From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about bringing random obscure games back into the light. This time it was one of Indy's most unfortunate misadventures this side of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Where to begin? Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is a godawful mess of a game by anyone's standards. It's ugly. It's boring. It's barely playable. What little plot there is gets buried instantly under the bad controls and embarrassingly poor puzzles. The interesting idea of being able to control two characters at once is utterly squandered by the fact that you won't want to spend a single second more than you have to in their company. And yet despite all this, when you mention Fate of Atlantis, you'll struggle to find anyone who doesn't have warm memories of it. They'll tell you it's one of Lucasarts' best adventures, with a great story and characters that deserved to be immortalised in an actual movie.

So what's going on? Simple. We're not thinking of that Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which is indeed fantastic. No, we're playing Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game.

Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game is an odd one—a cheap movie cash-in, only without the movie. It owe its existence to one, though. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was also split into two games—a SCUMM0based adventure by Noah Falstein, David Fox, and Ron Gilbert that wasn't great but did some interesting things, and a fairly generic cash-in platformer that didn't.

The Fate of Atlantis version took the form of an isometric action-adventure hybrid, but otherwise stuck to the stripped-down nature of movie ports at the time. The original adventure version was huge. The Action Game offered just six levels. The adventure featured a fun plot, with three paths designed around wits, fists, and Indy's new partner, feisty psychic Sophia Hapgood. The action game relies on the manual to tell you what you're doing and why. Most notably of all, at least on first glance, the adventure game actually has Harrison Ford's face on the cover, while the action game had to make do with a random guy in a fedora, plus a huge INDY logo to draw your eye away from the hideous artwork.

It's quite clear which of the two games Lucasarts gave a damn about. And in case you're wondering, yes, the Action Game does admit that it's based on the adventure, rather than pretending the two were equals.

You know you're in trouble from the start of the first level, which drops you into a Monte Carlo casino and promptly washes its hands of you. A few enemies wander around, occasionally shuffling over to punch you in the face for a bit, but just as quickly losing interest and getting back to more important daydreaming. If you punch them, sometimes they drop sweets. You can switch between Indy and Sophia at will, with the other in either 'stop' or 'go' mode, which lets them amble around on their own random walking and face-punching adventures. Indy starts off with his whip and his fists, while Sophia gets to gently kick people in the shins until they feign death in the hope that she goes away. If either character runs out of health, they get transported into a cell without even a door to stop them simply walking out, but of course they don't do that because that would be naughty and the Nazis might tell on them.

The best part of the game comes when a character talks to you. Instead of a line of dialogue, it just shows you a symbol - which you then have to look up on the grounds that Indiana Jones doesn't speak the local language and has no idea what they're saying to him. Hit a hotel guest for instance, and they scream "/" You promptly reach for your travel guide, flip to the relevant page, run your finger down the translations provided and discover to your amazement that "/" means "Do not hit the hotel guests." Genius.

Want to learn more Programmer Language? Here are some other handy phrases:

Circle Three-Bars - You can't leave without both a map and the Lost Dialogue

Triangle Hourglass - Tread not upon the Great Machine!

Circle Hourglass - Enough haggling! I have lost patience with you; go away for now

If you both survive and stay awake throughout the casino level, the next levels take you to a naval base, a submarine bay and an actual submarine. As with many arcade games of the era, the manual completely gives away everything that happens in the game. My favourite bit is this section, taken verbatim from the submarine level's description. Fun fact: the developers were called "Attention To Detail"...

"Find the periscope so you can steer the submarine to the islands... one of them has to be Atlantis!"

The greatest irony of Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game is that it's a million times duller than its supposedly non-exciting adventure version. What the real Fate of Atlantis lacked in tedious isometric face punching, it more than made up for with snarling enemies, its own arcade style fighting, funny situations, death-defying escapes and more. Its casino level involved tracking down your contact and having Indy dress up as a ghost to scare his pants off during a fake seance. Doesn't that sound like much more fun than punching easily distracted goons until they poo chocolate? The answer is yes.

