Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Adventure Prototype Recovered for the C64
14 comments
·September 8, 2025egypturnash
In 2017, a cartridge release was discussed for the game, but the response from Thorsten was that the game was so complex that it could take many years – the limitation was not RAM or CPU, but “Time”. He was very busy, managing a family with three small children, and so time to do the game was extremely limited. It seemed this would eventually contribute to the game being abandoned.
This sounds reasonable, the original game was the product of about 40 people working for about a year. Plus the four or five years some of those people previously spent on building their adventure game interpreter. Demaking a game takes less time than making one - you've got the whole game there already and you just have to figure out how to simplify it to fit into your target system - but it's still A Lot.
(original game credits: https://www.mobygames.com/game/534/indiana-jones-and-the-las...)
georgeecollins
I think I could add some great entries to this website! When I started at Activision I went through a bunch of old Infocom (Zork/ Planetfall) docs including design docs for games they never made. It taught me a lot.
And then I have my own. I might even still have a cartridge for Halo for the Nintendo DS. It was really pretty nice, but Bungie was like: No way!
brightball
I wonder how entertaining the old style text games would be with modern AI to help interpret actions that people try to make.
chubasco
Over here still holding my breath for a hi-def remaster of the Fate of Atlantis game.
Nifty3929
That game was SO GOOD. I really liked how they provided three different ways to play, and I completed the game on all three.
ggambetta
Shut up and take my money
dark-star
PSA, because I was expecting something different:
This was not found on some 30+ year old floppy that some Lucasfilm Games developer found in his attic or anything.
It is from a fan-remake from 2012 that was abandoned.
basfo
Agree completely, the title is misleading. I was amazed by it by just watching the video, but this is actually a fan project. Which is cool, but not a prototype of the original game as the title implies, or something that should be "recovered".
Friend of mine just finished a few year-long journey of developing and releasing a game, soon in physical format as well for Commodore 64 https://delta-machine.itch.io/tantooman There's still something magical in developing for ye olde machines, even by using modern tools like you know, text editors :), cross-compilers, etc.