula», closer, I’d argue, even than any of the actual Indiana Jones movies themselves (more on that below). Besides that, it is not always fun to play — parts of the game are quite frustrating — and, overall, feels more bare-boned and «clunky» (to use a highly overrated term in gaming circles, but I’ll try to justify it later) than, for instance, something like King’s Quest VI, released the same year with far more polish.

None of this, however, prevented the game from becoming a major bestseller for LucasArts (ultimate sales figures amounted to nearly 1 million copies, if Noah Falstein’s report is not exaggerated) and a cult favorite that is often referred to by fans as «the real Indiana Jones 4». (Some of its elements have even been accepted as «canon» within the franchise, such as the character of Sophia Hapgood, who would later return in several comic books and in the action-adventure sequel of Indiana Jones And The Infernal Machine in 1999). Perhaps it is my overall slightly condescending attitude toward the Indiana Jones franchise on the whole — after all, let’s face it, the entire thing has always been pure fluffy popcorn entertainment even when compared to the enduring family values of Star Wars — that prevents me from rating the game all that high; or perhaps it is precisely the fact that it seems to take itself a bit more seriously than the usual LucasArts fare, with its permanently satirical / post-modern overtones that simultaneously fawn over contemporary pop culture and lambast it to shreds. (Loom was the only exception, but it was far more unique in its execution than either of the two Indiana Jones games). In any case, let us delve into some details first and lay out the basis for these feelings so that everyone can make a fair decision.

Content evaluation

Plotline

Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein allegedly settled on the idea of connecting Indiana Jones with the myth of Atlantis while perusing George Lucas’ personal library at the Skywalker Ranch, after having rejected several earlier unrealised proposals for movie scripts. The idea itself was quite brilliant, I believe, in that it wouldn’t feel totally adequate for an actual movie — even if grappling with supernatural powers had been a fundamental component of the Indie formula from the very start, they were always thrown in as a cherry-on-top, usually culminating in deus-ex-machina fashion at the end of the movie rather than influencing the storyline and atmosphere at every single turn. Atlantis — especially if envisioned the way it is in the game, as a civilization set up by alien beings rather than super-intelligent humans — would have pushed the movie franchise into sci-fi overdrive, making it much harder for viewers to suspend disbelief while glued to the big screen. (Kinda similar to the distance covered from From Russia With Love to Moonraker in the Bond franchise, if you know what I mean).

For an adventure game, though, in which puzzles, exploration, and atmospheric immersion mattered far more than chase scenes, shootouts, or cliffhangers, the decision was ideal. Video game Indiana Jones had no such limits as movie star Indiana Jones, and nothing prevented the designers from sending him off to Mount Olympus or Orion’s Belt if they so desired. They still settled for something a little more humble than that, deciding that the scattered «clues» left behind in Plato’s dialogs would be a perfect fit for an Indie-themed adventure — in which the good guys would have to beat the bad guys (Nazis, of course) to the mystical secrets of Atlantean power. This would at the same time follow the standard formula of Raiders Of The Lost Ark and The Last Crusade AND keep things fresher than before by moving away from Judeo-Christian symbolism and embracing both pagan antiquity (at first) and Spielberg-style alien science fiction (eventually).

That said, my own major disappointment in the plot is that it sticks way too close to the formula. Sometimes, in fact, I can’t help but feel that Barwood and Falstein were simply working off the script of The Lost Ark, replacing specific parameters with Atlantean stuff as they went along. In addition to the «power-hungry scientist» / «sadistic Nazi brute» dichotomy of Belloq / Toht in the movie paralleled by the pairing of devious doctor Hans Ubermann vs. Nazi brute Klaus Kerner, the game also saddles us with the next incarnation of Marion Ravenwood — Dr. Sophia Hapgood, Indiana’s former assistant and (of course) love interest, whose love-and-hate relationship with Jones over the course of the game rather closely reflects the Marion line from the first movie. Almost every scene in the game evokes, sometimes directly, sometimes vaguely, some other moment from Lost Ark. There are archaeological digs, there is a Nazi U-Boat, and there is, naturally, the final victory over the bad guys through exploiting their own greed and stupidity rather than any particular acts of valiance on Indie’s part.

