Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 348: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

Episode Date: January 4, 2021

With the movie series (seemingly) finished, LucasArts capitalized on the public's slowly fading love for Indiana Jones with a brand-new adventure game. And instead of adapting one of his previous adventures, the developer instead developed a wholly unique story for the intrepid archaeologist—one players had to trek through three different times if they wanted to see everything. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey and Duckfeed.tv's Kole Ross as the two explore this adventure game that straddles the two eras of LucasArts and innovates in ways the publisher's future games wouldn't. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon.

Retronauts is part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. For more information, please go to greenlitpodcast.com. This week on Retronauts, team, fist, or wits, no one rides for free. Hello, everybody and welcome to another episode of Retronauts. This one is all about Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis. And yes, it is another entry in our LucasArts Adventure Game miniseries. We're working our way through almost all of them in the year of 2020. There's only a few more left to go.

And joining us once again is Cole Ross from duckfeet.tv. Hello, Cole. How you doing? Hello, I'm doing just great. Thank you very much for having me. And Cole was, he was a last guest on the Sam and Max Hit the Road podcast way back in March. That's number 286. And if you want to hear that, you have to be at the $5 level on the Patreon, although there is a free preview of that on the free feed. But that was a great podcast with Cole and he's back.

And Cole, I was looking at the calendar and it seems like seven months went by just in a blur. And I was looking to see exactly when you were on the show because I remember taking a, flight back from Vancouver right before our recording and playing Sam and Max on the plane can no longer do that anymore but I'm like what was that and it was one week before quarantine that we had our

we had our podcast so like there was like 10 days between getting back from Canada and the quarantine and that's that's exactly when our recording took place it was a time of blissful ignorance for me it simultaneously feels like it was two days ago and two years ago

which is weird not to get the time is dilating and contracting it's true it's true like not to get things off on a negative uh start here but i was like has it been too recently since i asked cool to be on the podcast it's like no it's been six months half half a year has passed and it's just been a treadmill of podcasting to get me through these these rough weeks but uh welcome back cole and cole i ask you to uh choose one of our remaining lucas arts adventure games for this mini series and why did you land on this one i i like this game quite a bit. I think that it's definitely a strange one as far as LucasArts games go, I think pretty much because it bridges, you know, a couple of different eras for them. But I think that this is a really fun Indiana Jones story. Like it fits in and it is a good adaptation of something that doesn't exist. It feels like it is a game based on something, even though the source material it was not there. And what is your history with Indiana Jones and your history with

this game? Were you fan of the movies as a kid? Did you play this when it was a newer game? Yeah. So for this game, it's kind of like with Sam and Max. I didn't play this when it was contemporary pretty much when I found out about Scum VM. I was

like, oh, I'm just going to play all of these games because I love them. Having like previously thrown in with like Grim Fandango and things like that. So I played this one well after its time, probably like in the mid-2000s or something like that when I was in high school and college. As for Indiana Jones, I'm not like a super fan or anything. I've seen the first three movies. I think they're all good in their own different ways. They're incredibly

fun. I like that pulpy, you know, globe-trotting kind of thing that it has going on. But I don't like have fights over which one which one is the best or the worst or whatever you know yeah i played this for the first time when i got the uh so we our family got a pc in 96 i think i've said this every time on every one of these but my first christmas with a computer i got one of the first lucas arts like treasuries of adventure games so just catching up on all of them really quickly and this is the one that i never really stuck around to finish until this podcast because when i was a kid and a teen i was really on board for like the snarky subversive cartooniness of, you know, your day of the tentacles or your, you know, Sam and Maxes.

And this realistic, you know, more realistic down-to-earth adventure game with, you know, crazy supernatural Atlanta stuff, I wasn't really on board for things starring a bunch of human beings. Monkey Island was fine, but I also wasn't an Indiana Jones fan at the time because I didn't really have the context for the films. Like a lot of movies, these were before my time. And, like, the third one came out when I was seven. I didn't have the context for, like, who this character was. I only knew through parody.

And then during several periods of unemployment in my life, during one of those periods, I was like, I want to watch a bunch of movies that I've only seen like 20% of on TBS or on USA or whatever. So I watched all the Indiana Jones movies in order and I really, really fell in love with them outside of the middle one. I still have not seen the Crystal Skull either, but I was like, oh, no, these are really well done and they are, you know, there's more value to this than just the parodies I've seen. So, yeah, I fell in love with these movies like in the late 2000. thousands as I did with Back to the Future. Another series I'd only seen like, you know, dribs and drabs of on cable TV. So, yeah, I came to the series late, but I would say I'm a fan of Indiana Jones. I've only seen each movie like twice maybe, but I do appreciate those movies.