Many of the problems with the game can no doubt be attributed to the number of platforms it was aimed at. The adventure game was fairly advanced for its time, and restricted to PC and Amiga. The Action Game on the other hand was ported over to Atari ST, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum as well, with the lack of text strings (not to mention capital letters) and input buttons smacking of developing for the lowest common denominator. That's still no excuse though. It's one thing to make a bad game to sucker people into spending money on something crap, but so much worse to distract them from the genuinely good game of the same name sitting only a couple of spaces away on the next shelf.

Needless to say, Lucasarts learned its lesson. Fate of Atlantis put an end to the "The Action Game" idea before it could infect the likes of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango, with future adventure games simply containing their own arcade sequences where necessary—from Full Throttle's fighting to Sam and Max's gimmicky asides. The real Fate of Atlantis went on to become a genuine classic of the genre, as well as the last dedicated Indiana Jones adventure. Future games took the Tomb Raider route instead, which seems only fair, even if they weren't necessarily what the original fans wanted.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is available on Steam.

The Action Game, oddly enough, is not.

Few adventure games actually feature much adventure. It’s a curious name for this, the most languid and cerebral of genres. But Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is a rare exception. Like the movies that inspired it—and the adventure serials that inspired them—it’s an exciting adventure in the truest sense. And it’s remarkable how they managed to squeeze this much energy out of a pretty standard point-and-click adventure game. 

The myth at the heart of this original Indiana Jones story is, as the title suggests, the fabled lost city of Atlantis. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Indy finds a mysterious Atlantean artefact in the vast, unorganised collection of the college he teaches at between expeditions. The discovery of the object serves as the game’s comical prologue, where a bumbling Indy stumbles through the college archives and leaves a trail of destruction behind him. 

But, as is often the case at the beginning of an Indiana Jones story, the artefact is cruelly snatched away from him by Klaus Kerner, a pistol-wielding agent of the Third Reich. The Nazis have taken a special interest in the Atlantis myth, in particular a mystery metal called orichalchum that is said to generate an incredible amount of energy—energy the Nazis want to turn into a nuclear weapon. And so Indy embarks on a dangerous quest to stop them, because as we know from The Last Crusade, he really hates Nazis.

Despite coming out well before some of LucasArts’ most famous games, Fate of Atlantis is one of the most innovative point-and-click adventures it ever released. There’s the IQ scoring system, which awards you bonus points if your solution to a puzzle is particularly imaginative. And some of the puzzle solutions are randomised too, making the game surprisingly replayable. But my favourite feature, which also adds to its replayability, is how the game is split into three distinctly flavoured paths: Fists, Wits, and Team. 

Early in the game Indy teams up with Sophia Hapgood, a selfprofessed psychic medium who claims to be in contact with the spirit of an Atlantean king. The pair were romantically involved once upon a time, and their relationship is similar to those of his female companions in the movies—more playful and sarcastic than romantic. Sophia has definite echoes of Marion Ravenwood. She’s tough, resourceful, and quick-witted, regularly putting Indy in his place. It’s refreshing (and surprising) to see a strong female character like this in a game, especially one from the early 1990s. 

If you choose the Team path you’ll spend the rest of the game with Sophia, solving puzzles together, trading barbs, and occasionally taking control of her. For me this is the most enjoyable way to play the game, simply because the interactions between the two characters are so much fun. The dialogue is sharp and funny and some of the puzzles involving both characters are well designed. But if you’d prefer to go solo, the Wits path sees Indy chasing Atlantis on his own, with trickier puzzles and, of course, less dialogue. You’ll visit many of the same locations in both paths, but they feel quite different.

One of the most entertaining puzzles is found on the Team path, where Indy and Sophia try to steal an artefact from a snooty French professor by staging a séance. While Sophia conjures up the spirit of her Atlantean king, Indy combines a bedsheet, a flashlight, and a creepy mask to scare the professor out of the room, leaving the object behind. Meanwhile, on the Fists or Wits paths, you get involved in a car chase with some Nazis to retrieve the item. That’s more exciting, granted, but the séance is a great character moment. 