This is hardly a problem if you happen to be new to the franchise (which may have been a vague possibility in 1992, but mere years, let alone decades, later who in the world would happen to get acquainted with Dr. Indiana Jones through a graphic adventure game?); however, if you are not, The Fate Of Atlantis is so reverent in its application of the «more of the same» principle that I personally could not help but get significantly bored during many of its segments. The endless quips between Indie and Sophia, for instance, are occasionally cute or funny, but we already know that style well enough from the Indie-Marion banter not to get too excited. The only saving grace is that, due to this being a LucasArts game and all, all the characters generally act goofier and more cartoonish-ly than they do in the movies — and it helps quite a bit that in the talkie version of the game, Dr. Hans Ubermann is voiced by the exact same actor who would later voice Dr. Fred Edison for Day Of The Tentacle, in exactly the same over-the-top buffoon-cartoon manner.

In other words, much like The Last Crusade was a cartoon-style filtered take on the movie, so does The Fate Of Atlantis continue to take the franchise into a goofier direction — a decision that seems to be not so much intentionally chosen as spontaneously triggered by both the game’s technical limitations (graphics, dialog system) and the fact that adventure game puzzling works best within a certain absurd-logic framework rather than in strict adjustment with real world circumstances. There is, for instance, a sequence where one of the secondary characters has to be relieved of an object with the aid of Indie in a ghost disguise — something that could never have worked in a proper movie, but absolutely does not feel out of place in the context of the game. While some (mostly people with a limited sense of humor, I’d say) might find such sequences difficult to adjust to, they are actually the ones that give the game a much-needed personality boost.

One thing that is always talked about when it comes to discussing the design of The Fate Of Atlantis is how, at a certain point, the game splits into three different scenarios, conventionally named The Team Path, The Wits Path, and The Fists Path. The first one involves taking Sophia along with you on most of your journey, solving puzzles through cooperation; the second and third are solo journeys, the first of which is more puzzle-oriented and the second one, obviously, includes more action sequences (where you have to remember your boxing lessons from Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade). This split was even originally marketed on a «three-games-in-one!» basis, apparently being regarded as a key point that would help boost both sales and critical appraisal — though, honestly, it was not even all that original, given that the three-part strategy had already been well-tested by Sierra’s Gold Rush! as early as 1989.

I myself was a little worn out by the game by the time I completed The Team Path — arguably the most fun of the three, since having the sharp-tongued companionship of Sophia is always a nice bonus — so I never went for the solo paths myself, but from what I have seen they are not that much different: mostly, Indie has to visit the same locations and interact with the same NPCs, but parts of the dialog are naturally changed and quite a few of the puzzles get alternate solutions, so, clearly, there is some replayability value here (also, you cannot get the full score without completing all three paths). Even so, the three paths eventually converge and give you more or less the same ending, so «three-games-in-one» is an overstatement; I certainly do not perceive it as the central focus point of the whole experience.

Speaking of the final act of the show, it, too, is a bit disappointing. Although the depiction of the ruins of Atlantis feels pretty stunning for a 1992 video game, Barwood and Falstein did not manage to come up with anything genuinely interesting happening in those ruins. You navigate some mazes, solve some door-opening puzzles, get into one odd final confrontation, let the baddies exterminate themselves by outwitting them, and get the hell outta there (with the obligatory explosions, of course). At the end of it all, «Atlantis» remains every bit of the same mystery that it was at the start. Perhaps it was wise of the designers not to abuse the cheapest possible strategy of having Indie and Sophia meet «the last Atlantean» or anything like that, but still, their journey through the underwater ruins could probably use some extra excitement. I certainly do get that uncomfortable feeling of «that’s it?» at the end of the game, much unlike the movies.