Mm-hmm. You only really need to see one of them to kind of get the vibe for it. There's just a really, it's just like the smart assery. Like I think Indiana Jones is a really entertaining character, being both, you know, just basically Hanzolo da text smart ass but also hapless and kind of like bumbling through a bunch different you know scenarios

I'm also a fan of ancient machines like I just really dig like temples and traps and stuff you know I don't know if it was just growing up on Legend of the Hidden Temple or whatever it was but yeah I was just a way down for anything that he did inside of a pyramid or whatever yeah it does feel like a very

fitting genre for you Indiana Jones, even though it is an action. I just feel like the mystical ancient puzzles are more of what I associate with the character than, you know, fist fights and swinging and whatnot. I feel like when I remember the movies, I remember like the fun set pieces that weren't just all punching and swinging and stuff, just like the cool puzzles. It's the first impression that it makes is him doing the swap with the bag of sand for the idol, right?

Yeah, that's like, that could just be an adventure game puzzle. Yeah. And then, I guess, running away from the Boulder is a quick time event, but we have not invented those yet in 1992. Thankfully. But, yeah, we have not done the last crusade adventure game yet. It's a lesser game. It's not super great, but we'll get around to doing that. But for now, we're going to be talking about this game.

And what I think is cute in that a lot of the research for this game was made or produced before 2008. And before the Crystal Skull, everyone called this game Indie 4, before we actually had a fourth Indiana Jones movie. So I found that very adorable. Yeah. And we're on the brink of having Indiana Jones 5. Of course, COVID has delayed a lot of things. And Harrison Ford is approaching the age of 80. But it's one of those things that's been in pre-production for a while.

And I honestly wonder if it's going to come to pass and like what Harrison Ford will be doing. I'm guessing a lot of sitting around and maybe being a mentor for another character. But apparently they're going to try to get one more out while he's still like able to walk around and remember lines and stuff. Yeah, while he's still ambulatory, with as many plane crashes as that guy has survived, I don't think that anything like COVID is going to get him down. Yeah, I mean, it's just going to be a question to as to whether or not, like, what his presence is going to be on screen, because like, what I really like about Harrison Ford playing the character is that he's just being himself and there's a certain amount of like, I don't give a shit to both the performer and the character that I appreciate, like, that I think the voice actor, there's too much passion. in his voice at times, that makes me feel this is not Harrison Ford. But I saw him in whatever Star Wars he was in, the new one. I'm like, boy, he does not care at all.

He is just looking, he's looking off screen at the craft service table thinking about those club sandwiches after he talks about Chewbacca or whatever. His eyes are on the prize and it is not like an Oscar. It's like, I'm going to get some snacks after this is over. So I don't know. I mean, frankly, he's figured it out. He's just, he's smoking weed in Santa Fe with Callista Flockhart. That's much more fun than being on solo, I think, in your 80s.

yeah i would agree with him you know he dude knows the score i just realized we're recording several months in advance and by saying oh he survived all of that i probably just cursed him yes we're gonna knock on like several kinds of woods so right now cole and i are in uh late september you're in late december three months have passed i'm sure harrison had a great christmas right i'm sure he had a great christmas with his family and he's perfectly fine now and i will not have to record a disclaimer before this podcast in the next three months but here's hoping I'm knocking on wood currently but as for this game

I want to talk about the production up front as we normally do and also as we normally do the great website Mixin Mojo has a great secret history series on all the LucasArts games it's normally where I start these have been online for like over a decade now

and that's a good place to start for all of you out there because most of this is informed by that and also the resources that this draws from but talking about where this falls in the timeline and Cole you mentioned earlier, it's like sort of branching, it's like straddling two eras of LucasArts games, and that's very much true in that it falls between Monkey Island 2 and Dave the Tenticle in the LucasArts timeline. Its development overlap with Monkey Island 2's. Monkey Island 2 was entering

development later, but it came out first. So these games are being developed at the same time, roughly within LucasArts in the early 90s. Yeah, it's kind of a real, this is an unfair way to put it, but a team B team kind of thing. I think that this does a little bit fall in line with something like Sam and Max, where it is not a Ron Gilbert or a Tim Schaefer

or, you know, Grossman kind of joined. So I think that it ends up getting backseated a lot. Yeah. Simply because it doesn't have that kind of a tour kind of associated with it. I definitely agree. And when we see like how the team came together, it seems like it was built out of

people who had worked on failed projects, previously, so not ideal circumstances, but yeah, like, if you look at this game and Day of the Tenicle, Day of the Tenicle seems so much more of a modern adventure game, and not just because it's my favorite of these. I feel like there are so many, the last lingering remnants of what made adventure games annoying are still in this game. Like, all the mazes you go into, the weird, like, beat economy of the end of the game, like, these little tiny things that would just be sanded away so beautifully in the rest of the LucasArts adventure. games.

Yeah. I mean, fail states. That too, yeah. Before those were like eliminated by mandate, right? Yeah, that's true. This is the final LucasArts game that had fail states in it. If you don't count like the Easter egg monkey island drowning guy brushed off.

