If you spend any time online, you might’ve witnessed a bit of a kerfuffle over the Super Mario Galaxy Movie. One side said kids deserve only high-quality media; the other said kids need crap TV and movies so they experience a wide range of things and can develop taste. (And if you didn’t witness this, I’m happy you were left to enjoy or hate the movie in peace). Anyway, it got me thinking about a terrible piece of media from my childhood that, despite its flaws, still sticks with me 30 years later: Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures.
It’s an action-adventure game in the original sense of the term: a puzzle-heavy game (adventure) with action (snakes and guns). A squished-looking Indy gets dropped into a randomized map with a story randomly selected from a small pool of potential narratives. They all involve finding some object or other and stopping an Evil Bad Guy from getting it first. There are also Nazis and stereotypical portrayals of indigenous people. It’s classic Indiana Jones, in other words.
The bits in between the story — not so much. The gist of Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures is that you, Indiana Jones, go back and forth across some sparsely populated part of Central America, finding items to solve puzzles, which reward you with more items to trade for other items you need to solve puzzles. There’s a handful of ruins with Big Secrets (spoiler: it’s more items for puzzles); a talking skeleton; leopards roughly 10 times more dangerous and aggressive than Nazis; tequila, a substance of which I had no knowledge, but one that sounded very Indiana Jones and, thus, cool; and some fairly rudimentary challenges that involve pushing rocks in the right order.
Enemies move three times as fast as you and can attack you from a diagonal angle. It’s a feat you can’t pull off yourself, and it makes combat terribly one-sided. Running away is almost always a better option than fighting (a concept MachineGames put to much better use in The Great Circle). And then after you clear the scenario, you can load a new game and do basically the same thing — just on a slightly different map with the locations shuffled around.
It sounds atrocious, because it was. Six-year-old me didn’t know any better, though, and I was entranced. I didn’t mind the icky-looking character models. My favorite games at that point were the original Pokémon and that weirdly terrifying skiing game any computer could run. Games were for doing things, not for looking at, and I had limited time for doing things. A strictly-enforced parental rule of “only playing games for 30 minutes a couple of times per day” meant it took ages before I cleared a single scenario, let alone saw enough of the game to realize how repetitive it was.
I did register that it wasn’t quite as varied or reactive as Yoda Stories, which is essentially the same game, but with minor scenario differences depending on what you do. Darth Vader might appear sometimes, or you’d land on Hoth instead of Endor, or your lightsaber color would change to green after a while, reflecting the maturity of your Jedi experience (the number of scenarios you’d cleared). Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures had none of that, but the more grounded (to my child mind) setting and the vague historical-ness of it all gave the game an aura of mystery Yoda Stories didn’t have.
Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures is not a good game. But it sparked a love of puzzles and figuring things out — and finding joy in the process of trying, even if you don’t have time to finish it. 30 years on, I still love adventure games for all the same reasons, even if my tastes have, mercifully, grown more refined. So maybe it was a good thing I experienced such a bad piece of media as a kid after all.
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