Of course, credit must still be given to the amount of research and creativity that went into the construction of the «lore» of the game — including Barwood’s writing of a large chunk of «Plato’s lost dialog», though the end result is really more of a monolog than a dialog, to be accurate. The game also takes care to guide you to locations that the movie Indiana Jones never got around to visit — such as Iceland or Crete — and manages to build an interesting speculative connection between the idiosyncrasies of Archaic Greek civilization and imaginary alien cultures, as probably the only positive outcome of Madame Blavatsky’s hallucinatory legacy. Unfortunately, we are dealing with a limited-budget adventure title, not some sprawling RPG with virtually unlimited space for world-building à la Morrowind, so you really only get a small taste of what could have been a much grander experience. It’s too bad because The Fate Of Atlantis is not an action game — it’s a game of exploration and thinking — and it would have significantly benefited from a more in-depth presentation of the lost world it gave us.

Puzzles

In general, the design and practical implication of the puzzles and challenges for The Fate Of Atlantis follows the formula already established in The Last Crusade. The tasks alternate between dialog-based (navigate your way through the dialog tree to fall upon the correct and/or optimal choice), inventory-based, logic-based (often by using the clues provided by the «lost Plato dialog» in your backpack), and, of course, action-based if you happen to be a fan of Indy’s pugilist moves (I am not and I always opt for a pacifist solution — just because it’s usually more fun).

Any modifications to the formula are mostly cosmetic; for instance, the early stages of the game play out more or less as a tutorial, with Indy having to perform several basic actions while the opening credits are still rolling — the game plunges you into (lightweight) action right from the opening seconds, which was still quite an innovative move in the early 1990s. Then the very first proper «challenge» — Indy needs to get past the bouncer to get inside the theater where Sophia is giving a lecture on Atlantis — can already be resolved in three different ways (talking / sneaking / fighting), presaging the eventual split of the game into three paths. And then, finally, you get your first inventory-based puzzle in order to be able to draw Sophia’s attention, and now we are back in fairly traditional adventure game mode.

Rather predictably, the puzzles tend to oscillate between fascinating and tedious — the latter mostly having to do with inavoidable action sequences (like having to navigate your hot air balloon through the Egyptian desert, or to clunkily pilot the Nazi submarine inside a tiny hole which gives nary a single clue that within may be hidden the ruins of Atlantis... what is this, frickin’ Codename Iceman?), pesky mazes (the one you have to navigate to get to the center of the circle in Atlantis is particularly generic and frustrating), and — this is a personal peeve of mine — the unnecessary randomization factor, wherefore certain objects can be found in randomly allocated places with each new playthrough; I have always found this is a fairly cheap and uninspired way to raise a game’s replayability value. With three different paths with different puzzles already covering a solid chunk of the game, why should one resort to such additional complications? You have probably sniffed out all these locations during your first playthrough anyway, now you just have to run around them like crazy all over again.

On the other hand, puzzles where you have to combine the right dialog choices with a little inventory-juggling, such as the goofy seance with Sophia and Professor Trottier, or the run-in with the knife-thrower in the Algierian desert, are all classic examples of solid LucasArts design. And even some of the logical puzzles (like figuring out the right symbol combinations to make the three Stones properly turn on their spindles) are, well, logical if you’re not too lazy to read between the lines of «Plato’s Lost Dialog». I probably wouldn’t place any of those challenges on the 100 Best Adventure Game Puzzles list, but there is a solid enough number of them to keep the game from turning into a fully tedious slog.

