Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is a point-and-click adventure game developed and published by LucasArts and released in June 1992 for Amiga, DOS, and Macintosh. Almost a year later, it was reissued on CD-ROM as an enhanced "talkie" edition with full voice acting and digitized sound effects. The seventh game to use the script language SCUMM, Fate of Atlantis has the player explore environments and interact with objects and characters by using commands constructed with predetermined verbs. It features three unique paths to select, influencing story development, gameplay and puzzles. The game used an updated SCUMM engine and required a 286-based PC, although it still runs as a real-mode DOS application. The CD talkie version required EMS memory enabled to load the voice data. An alternate version, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game, was released simultaneously, featuring a similar story but more combat-focused gameplay.
The plot is set in the Indiana Jones universe and revolves around Indiana Jones's global search for the legendary sunken city of Atlantis. Sophia Hapgood, an old co-worker of Indiana Jones who gave up her archaeological career to become a psychic, supports him along the journey. The two are pursued by the Nazis who seek to use the power of Atlantis for warfare, and serve as the antagonists. The story was written by Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein, the game's designers, who had rejected the original plan to base it on an unused film script. They came up with the final concept while researching real-world sources for a suitable plot device.
Fate of Atlantis was acclaimed by critics and received several awards for "Best Adventure Game of the Year" and "Game of the Year" after its release by several game publications. It became a million-unit seller and is regarded as one of the greatest video games of all time. Two concepts for a supposed sequel were conceived, but both projects were eventually canceled due to unforeseen problems during development. They were reworked into two separate Dark Horse Comics series by Lee Marrs and Elaine Lee, respectively.
In June 2009, the game was released as an unlockable extra of the Wii action game Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, and as a digitally distributed Steam title for Microsoft Windows and OS X on July 8 the same year.
Gameplay Fate of Atlantis is based on the SCUMM story system by Ron Gilbert, Aric Wilmunder, Brad P. Taylor, and Vince Lee, thus employing similar gameplay to other point-and-click adventures developed by LucasArts in the 1980s and 1990s. The player explores the game's static environments while interacting with sprite-based characters and objects; they may use the pointer to construct and give commands with a number of predetermined verbs such as "Pick up", "Use" and "Talk to". Conversations with non-playable characters unfold in a series of selectable questions and answers.
Early on, the player is given the choice between three different game modes, each with unique cutscenes, puzzles to solve and locations to visit: the Team Path, the Wits Path, and the Fists Path. In the Team Path, protagonist Indiana Jones is joined by his partner Sophia Hapgood who will provide support throughout the game. The Wits Path is centered on complex puzzles, while the Fists Path focuses heavily on action sequences and fist fighting, the latter of which is optional in the other two modes. Atypical for LucasArts titles, it is possible for the player character to die at certain points, though dangerous situations were designed to be easily recognizable. A score system, the Indy Quotient Points, keeps track of the puzzles solved, the obstacles overcome and the important objects found.
Plot In 1939, on the eve of World War II,Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis back cover. LucasArts Entertainment Company LLC. June 1992. archaeology professor and adventurer Indiana Jones tries to find a small statue in the archives of his workplace, Barnett College, at the behest of a visitor named Mr. Smith. After Indy retrieves the horned figurine, Smith uses a key to open it, revealing a sparkling metal bead inside. Smith pulls out a gun and escapes with the two artifacts, but loses his coat in the process. The identity card inside reveals "Smith" to be Klaus Kerner, a Nazi agent. Also inside the coat is an old magazine containing an article about an expedition on which Jones collaborated with a young woman named Sophia Hapgood, who has since given up archaeology to become a psychic.
Fearing that she might be Kerner's next target, Indy travels to New York City to warn her and to find out more about the mysterious statue. There, he interrupts her lecture on the culture and downfall of Atlantis, and the two return to Sophia's apartment. They discover that Kerner ransacked her office in search of Atlantean artifacts, but Sophia says that she keeps her most valuable item, her necklace, with her. She owns another of the shiny beads, identified as the mystical metal orichalcum, and places it in the medallion's mouth, invoking the spirit of the Atlantean king Nur-Ab-Sal. She explains that a Nazi scientist, Dr. Hans Ubermann, is searching for the power of Atlantis to use it as an energy source for warfare.
Sophia gets a telepathic message from Nur-Ab-Sal, instructing them to find the Lost Dialogue of Plato, the Hermocrates, a book that will guide them to the city. After gathering information, Indy and Sophia find it in a collection at Barnett College. Correcting Plato's "tenfold error", a mistranslation from Egyptian to Greek, the document pinpoints the location of Atlantis in the Mediterranean, 300 miles from the Kingdom of Greece, instead of 3000 as mentioned in the dialogue Critias. It says that in order to gain access to the Lost City and its colonies, three special engraved stones are required. At this point, the player has to choose between the Team, Wits, or Fists path, which influences the way the stones are acquired. In all three paths, Jones meets an artifact dealer in Monte Carlo, ventures to an archaeological dig in Algiers, explores an Atlantean labyrinth in Knossos on Crete, and Sophia gets captured by the Nazis. Other locations include the remains of a small Atlantean colony on Thera, a hydrogen balloon and a Nazi submarine.
