Indiana Jones and the illusion of creating an even bigger game

The creative director behind Indiana Jones and the Great Circle fields some new and old questions about guns, hats, the magic of unmarked missions and the secret success of Wolfenstein Youngblood.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. All game screenshots in this post are from MachineGames’ game, captured by Game File.

Before he recently sat for an interview with me, Axel Torvenius, creative director of December’s refreshingly excellent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, estimated he had done about 70 interviews about the game. My hope was that I’d ask him at least one question he hadn’t been asked before.

It was an obvious one, but I started by asking about the hat.

In this new Indiana Jones adventure from MachineGames, players mostly control the famous archaeologist from a first-person perspective. If they are defeated by their fascist/Nazi enemies, they will be knocked to the ground and be given a brief chance to spin the camera around to find Indy’s famous fedora, which, in times of distress like these, is knocked off his head. If players can find the hat, crawl to it and press a button, Indy will put it on (shown in third-person, as he makes the slightest of smiles), and players will get a second wind from what otherwise would have been a game-over.

Where’d that idea come from?

Torvenius credited studio game director Jerk Gustafsson with that one, saying he came up with the hat-revival idea “quite late” in the production.

“I think there were a lot of question marks and looks on people's faces like, ‘Really, is this cool?’ But then when we started to implement it and try it, I was like, ‘Yes, this is actually really cool.’”

Torvenius told me (just me, I hoped) that he’d given an internal talk at MachineGames about treating Indy’s hat as an in-game character, about how integral it was to Indy and to the game, how important it was to shaping the silhouette players see when the game’s light sources cause Indy to cast a shadow.

Having more gameplay around the hat was a winner.

Cool, but I suspected Torvenius had done all this hat talk before. What about something from the past?

Before Torvenius was creative director on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, he was the art director on 2019’s Wolfenstein: Youngblood, an unusual game that did not go over very well with fans. I wondered if that experience had put any fear in the studio about taking creative risks.