Generally, though, there is little to discuss in this section that has not already been discussed in the review for The Last Crusade, other than make an observation that, perhaps, the puzzle part of both Indiana Jones games actually suffers from the games having to be a bit more «realistic» than the downright absurdist scenarios of the majority of LucasArts classics, where the writers could frustrate the players to no end — but at the benefit of displaying bewilderingly amusing surges of imaginative power. I mean, you may hate the infamous «monkey wrench» puzzle of Monkey Island 2, or the «hamster sweater» challenge of Day Of The Tentacle, or the (somewhat later) «gold tooth» venture in The Curse Of Monkey Island, but at least you’ll never forget them, especially if you eventually manage to work through them without hints. The Fate Of Atlantis, in comparison, offers nothing to truly stun your imagination. Whether or not the designers realized it themselves, they were still firmly held back by the unwritten laws of the Hollywood blockbuster formula — this was, after all, Indiana Jones And The Holy Grail, not Monty Python And The Same.

Atmosphere

First and foremost, The Fate Of Atlantis is a (comparatively) large game — almost twice the size of The Last Crusade, especially if you throw in the variations from its three paths. Its predecessor was notably claustrophobic, with the majority of the action taking place in dungeon-like locations (the Venetian catacombs, Castle Brunwald, the Zeppelin, the Temple); this one, in full accordance with classic Indiana Jones’ love for esoteric geography, takes you to Iceland, Central America, Algiers, and Crete, in addition to more «civilized» locations like Monte Carlo — often doing so, I should add, at your own pace, with the ability to easily transport from one place to another as much as you need (costing poor Indy a fortune in boat and airplane tickets, I guess, but then nobody in the world pays its professors more than the legendary Barnett College). This alone means that the game is more «atmospheric» by definition than its tightly budgeted predecessor — but, unfortunately, it is still a fairly perfunctory type of atmosphere.

As befits Indy’s character, he is not on vacation in all these beautiful places: they act strictly as clue-holders to the secret he’s chasing, and while there may be an occasional remark or two on admiring the scenery, the usual ideology is «get through these jungles / deserts / sprawling hillside ruins as quickly as possible to get to the real McGuffin». The diversity of the locations and scenery is commendable, but you run through them all too quickly, with no desire or incentive to linger too long in any single space. The Fate Of Atlantis is quite straightforward about its mission: you are not here to live in this big wide world, you are to apply your brain in order to solve its challenges.

Arguably the only segment of the game where it feels like the artists and designers really wanted to impress you are the ruins of Atlantis as such — with all those extra corridors and empty rooms crafted just for show, they clearly want us to generate some feelings for that one location of theirs which is a pure product of imagination. What those feelings are supposed to be is not exactly clear, but on the whole, the team chooses a «threatening» look for Atlantis, making it look somewhat like a cross between an Assyrian palace and a Star Trek location, combining monumental imposing coldness with befuddling alien weirdness. Additionally, it’s all about engine rooms, dungeons, lava pits, and places of worship — a nice setting for a couple rounds of Doom or Quake or, at the very least, Tomb Raider — which, if you think about it, makes the Atlantean underworld into a very natural location for potential Nazi occupation. It’s done reasonably well, but not well enough to give you nightmares, I’d say (this is where LucasArts’ refusal to include gratuitous death scenes plays against them: this kind of Atlantis is an ideal place for all sorts of monsters and deathtraps, but you can’t even die to that giant octopus!).

Ultimately, most of the atmospheric impact of the game, as is typical for LucasArts, comes from its characters rather than the scenery they find themselves in. This is why the best path of the three is always the Team Path: by having Sophia as a near-permanent companion, Indy can always turn to her for interaction and banter — the latter is usually quite curt, but there are new snippets after almost each new challenge, and the constant barb-trading between the two can have an amusingly soothing effect when you once again find yourself stuck in some God-forsaken spot, trying to extract oblique clues from whatever meager game ammunition you are given. Other characters, be they foes or friends, are also written well enough to make you yearn for human company — too bad that very, very large and long segments of the game have Indy wandering around all alone (and eventually, even Sophia can start getting on your nerves with the same type of jokes).