Then, finally, there’s the more action-focused Fists path, which is the one I would avoid—if only because it forces you to endure the game’s abysmal fighting minigames more often. While the opportunity to punch Nazis in a game is always welcome, actually beating someone up in Fate of Atlantis is a chore. You use a combination of key presses and mouse clicks to block and strike at different angles, but enemies are difficult to read and the controls just feel clunky and unsatisfying. However, some fights can be bypassed by solving puzzles, which in turn earns you more IQ points. 

One of the game’s greatest strengths is capturing the pulpy adventure feel of the films, but within the fairly rigid confines of a 1990s point-and-click adventure. One of the ways it does this is by never lingering in one location for too long. In the first couple of hours you’ll have visited New York City, Monte Carlo, Iceland, Guatemala, and the Azores. The changing scenery makes for an energetic, fast-paced game, helped by the dynamic iMuse soundtrack, which deftly incorporates John Williams’ iconic score.

It looks fantastic too. The art is pretty low resolution by modern standards, and even compared to other LucasArts adventures released only a few years later. But each country Indy visits has a rich and distinctive atmosphere, tied together by a tastefully understated colour palette. Whether you’re exploring the frozen, overcast plains of Iceland, a bustling Algerian marketplace, or a Nazi U-boat, every location is rich with detail and personality. The character animation is wonderfully lively and expressive too, perfectly capturing the scrappy, rough and tumble action of Spielberg’s movies.

But there are times when the game slips hopelessly into 1990s adventure game absurdity, which dampens the feeling of being Indiana Jones somewhat. One puzzle involves peeling some chewed gum off a school desk then sticking it to the bottoms of your shoes. Why? To walk up a coal chute, of course. I tried to imagine Indy doing this in the movies, but my brain simply couldn’t process it. But for the most part the puzzles are pretty logical and in keeping with the tone of the source material, particularly the ones involving activating ancient, arcane mechanisms and other such archaeological antics. 

As well as the aforementioned fighting system, there are some other, equally as maddening minigames. One involves flying over the desert in a balloon that is an absolute nightmare to control, and if I never have to play that part again in my life I’ll be happy. Luckily these are used quite sparingly and most of the game is in the classic adventure game mould: exploring, talking to people, combining items, and so on. This is about as vintage as point-and-click games get, with the classic verb buffet taking up half the screen, and an inventory that’s constantly filled with seemingly useless items. 

Fate of Atlantis is easy to get running on modern PCs thanks to its availability on digital platforms such as Steam and GOG. Just make sure you hit Alt+S when you start the game on Steam to disable the pixel smoothing filter, which is enabled by default. If you’re into adventure games you absolutely should play this. The randomised elements, IQ system, and multiple paths through the story set it apart from more straightforward adventure games of the era. The story and characters are engaging, the music is superb, it’s brilliantly paced, and it’s better than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Another day, another promising player-made remake of a big-budget developer's game gets shut down. Hardly surprising nowadays, but it's always a shame to see such ventures being forced to close—especially when being distributed for free. The Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Special Edition project is the latest to bite the dust, after its creators were "politely" asked by Lucasfilm to cease development of their ambitious remake. 

"Our mission is to create a remake of this legendary game after more than 20 years, which nobody has attempted yet," says the creators' missions statement on Facebook of the remaster, which also promised high definition digital artwork, new animations, new music, new sound effects and new voiceovers. 

Before Lucasfilm's intervention, the Fate of Atlantis Special Edition team had crafted a fully-functioning demo—which can still be downloaded on the game's site, but is set to be removed come Sunday, March 5.    

Taking to its Facebook page to break the bad news, the game's team said: 

"We have been asked politely by a new promoted Lucasfilm Head of business development person to stop developing and distributing Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Special Edition demo. We will remove the downloading buttons from our website this Sunday (5th March 2017). We have been told that Lucasfilm don't want to share the Indy license with anyone right now, so we came up with other solution and we will see if that is going to work for them."