The individual scenarios converge at this point as Indiana makes his way to the underwater entrance of Atlantis near Thera and starts to explore the Lost City. He figures out how to use various Atlantean devices and produce orichalcum beads. With this knowledge he saves Sophia from a prison, and they make their way to the center of Atlantis, where her medallion guides them to the home of Nur-Ab-Sal. The spirit of the Atlantean king takes full possession of Sophia and it is by a trick that Indy rids her of the necklace and destroys it, thus freeing her. Meanwhile, they notice grotesquely deformed bones all over the place. They advance further and eventually reach a large colossus the inhabitants of the city built trying to transform themselves into gods. They had hoped using ten orichalcum beads at a time would enable them to control the water with the powers they gained, keeping the sea level down to prevent an impending catastrophe.
Unknowingly, Indiana starts the machine, at which time Kerner, Ubermann, and Nazi troops invade the place and announce their intention to use the machine to become gods. The machine was responsible for creating the mutated skeletons seen earlier, but the Nazis believe that it will work on them due to their "Aryan" qualities. Kerner insists on stepping onto the platform first, claiming himself to be most suitable for godhood. After Jones mentions Plato's tenfold error, Kerner decides to use one bead instead of ten. He is turned into a horribly deformed and horned creature, and jumps into the surrounding lava. Indiana is forced to step on the platform next but threatens Ubermann with eternal damnation once he is a god. Fearing his wrath, Ubermann uses the machine on himself, feeding it one hundred beads. He is turned into a green ethereal being, but his form becomes unstable and he flies apart with an agonized scream.
Two alternative bad endings see one of the protagonists undergo the second transformation if Indiana could not convince Ubermann to use the machine instead, or if Sophia was not freed from her prison and Nur-Ab-Sal's influence. In the happy ending, Atlantis succumbs to the eruption of the still active volcano as the duo flees from the city. The final scene depicts Indiana kissing Sophia on top of the escape submarine, to comfort himself for the lack of evidence for their discovery.
Development
At the time a sequel to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure was decided, most of the staff of Lucasfilm Games were occupied with other projects such as The Secret of Monkey Island and The Dig. Designer Hal Barwood had created two computer games on his own before, but was put in charge of the project because of his experience as a producer and writer of feature films. The company originally wanted him to create a game based on Indiana Jones and the Monkey King/Garden of Life, a rejected script written by Chris Columbus for the third film that would have seen Indiana looking for Chinese artifacts in Africa. However, after reading the script Barwood decided that the idea was substandard, and requested to create an original story for the game instead. Along with co-worker Noah Falstein, he visited the library of George Lucas' workplace Skywalker Ranch to look for possible plot devices. They eventually decided upon Atlantis when they looked at a diagram in "some cheap coffee-table book on the world's unsolved mysteries", which depicted the city as built in three concentric circles. Falstein and Barwood originally considered the mythical sword Excalibur as the story's plot device, but the idea was scrapped because it would not have easily given Indiana Jones a reason to go anywhere except England.
Writing the story involved extensive research on pseudo-scientific books. Inspiration for the mythology, such as the description of the city and the appearance of the metal orichalcum, was primarily drawn from Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, and from Ignatius Loyola Donnelly's book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World that revived interest in the myth during the nineteenth century. The magical properties of orichalcum and the Atlantean technology depicted in the game were partly adopted from Russian spiritualist Helena Blavatsky's publications on the force vril. The giant colossus producing gods was based on a power-concentrating device called "firestone", formerly described by American psychic Edgar Cayce.
Once Barwood and Falstein completed the rough outline of the story, Barwood wrote the script, and the team began to conceive the puzzles and to design the environments. The Atlantean artifacts and architecture devised by lead artist William Eaken were made to resemble those of the Minoan civilization, while the game in turn implies that the Minoans were inspired by Atlantis. Barwood intended for the Atlantean art to have an "alien" feel to it, with the machines seemingly operating on as yet unknown physics rather than on magic. The backgrounds were first pencil sketched, given a layer of basic color and then converted and touched up with 256-colors. Mostly they were mouse-drawn with Deluxe Paint, though roughly ten percent were paintings scanned at the end of the development cycle. As a consequence of regular design changes, the images often had to be revised by the artists. Character animations were fully rotoscoped with video footage of Steve Purcell for Indiana's and Collette Michaud for Sophia's motions. The main art team that consisted of Eaken, James Dollar and Avril Harrison was sometimes consulted by Barwood to help out with the more graphical puzzles in the game, such as a broken robot in Atlantis.