What is also a little disappointing is that, although the game’s (formally) original plot gives the writers much freer reins than The Last Crusade, its humor is comparatively more direct and traditional and, well, Spielburg-esque than the various subtle and/or post-modern jokes inserted in its predecessor. Doubtless, this has to do with Barwood and Falstein writing all of the script, without any input from Ron Gilbert — which is why the most remembered meme of the Indiana Jones series ("I’m selling these fine leather jackets") still comes from the first game rather than the second. Even the Easter Eggs are fairly predictable, such as the multiple mementos from all of Indiana’s movie plots scattered around his office; the game very rarely breaks character or the fourth wall (Ron Gilbert does get namedropped once, in the context of the Algerian merchant’s shop, but that’s about it, I believe). It’s almost as if Barwood was really bent on the idea of planting the player straight inside the fourth Indiana Jones movie — but as we have, I think, already established, this was still a technical impossibility back in 1992, so if it were up to me, I’d still try to go the Ron Gilbert route and make the whole thing intentionally sillier and more absurd than it turns out to be unintentionally.

Technical features

Graphics

It is probably not a very good omen for the game that its lead artist, William L. Eaken, does not seem to be credited as lead artist on any other game — even despite having an overall impressive portfolio. According to MobyGames, "he has created work for Rhino Records, Paramount Pictures, Steven Spielberg, and NASA", but the next bit sounds somewhat more alarming: "Eaken entered the game industry at Sierra On-Line. Originally he was contracted to work on games, but after they saw some slides of his work, they put him in the marketing department". By 1990, he’d jumped ship and defected to LucasArts (thus becoming one of the very few people to have worked for both of the classic titans of adventure gaming), where he spent a much longer amount of time, but usually in supporting roles.

Not that his work on The Fate Of Atlantis is bad in any constructively describable way; it does what it is supposed to do, achieving the highest possible level of realism for 1992 — especially in the 256-color version — it’s just that graphic realism is not necessarily what I’d like to associate with a studio as whacky and irreverent as LucasArts. Be it the wild impressionistic imagination of Loom, or the cartoonish distorted proportions of Day Of The Tentacle, or the voodoo-breathing, ganja-reeking grotesqueries of Monkey Island, the art of LucasArts was always at its best when blowing our minds with pixel projections of things that only exist in alternate realities, not when it was trying to painstakingly emulate reality, even if we’re talking the reality of Atlantis and its horned inhabitants. The approach here is quite pragmatic — the player has to believe that he is inside a slice of the true Indiana Jones universe — and from that angle, it totally works, but only from that angle.

Of course, the attention to detail is commendable; the artists clearly studied their Cretan source of inspiration well, and the «Atlantean labyrinth» that Indy has to cross several times quite vividly follows the pattern of the actual mazes of Knossos (in this respect, The Fate Of Atlantis rather slyly expands on the alien conspirology themes of Zak McKracken, which drew a direct line from imaginary Martian art to the Egyptian pyramids; here, the suggestion is that aliens were behind the unsolved mysteries of the Minoans rather than Egyptians, but it’s all the same really). The highest peaks of artistic imagination here are the screens on which this «alien Minoan» art is joined with elements of «Stone Age Industrial», as the artists attempt to introduce elements of alternate physics, driven by the unknown properties of the legendary orichalcum — factory-like mechanisms interwoven with statues and architecture from three thousand years ago. These images must have been very impressive back in 1992, and to a certain extent they still hold up even today.

Unfortunately, much like in the previous game there are almost no close-up images or cinematic cut scenes — other than one black-and-white close-up of a newspaper article, we don’t even get a very good idea of what Indy and Sophia look like «in real life», magnified from their sprite incarnations. Speaking of sprites, the game does try to depict those realistically as well: following the trends of the times, real actors were used for motion capture to model the movements of the main characters, even though I cannot say that it makes that much of a difference — the sprites are much smaller than, say, the fighters of Mortal Kombat, so it was a bit of a wasted effort (I don’t think, for instance, that motion capture was used for Gabriel Knight the following year, and the sprites in that game move across the screen just as efficiently). Anyway, just a few close-ups here and there would have been nice — especially during the grand finale, which turns out a bit underwhelming because the supposedly «terrifying» transformations of the bad guys look laughable rather than shocking.