The game's creators don't go into detail regarding their proposed compromise, however do suggest they have "proved [their] skills" to Lucasfilm, and that it's "now up to them if they change their minds and start [supporting] independent developers."

The post continues: "Whatever the response will be, We are extremely proud of what we have done, it has been a great fun, we will love this project forever and we thank you all who participated or support us during this 'long-term, free-time' development… This is not the end of this project and this is not the end of any fans projects. Big companies need to understand that: 'All things come to him who waits.'" 

Cheers, Kotaku UK. 

The first part of GOG's new six-day "Bundle Tower" sale is simple enough: It's about game bundles. Today, for instance, they've got the Hasbro D&D Immortals package, the Divinity Trilogy, LucasFilm Adventures (including the fantastic Sam & Max Hit the Road and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis), and the Broken Sword Saga, all discounted by up to 80 percent. Good deals all around—but what's the "Tower" part all about?

"New floors, with up to four new bundles, will be unveiled ever 24 hours—some of the bundles will even include fresh GOG.com game releases!" GOG explained, not especially helpfully. "Beyond that, the tower is a mystery, so it's worth the daily trip to see all news, intrigue, and a mystery final offer."

Sounds good to me, even if I don't really get the architectural angle. One point probably worth clarifying is that bundles added to the "tower" will remain on sale until it's "built" rather than being swapped out for the next group, so there's no harm in waiting if you're on a budget and want to see if something better comes along. The GOG Bundle Tower sale is live now and runs until 12:59 pm GMT on April 19.

It's easy to misremember the locations and characters of the old Lucasarts adventure games. I recall wandering through the vast caverns of Atlantis, stepping over streams of molten gold to activate titanic robots. It's only when you go back and see the original art that you realise how much the artists did with so few pixels. Redditor Hovercastle has compiled 604 pieces of background art from some of the very best Lucasarts games, including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Dig, Loom, the first two Monkey Island games and Sam and Max Hit the Road.

The whole collection can be viewed online, or downloaded. Because they're displayed at their original resolution, they seem tiny on modern monitors. Have a flick through and be prepared for a bit of a nostalgia shock. We've picked out a few favourites from Monkey Island 1 and 2, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and The Dig below.

Monkey Island






 
Monkey Island 2






 
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis






 
The Dig

Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth is a fan made Indiana Jones adventure game inspired by the Lucasarts classic, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. The game features new artwork, it's own soundtrack and a new adventure in which Indie must get his hands on the elusive fountain before the Nazis. If you fancy some classic retro adventure gaming an updated version of the demo has just been released. Read on for more details.

The trial can be downloaded now from the Indiana Jones and the Fountain of Youth site. The demo sends Indie to the tropical island of Bimini as he picks up the trail of the fountain. The game was made entirely using the free Adventure Game Studio software, and was created by a team of nine Fate of Atlantis fans, who started the project in 2003 and are still working hard on getting the whole game finished. Hopefully they'll be finished sooner rather than later, a brand new Indiana Jones adventure game can only be a good thing.

Richard Cobbett looks back at one of Lucasarts' worst ever games, and one of Indy's most unfortunate misadventures this side of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Shudder.

Where to begin? Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is a godawful mess of a game by anyone's standards. It's ugly. It's boring. It's barely playable. What little plot there is gets buried instantly under the bad controls and embarrassingly poor puzzles. The interesting idea of being able to control two characters at once is utterly squandered by the fact that you won't want to spend a single second more than you have to in their company. And yet despite all this, when you mention Fate of Atlantis, you'll struggle to find anyone who doesn't have warm memories of it. They'll tell you it's one of Lucasarts' best adventures, with a great story and characters that deserved to be immortalised in an actual movie.

So what's going on? Simple. We're not thinking of that Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, which is indeed fantastic. No, we're playing Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game.





Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game is an odd one - a cheap movie cash-in, only without the movie. It does owe its existence to one though: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which was also split into two games - a SCUMM based adventure by Noah Falstein, David Fox and Ron Gilbert that wasn't great but did some interesting things, and a fairly generic cash-in platformer that didn't.

