Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Bringing ’80s Movie Magic to a 2024 Game

Indiana Jones has a feeling. It’s not just in the more tangible elements – the stories, the hero, or the music – it’s also in the way it was filmed, the minutiae of choreography, and the tone. Those ineffable qualities are what have made this series so beloved, and so lasting. And that’s a very difficult thing to recreate in a video game.

It presented Indiana Jones and the Great Circle developer MachineGames with an extra challenge – not only did the team have to create a fantastic, modern-feeling game, but one that simultaneously captures the magic that swirls around the movies. It comes down to a question of balance: making a compelling game that still looks, feels, acts, and sounds like the movies it’s drawing inspiration from.

In speaking to developers across MachineGames, it’s fascinating to hear how that was achieved, mixing modern game design with traditional filmmaking techniques, all in service of creating something that hits the sweet spot MachineGames has been striving for.

Perhaps one of the best examples of the deep thinking applied comes out of a single scene – one you might even describe as incidental.

‘Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark’ contains perhaps one of cinema’s best-known jokes. A crowd parts, and our hero is faced with a menacing swordsman, brandishing a scimitar. He chuckles darkly, passing his sword from hand to hand, before twirling it with expert precision – a show of how tough this fight will be. Indy grimaces, pulls out his revolver, and drops him with a single shot. What we thought was about to be a fight scene becomes a punchline. It’s perfect.

And it’s exactly the kind of scene that shouldn’t work in a video game. This is effectively the intro to a boss battle – this guy should have multiple attack patterns, three different health bars, the works. As it turns out, that very scene may have started as the challenge the team faced – but it became part of the solution:

“That scene is a very good example of type of humor that one can experience in the classic Indy movies – priceless!”, says Creative Director Axel Torvenius. “What we absolutely have been inspired by from that, and similar scenes, is that very humor. To have varied, engaging and rewarding combat encounters has been very important – but to make sure we spice them up with the Indy-humor has been equally important.”

Taken on a wider level, this tells us a lot about MachineGames’ approach – in almost every regard, the team has gone the extra mile to help capture the movies’ magic, even if they’re not an immediately natural fit for gaming, in a new form. And as you’ll see, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Matinée Idol

“Sitting as close as possible to the original look and feel of ’80s cinema was something we wanted to get right from the beginning,” explains Torvenius. “There was never an interest in reinventing the look or feel of Indiana Jones – the core ambition was always to make sure it really hit home in terms of having a style close to ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’.”

You might be surprised at just how deep that effort goes. The team scrutinized the early films, not just for their tone and writing, but for technical detail. What color palettes and film grading were used? Which kind of film stock was in the cameras? How did the original audio team record sound effects? What kind of stunt work was done? And from there, the hard work began – translating those original techniques into not just a modern context, but an entirely different medium.

Some of the stories here are fascinating. Torvenius explains that the team studied how the original film teams created their sets, and applied those rules to locations in the game:

“Obviously in games, the big challenge is that you can constantly peek behind the curtain and go ‘backstage’ – you can roam freely and break the composition. But there are many locations throughout the game where we know from which direction the player will come, or where they will exit and what type of scenery they will see. So we identified those early and pushed those further so we can set the scene more in certain places.”

For cutscenes, which are naturally more controlled, the team could go further: “Another big thing we did for this project was to have a Director of Photography on set for all the cinematic filming in the motion capture studio,” continues Torvenius. “We had the talented Kyle Klütz helping us and working in the mocap studio with this huge, heavy camera dolly rolling around to make sure we captured the right amount of velocity in pan, angular movement, composition and framing. Once we transfer this data into the cutscene shots in the game engine, it gives us a very solid start in terms of a camera work that feels reminiscent of the early Indiana Jones movies.”

Pitch Perfect

Sound is just as important as look for Indiana Jones, of course. From the iconic John Williams score, to the “feel” of its effects, to the iconic Wilhelm Scream (yes, it’s in the game), the soundscape of the movies is just as nostalgic as the look and story.

“The first thing we did was try to identify the core elements of that Indiana Jones sound,” says Audio Director, Pete Ward. “What did we have to nail to evoke the feeling of playing as Indy, in a cinematic way? We sat down as a team and watched all the Indy movies again, and we realized there were several things we absolutely had to get right – Indy’s voice likeness, the musical score, the whip, the revolver, and the punches. There were other things too, like the sound of the puzzles, and the fantastical elements, where we constantly referenced the original movies and [original Indiana Jones sound designer] Ben Burtt’s sound design.”

It led Ward’s team down some unexpected paths. The aim wasn’t to reuse sound effects directly from the game, but reproduce them as faithfully as possible to serve the game’s needs – which in some cases meant returning to techniques used by the original team more than 40 years ago.

“We did hundreds of hours of original recordings, using props like the whip, the fedora, the leather jacket, and lots of different shoe types on lots of different surfaces,” continues Ward. “For impacts in particular, we also used techniques originally used by Ben Burtt and his team, like beating up leather jackets with baseball bats. We also used practical effects where possible, like plucking metal springs with contact mics attached, to get some of that old-school vibe in our spectacular set pieces.”

The result is a game that sounds reminiscent of an ’80’s movie – it’s still naturalistic, but listen closely and you’ll find it comes across in a different way from most modern games.

For impacts in particular, we also used techniques originally used by Ben Burtt and his team, like beating up leather jackets with baseball bats.

Pete Ward, Audio Director

The same went for the score – John Williams’ soundtracks are among the most recognizable in cinema history, but the aim was never simply to impersonate them. MachineGames brought in composer Gordy Haab to achieve that – a fitting choice given that he’s won awards for his work on multiple Star Wars games by drawing heavy inspiration from Williams, while making them his own.