All in all, there certainly were games back in 1992 that looked more astounding (even something like Sierra’s King’s Quest VI, with its realistic cut scenes and high resolution portraits), but the imagery still holds well enough for the game to be perfectly playable even today.

Sound

That the game development team took its duties far more seriously in 1992 than in 1989 is rather evident from a brief comparison of the sound­tracks alone: the complete «rip» of all the tracks from The Last Crusade barely yields about 16 minutes’ worth of music (most of them adapted from John Williams’ score), whereas the same rip for The Fate Of Atlantis yields about four and a half hours’ worth of mostly original compositions (apart from the ubiquitous main theme, of course — the Raiders March). Instead of Eric Hammond, this time around the musical duties were handled by the steady in-house team of Michael Land, Clint Bajakian, and Peter McConnell — the same team that brought to life such gems as Monkey Island 2 and Day Of The Tentacle — and I must say that I am seriously impressed by how they were able to produce a reasonably «serious»-sounding set of compositions, with an epic flair that is every bit as suitable for an Indiana Jones video game as their relatively more whimsical and goofy soundtracks are for the abovementioned titles.

Unfortunately, I failed to emulate the full MIDI paradise while playing myself, but listening separately to the «official» soundtrack, with full-blown orchestration and everything, is a highly enjoyable experience provided you’re into soundtracks at all (and I kind of am). With Andean overtones for the Latin American section, Mid-Eastern influences for the Algerian parts, German martial flairs for the Nazi-related bits, etc., the composers rise to the multi-cultural challenge — and for Atlantis, they produce a set of moody, dreary, cavernous soundscapes whose ancestry is all over the place (‘Darkness At The Entrance Of Atlantis’ is probably the creepiest one of those, but they all work one way or another). That said, the focus is consistently on ambience rather than specific memorable themes — in terms of «can you hum this?», none of the tracks could even begin to approach The Raiders’ March. Keeping in mind that Michael Land was perfectly capable of producing catchy tunes (Monkey Island alone supplies you with more whistle-while-you-work melodies than you’ll ever need for a day at the office), I have to assume that this was intentional — or, perhaps, that they decided they needed to compete in epicness and symphonicity with John Williams himself, which is a battle they could never hope to win... but at least they lost with grace.

But since the game is for playing, after all, not for ripping soundtracks, chances are you’ll be paying much more attention to the voice acting than the music anyway — that is, if you’re playing the CD-ROM talkie version that came out in 1993, which is a bit of a stupid correction to make in 2025, when only the dedicated historian would intentionally seek out a text-only version with a 16-color EGA palette. Unfortunately, the game designers could not get Harrison Ford himself to voice Indiana, but his «substitute», Doug Lee, fills in his shoes pretty well — not that these are particularly grand shoes, as Ford’s voice was probably never his biggest attraction in the first place (then again, I’m not exactly sure what was Harrison Ford’s specific point of attraction; he’s kinda just... Harrison Ford, that’s all). Anyway, Lee’s performance is right on the money: moderately deep and brawny with overtones of average intelligence, remaining steady and unperturbed for most of the game’s running time. Without paying close attention, you could possibly mistake him for Ford himself, and that’s all that matters.

The rest of the cast turn in suitably acceptable performances as well, though not too outstanding. Sophia Hapgood is voiced by Jane Jacobs, who would very soon do an amazing job with the creepy-freaky Laverne in Day Of The Tentacle; here, instead of a weirded out teenage nerd on methadone, she sounds like a fairly normal grown-up woman who might just be a little too obsessed with her mission (although her exaggerated voice when Sophia is possessed by Nur-Ab-Sal is quite grotesque, neither too funny nor too creepy). Denny Delk, another future star of Day Of The Tentacle (HOAGY!), voices several minor characters such as the merchant Omar in Algiers and several of the Nazis — imposingly versatile, but not yet stepping into a role that could properly capture his greatness. Most memorable of the lot is probably Nick Jameson, the future voice of Dr. Fred (and Doctor Red, and Zed) Edison — here, he is playing the Nazi doctor with the exact same mad-scientist intonations he’d use in Day Of The Tentacle, acting as the game’s chief reminder that it should not, after all, be taken seriously.

