With the help of unseen archival material from the original film AFP, the young Ford is pieced together
Last year, Harrison Ford played a younger actor on the big screen in Indiana Jones and the Second Half of the Fate, and video game makers are doing the same trick with the latest take on the whip-wielding old hero on the small screen.
In the trailer for Indiana Jones and the Grand Circle, a bespectacled Nazi sneers at an archaeologist-adventurer buried up to the neck in sand: “Dr. Jones, let me tell you what you’ve been missing”.
Seconds later, the Nazi hits him hard with his head and the melody of the famous theme song plays.
The game, which was released on Monday, takes players back to the days of the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
The villains are familiar, as are the settings and traps—an ancient building looming in the jungle, a firelit cave filled with loot, a rickety rope bridge spanning a snow-covered ravine.
Players can play the hero from a first-person perspective and feel the glory of his youth.
The creators knew that the biggest challenge would be to create a convincing young hero.
And unlike other actors in the game, Indiana Jones could not be created by 3D scanning an actor.
“We don’t have the opportunity to go back in time and scan a young Harrison Ford,” said Axel Torvenius, creative director at MachineGames.
Tovenis said Ford’s characterization was pieced together with the help of unreleased archival material from the original film.
He said: “We’ve been looking at photos of Harrison Ford to make sure we have the right facial features for him at the time.
“Having access to their archive was invaluable in creating the 3D mesh of the Indiana Jones character.”
The game, which took four years to develop, tells the story of an archaeologist who gets caught up in chases and fights while solving puzzles.
The story is set in 1937 and tells the story of Indiana’s pursuit of a mysterious power coveted by Nazi spies from the Vatican via Egypt to China.
The Grand Circle isn’t the first game to tell the Indiana Jones story.
There have been more than a dozen adaptations in the past forty years.
The Swedish studio is well aware of how protective gamers are of the games they grew up with, so they feel a huge responsibility to get this one right.
“It was very stressful,” Tovenis said, adding that his team had done its best to recreate the style and atmosphere set by the original film’s director, Steven Spielberg.
Game designer Jens Andersson agreed, adding that he’s a big fan of the point-and-click Indiana Jones adventures of the 1990s.
“All of that was the inspiration for what we do here,” he said.
“These are the products of the times, and we need to use them to do something new.”
Ford’s last Indiana Jones role will be in 2023, AFP