 “Gordy was such a great composer to work with for this project – he really nailed the style and tone, and was able to emulate and seamlessly extend the original score where needed, while also creating entirely new themes for our story and characters that fit perfectly within the Indiana Jones universe,” enthuses Ward. “We were very careful about where and when we first hear certain themes as well – the Raider’s March is the iconic, instantly recognizable theme for Indiana Jones, and we wanted to incorporate it at the right moments, but also develop our own musical story with our own new themes.”

But the risk of creating new elements amid such an iconic score is that they’ll stick out –and again, MachineGames went the extra mile to ensure that this didn’t happen. Haab and Ward researched how the original soundtracks were recorded, and even recorded in the same studio, Abbey Road. Amazingly, they even found out that they’d created accidental connections to the original along the way:

“We even had a couple of session musicians who played on the original sessions for Raiders,” explains Ward. “It was a lovely moment when they came to the control room after the session was finished and told us that!”

Telling the Tale

But where look and sound allowed the team to look back at what had come before, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle’s story needed to be something entirely new, yet totally fitting for both the franchise – not to mention the game’s setting between ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ and ‘Temple of Doom’. For Lead Narrative Designer Tommy Tordsson Björk, it required a different kind of research.

“Indiana Jones has an incredibly rich lore with movies, comic books, games and more that we could dig into and use in different ways, not only for immersing the player in     Indy’s world, but also to connect the different stories and characters. In this regard, our great working relationship with Lucasfilm Games helped us enormously.

“From there, a lot of our work when developing the worldbuilding has been devoted to researching the 1930s, and then filtering it through lens of what we call an ’Indy matinée adventure’ to make it feel both authentic and true to the story of this world.”

You’ll see that commitment not just to the Indy series itself, but for the time period in which it’s set, in the ways characters talk, the world around you, and even down to the era-appropriate spelling of Gizeh. MachineGames – and the connection of many of its developers, including Björk, to the acclaimed Starbreeze – means that the team has a lot of experience working with established franchises, from The Chronicles of Riddick to The Darkness, and it’s an experience that guided them in this new endeavour.

“The approach that we’ve had on all of our games is to make them as true to what made the originals so great. We don’t want to retread what has already been told, but instead move into new territory that evokes the same tone and spirit,” says Björk. “I think what the development of Indy has taught us is the importance of letting the character control the path of both the story and the gameplay, because this franchise is so much defined by Indy and who he is to an even greater extent than the previous games we’ve worked on.”

Playing With History

And that leads us to the final piece of the development puzzle – turning the history of a movie series into a playable experience. How do you capture the excitement of a tightly-edited, linear movie in an interactive experience, where every player will choose to do things slightly differently, and take their Indy in different directions?

Part of that is in returning to the movie making of it all, by grounding so much of what we play in real-life performance:

“We have done so much motion capture for this game! I think this is most motion capture and stunts we have ever done,” says Torvenius. “And some of the scenes we have in the game are quite wild from a stunt perspective. We shot a number of scenes at Goodbye Kansas in Stockholm, which has a ceiling height of almost 8 meters, just because some scenes required stunts to be performed from that height.

“We’ve been working with some very talented stuntmen and women throughout the production and together with our talent director Tom Keegan I dare to say we have some of the strongest action scenes from a MachineGames perspective yet. When it comes to capturing the look and feel of the stunts and action sequences in the early Indiana Jones movies, it has been a combined effort from various members within MG; obviously our Animation Director Henrik Håkansson and Cinematic Director Markus Söderqvist has an important part to play here for look and feel of animations. And then the audio work from Audio director Pete Ward and his department also plays an important part in making sure everything sounds true to the movie.”

One of the core ingredients in Indiana Jones is definitely humour. It is something we have worked hard with across every aspect of the game – and it absolutely needs to be conveyed in the minute-to-minute gameplay, such as combat.

Axel Torvenius, Creative Director

But even the smallest elements have been scrutinized, like throwing a simple punch, for example:

“It has been very important to make sure the combat feels fun and rewarding and easy enough to get drawn into but then hard to master for the ones that likes to crank up the difficulty settings,” explains Torvenius. “We definitely wanted to capture the cinematic feel of the melee combat! Getting those heavy cinematic impact sounds in, having a good response from the spray of sweat and saliva as you punch someone in the face, interesting animations, and the behaviour of a hulking opponent coming towards you.”

This depth of thought is everywhere in the game. Puzzles have been designed with the spirit of whether they might feel right for the movies; locations given the buzz not just of real-life, but a film set; and even the ability to use almost any disposable item as both a distraction and a weapon is drawn from the comic spirit of the movies.

“One of the core ingredients in Indiana Jones is definitely humour. It is something we have worked hard with across every aspect of the game: environmental storytelling, script and VO, in cutscene and story beats, and it absolutely needs to be conveyed in the minute-to-minute gameplay, such as combat. And it is not only the tools you use but also a lot of hard work from the engineer and animation teams to make sure we have interesting, rewarding and fun take down animations. And on top of all of that you also need the best possible audio! And when that cocktail is shaken just the right amount, voilà – out comes something very delicious and fun!”

Which brings us all the way back round to that iconic scene with the swordsman. In a normal game, no, that scene might not make sense when translated to a video game context. But in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle? Well, MachineGames has put in the research, the work, and the commitment to ensure that, while you’re playing this game – from solving spectacular puzzles to near-slapstick combat – it’ll feel worthy of those classic movies.

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Indiana Jones and the Great Circle comes to Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC (with Game Pass), or Steam on December 9. Premium and Collector’s Editions will offer 3 days of early access from December 6.