The Fate of Atlantis version took the form of an isometric action-adventure hybrid, but otherwise stuck to the stripped down (read: lazy) nature of movie ports at the time. The original adventure version was huge. The Action Game offered just six levels. The adventure featured a fun plot, with three paths designed around wits, fists, and Indy's new partner, feisty psychic Sophia Hapgood. The action game relies on the manual to tell you what you're doing and why. Most notably of all, at least on first glance, the adventure game actually has Harrison Ford's face on the cover, while the action game had to make do with a random guy in a fedora, plus a huge INDY logo to draw your eye away from the hideous artwork. It's quite clear which of the two games Lucasarts gave a damn about. And in case you're wondering, yes, the Action Game does admit that it's based on the adventure, rather than pretending the two were equals.

You know you're in trouble from the start of the first level, which drops you into a Monte Carlo casino and promptly washes its hands of you. A few enemies wander around, occasionally shuffling over to punch you in the face for a bit, but just as quickly losing interest and getting back to more important daydreaming. If you punch them, sometimes they drop sweets. You can switch between Indy and Sophia at will, with the other in either 'stop' or 'go' mode, which lets them amble around on their own random walking and face-punching adventures. Indy starts off with his whip and his fists, while Sophia gets to gently kick people in the shins until they feign death in the hope that she goes away. If either character runs out of health, they get transported into a cell without even a door to stop them simply walking out, but of course they don't do that because that would be naughty and the Nazis might tell on them.



The best part of the game comes when a character talks to you. Instead of a line of dialogue, it just shows you a symbol - which you then have to look up on the grounds that Indiana Jones doesn't speak the local language and has no idea what they're saying to him. Hit a hotel guest for instance, and they scream "/" You promptly reach for your travel guide, flip to the relevant page, run your finger down the translations provided and discover to your amazement that "/" means "Do not hit the hotel guests." Genius.

Want to learn more Lazy Programmer Language? Here are some other handy phrases:

Circle Three-Bars - You can't leave without both a map and the Lost Dialogue
Triangle Hourglass - Tread not upon the Great Machine!
Circle Hourglass - Enough haggling! I have lost patience with you; go away for now



If you both survive and stay awake throughout the casino level, the next levels take you to a naval base, a submarine bay and an actual submarine. As with many arcade games of the era, the manual completely gives away everything that happens in the game. My favourite bit is this section, taken verbatim from the submarine level's description. Fun fact: the developers were called "Attention To Detail"...

"Find the periscope so you can steer the submarine to the islands... one of them has to be Atlantis!"

The greatest irony of Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game is that it's a million times duller than its supposedly non-exciting adventure version. What the real Fate of Atlantis lacked in tedious isometric face punching, it more than made up for with snarling enemies, its own arcade style fighting, funny situations, death defying escapes and more. Its casino level involved tracking down your contact and having Indy dress up as a ghost to scare his pants off during a fake seance. Doesn't that sound like much more fun than punching easily distracted goons until they poo chocolate? The answer is yes.

Many of the problems with the game can no doubt be attributed to the number of platforms it was aimed at. The adventure game was fairly advanced for its time, and restricted to PC and Amiga. The Action Game on the other hand was ported over to Atari ST, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum as well, with the lack of text strings (not to mention capital letters) and input buttons smacking of developing for the lowest common denominator. That's still no excuse though. It's one thing to make a bad game to sucker people into spending money on something crap, but so much worse to distract them from the genuinely good game of the same name sitting only a couple of spaces away on the next shelf.



Needless to say, Lucasarts learned its lesson. Fate of Atlantis put an end to the "The Action Game" idea before it could infect the likes of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango, with future adventure games simply containing their own arcade sequences where necessary - from Full Throttle's fighting to Sam and Max's gimmicky asides. The real Fate of Atlantis went on to become a genuine classic of the genre, as well as the last dedicated Indiana Jones adventure. Future games took the Tomb Raider route instead, which seems only fair, even if they weren't necessarily what the original fans wanted.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is available on Steam.

The Action Game, oddly enough, is not.