At the time, the studio (like everybody else) was still in the early days of releasing «talkies»; their only previous experience, and a fairly unsatisfactory at that, had been the talkie version of Loom, so the good news is that adding voices to this game at least did not spoil the experience — nobody here does anything truly remarkable, but everyone rises to the challenge and adds a bit toward livelying up the experience, even if the muffled, relatively lo-fi voice tracks could use some polishing. I would say that 1993 was the golden year in which both Sierra and LucasArts started really making full use of voiceovers (with Gabriel Knight and Day Of The Tentacle closely competing for championship); at this stage, they are still learning the trade. But on the other hand, having the pleasure to hear Jacobs, Delk, and Jameson, all three of them, do their tentative thing here and then, just one year later, being goaded into one of the greatest video game voice performances of all time, offers a fantastic perspective on game development as such — and also, I suppose, on how the interaction between script writers and voice actors would motivate both to significantly raise the bar in the mid-to-late Nineties.

Interface

With a couple years of general evolution between it and the first Indiana Jones game, The Fate Of Atlantis switched to a slightly updated and optimized interface system: the number of command verbs in the menu has been reduced (at the expense of genuinely redundant stuff like "Turn on" and "Turn off"), while the inventory list is now seen not as a plain boring text list at the bottom of the screen, but rather as a cute icon-filled window in the bottom right corner. Both of these innovations are welcome, but, of course, they are fairly minor. Meanwhile, the cumbersome and annoying boxing mechanics remain largely the same as in The Last Crusade, ensuring that you’ll want to spend as little time fighting in this game as possible — it’s a good thing they didn’t have online server statistics in those days, because I’m fairly sure that the number of people who chose the "Fists Path" for any other purpose than stubborn completionism would be pitiful.

As is typical for just about any classic adventure game, everything works fine as long as everything stays within the confines of an adventure game, and everything goes to hell whenever an action / arcade sequence is introduced. For instance, there is a section where you must properly land your balloon in a particular spot in the desert; the mechanics are simple — you just have to switch between clicking the "Vent hydrogen" and "Drop ballast" buttons — but the results of these commands are not intuitive, and the responsiveness of the balloon to the clicking is far from ideal. Over time, you’ll get the hang of it, but I’m not sure if the resulting sense of pride will be really worth it. Much worse than that is the submarine control mini-simulator, where you have to use a set of wheels and levers to guide your submarine inside a tiny cavern opening; the designers toughen up the task by introducing a pseudo-3D perspective to the process, but with the sub only capable of moving in a straight line, the whole procedure becomes exceptionally confusing.

Alas, in this respect The Fate Of Atlantis does nothing whatsoever to disprove the classic golden maxim — the value of each adventure game decreases proportionally to the number of its action sequences (a rule that knows no exceptions when we’re talking of parser-based or point-and-click titles). The good news is that other than the balloon sequence, the sub sequence, the (fully optional) fist-fighting, and maybe that really dumb lava maze at the heart of Atlantis, the game relies almost completely on puzzle-solving. The bad news is that the few unavoidable action sequences may very easily frustrate any modern player, interested in trying out a vintage classic, into dropping the game half-way — but, well, such is the risky fate of just about any classic adventure game title ever released.

Verdict: Arguably the most «grown-up» game LucasArts ever released, both for the better and for the worse.

