F
ew 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 artifact in the vast,
unorganized 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 if often the case at the
beginning of an Indiana Jones story,
the artifact 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, inparticular 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.IQ TEST
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
randomized too, making the game
surprisingly replayable. But my
favorite feature, which also adds to its
replayability, is how the game is split
into three distinctly flavored paths:
Fists, Wits, and Team.NEED TO KNOW
RELEASED
1992
PUBLISHER
In-houseDEVELOPER
LucasArts
LINK
bit.ly/fateatlantisINDIANA JONES AND
THE FATE OF ATLANTIS
A real adventure game. By Andy Kelly
EXTRA LIFE
NOW PLAYING (^) I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO (^) I DIARY I REINSTALL (^) I WHY I LOVE I MUS T P L A Y
You have to trade junk
with this merchant.