Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis - Development

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 was occupied with other projects such as The Secret of Monkey Island and The Dig. Designer Hal Barwood had only 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 movie 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.

Writing the story involved extensive research on a plethora of pseudo-scientific books. Inspiration for the mythology in the game, 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 actual 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 of yet unknown physics rather than on magic. The majority of the 256-color backgrounds in the game were mostly 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.

The addition of three different paths was suggested by Falstein and added about six more months of development time, mainly because of all the extra dialogue that had to be implemented for the interaction between Indiana and Sophia. Altogether, the game took around two years to finish, starting in early 1990, and lasting up to the floppy disk release in June 1992. The only aspect Barwood was not involved in at all was the production of voices for the enhanced "talkie" edition released on CD-ROM in May 1993, which was instead handled by Tamlynn Barra. The voice-over recordings for the approximately 8000 lines of dialogue took about four weeks, and were done with actors from the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The "talkie" version was later included as an extra game mode in the Wii version of the 2009 action game Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, and distributed via the digital content delivery software Steam as a port for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X that same year.

The package illustration for Fate of Atlantis was inspired by the Indiana Jones movie posters of Drew Struzan. It was drawn by Eaken within three days, following disagreements with the marketing department and an external art director over which concept to use. Clint Bajakian, Peter McConnell and Michael Land created the soundtrack for the game, arranging John Williams' main theme "The Raiders March" for a variety of compositions. The DOS version uses sequenced music played back by either an internal speaker, the FM synthesis of an AdLib or Sound Blaster sound card, or the sample-based synthesis of a Roland MT-32 sound module. During development of the game, William Messner-Loebs and Dan Barry wrote a Dark Horse Comics series based on Barwood's and Falstein's story, then titled Indiana Jones and the Keys to Atlantis. In an interview, Eaken mentioned hour-long meetings of the development team trying to come up with a better title than Fate of Atlantis, though the staff members could never think of one and always ended up with names such as "Indiana Jones Does Atlantis". The final title was Barwood's idea, who first had to convince the company's management and the marketing team not to simply call the game "Indy's Next Adventure".

LucasArts developed a port of the enhanced edition for the Sega CD, but the release was eventually canceled because The Secret of Monkey Island failed to be much of a commercial success on the platform. The arcade-style game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game designed by Attention To Detail was released almost simultaneously with its adventure counterpart, and loosely follows its plot.