Among veteran adventure gamers, Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis remains a cult classic — an unjustly forgot­ten one at that, since, unlike many other classic LucasArts games, it has so far remained without a properly remastered version and has to be played through an emulator in woefully inferior graphic resolutions, with woefully inferior soundtrack quality, and so on. The reasons why it has not yet received the caring Monkey Island or Day Of The Tentacle treatment are unclear to me — it may have something to do with Indiana Jones trademark copyright issues, or maybe it’s because neither Ron Gilbert nor Tim Schafer, the chief bearers of the LucasArts torch, were involved with the original game, or maybe it’s just an accident. But to me, it feels like a reasonable enough arrangement of priorities: The Fate Of Atlantis is one of the least typically «LucasArts-flair» games released by the studio, and, blasphemous as it might seem, I sometimes entertain the thought that this is one of the few games made by LucasArts that might have fared better as a Sierra title.

With its overall emphasis on intrigue and adventure rather than on humor and sarcasm, it sets a completely different goal: emulate the popcorn excitement of a Hollywood adventure blockbuster while placing you, the player, square inside the center of the action. At about the same time, Sierra was doing the same with King’s Quest VI, taking its cues from fantasy rather than action movies but otherwise following the same recipe — and with their larger budgets, tougher working teams, and creative talent that was at least equal to LucasArts (Jane Jensen, who did most of the writing, could easily go nose-to-nose with Hal Barwood), they ultimately came out with the superior product. By contrast, The Fate Of Atlantis, created largely within the same «cozy-intimate» framework that yielded all of LucasArts’ post-modern masterpieces, feels rather overweight for its family britches.

I mean, I could certainly forgive it for not having as many straightforward jokes or obscure pop culture references as Monkey Island, but only if it did its own thing in a fully satisfactory fashion. Instead, it tries to give you a really imposing slice of the Indiana Jones universe, but does so very superficially — you run around all those exotic locations without actually being able to immerse yourself into them with plenty of detail, and the «Atlantean lore» is largely confined to a few pages of pseudo-Plato and a bunch of intriguing horned statues around weird mechanical devices that get no true explanation. The characters you meet are usually one-dimensional and strictly quest-focused (compare this, for instance, to the in-depth nature of most of the dialog with NPCs in Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight), while the chief characters — Indy and Sophia themselves — look like believable, but still pale shadows of their counterparts (Indy and Marion) from Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

If you are into games like this primarily for, you know, the elements that make them games — the puzzles, the challenge, the thrill of breaking through — The Fate Of Atlantis is a solid case of game design, minus the clunky action sequences. If, like myself, you enjoy a good balance between the challenge and the «artistic offer», it won’t be difficult to understand why I do not rank this one in the top tier of LucasArts titles, even despite its impressive sales record and everything (but note that the studio would never ever again produce a «semi-realistic» adventure game afterwards: coincidence or...?). The feeling of constantly being underdelivered on some unseen promise never leaves me alone while playing — each scene leaves me wanting more in terms of visuals, dialog choices, hotspot options, surrounding information, whatever. If there ever was a game that suffered more from its low budget, I don’t even know what that is... although, in all honesty, I have no way of knowing if it was really the lack of time and money that was responsible for the result. Perhaps it was just the usual terse / economical way of making LucasArts games — the way that worked admirably well for Monkey Island, but didn’t fare so good in a game that (almost literally) immersed you into the lost world of Atlantis.

That said, I’ll wrap things up with the usual disclaimer: unlike Sierra On-Line, LucasArts never made even one truly bad game in their lives, and my grumblings about The Fate Of Atlantis have to be understood within the context of answering the question «what was it that really made LucasArts great?». Taken strictly on its own, the game has plenty of entertainment value and the usual «retro-charm» that you, by definition, shall never get from the recently released Indiana Jones And The Great Circle (no bad-to-good comparison here — the latter represents a whole new era in gaming). It’s still a fine testament to the imagination, hard work, and idealism of people who truly hoped to elevate humanity to a slightly higher level by giving them agency over artistic content — and I am not even sure they didn’t succeed in this, at least a little bit. But ultimately, I think I’ll still stick to the movies for the rest of my life.