Like last crusade and this are the most Sierra like in terms of like how you can die. For sure. So I want to talk about like the state of Indiana Jones as a property in 1992 when this game came out. So the game entered development in 1990. year after the last crusade came out, which is presumably the last movie, at least we thought. So by the time this game came out, the trilogy had been out for over three years, and Harrison Ford was like 50 years old. So Harrison Ford was 50 years old 30 years ago, and he was transitioning into more like suit

and tie action thrillers compared to like rugged world traveling, globe trotting, you know, strong man kind of thing. Like he was getting older in the early 90s and he was transitioning to more of these more appropriate roles for his age, not knowing he'd be in an Indian Jones movie in 20 years so yeah he got a call from Hollywood and they just said hey you're going to be playing presidents from now on exactly gruff presidents or gruff fugitives basically uh but they all have suit and ties on at some point in the movie and so yeah this the the trilogy is over and uh to continue milking the cash cow of indiana jones there is a tv series that wasn't

actually a hit but a lot of money was poured into it uh the young indiana jones chronicles aired for a few seasons on TV and there were a few TV movies to continue that character and in fact the Last Crusade the beginning of that movie is sort of a soft pilot for young Indiana Jones

because it sets up a lot of who the character is with that initial scene of him as a youngster and like it's just making the offer to moviegoers do you want to see more of this we can't get Harrison Ford but how about this kid so yeah that is the soft pitch

but you know Harrison Ford doesn't don't want to do this anymore and more important Certainly, George Lucas and Steven Spielberger are like, we don't have any good ideas. And it seems like such an innocent time where a movie franchise could stop for a decade or longer because it's like, well, we don't have any good ideas. Like, simpler times. Let's just let's just let the sunset on this. We can leave it in the past.

There can be like reissues or whatever when there's a new, when there's a new format, we could put it on. But yeah, let's just let it fade away with dignity and everybody can have their memory. And it's such a different world from the modern capitalist dystopia of like Kathleen Kennedy coming out in like 2012 and showing you the roadmap of Star Wars for the next 50 years. Jesus Christ. It's such a different, way different world. And of course, then you get like movies written by committee and, you know, the auteur's are gone and they're fired from movies if they try to put too much of their own stamp on it. But still like even the bad Indiana Jones movie, the middle one, it still is the product of like, like people, not of like a committee for the most part.

And it was so weird that like Lucas and Spielberg, they had these toys like Star Wars and Indiana Jones and they just were allowed to put them away in the 90s. Like we put our toys away and then LucasArts could play in that toy box as much as they wanted. Like again, it blows my mind and I hate to repeat myself, but like what a weird, simpler time that these huge properties could just be the playthings of a software company.

Yeah. I almost feel like Indiana Jones benefited from. its slightly lower profile compared to Star Wars at this point, because Indiana Jones got this, you know, which was already a bit of a format that was maybe, maybe looking a little aged in the early 90s. The point and click graphic adventure game, I think because Star Wars was so high profile and like had just a, you know, an expectation of a particular kind of production, it ended up getting worse games. rebel assault that kind of around the same time right worse and more games too just uh i feel like because there are so many more characters and so many more uh different kinds of actions they can do in that world that made for a lot more games too mm-hmm yeah they they should have they should

have kept it to tie fighter i agree that was the best thing that come out of the star wars uh legacy of games but uh how this game came in the being is uh all due to money because the last crusade adventure game was a huge hit for LucasArts, their biggest hit at the time. I believe it sold over 250K copies, and I believe in the end, this one sold over a million. So the indie name was still very powerful for, you know, PC software buyers. And so it came as a natural thing, like, let's make another one of these. Unfortunately, LucasArts' staff wasn't very huge at the time, and most of the staff was working on Monkey Island 2.

And then also at the company, they were working on games that wouldn't come out. So along with Monkey Island 2 in development There was one of the many versions of the dig And we got to do our dig podcast at some point And also there were working on a sequel to Loom called Forge Which also never came out So some of these people would eventually move over To this Indiana Jones project

But like they were being The talent was spread very very thin at LucasArts Yeah So they need a new creative lead on this project And all of their creative leaves are busy So what do they do? Well they hire a guy fairly new to computers

and well not computers but to game design named Hal Barwood he was not a pro game designer he was just a guy who was like a teenager when video games were invented and he was like this is my passion I'll do movies for now because that's the art form that can make money but all I care about is video games

and keeping up with them but what helped is that he had screenwriting ties to Steven Spielberg which helped got him this job And we'll talk more about him later. But, yeah, Hal Barwood is this industry outsider. He had worked on a few Spielberg movies. He had directed a movie. He was in the world of cinema, but he was just a computer geek at heart.

And he was looking for a reason to develop a computer game. If this was any other kind of game, you know, something that didn't rely on needing to understand, like, the way cinema was put together, you know, and didn't rely on, you know, just a real affinity for the, for the source material. this hiring move could have been disastrous, actually. I agree. And we've seen what happens when, like, Hollywood outsiders think they can make games or when gaming people think they are Hollywood outsiders, both the scenarios never end well. Right.

So this is an unlikely success, it seems. And we'll do a little bio on him. He seems fascinating just to be where he was. And, like, not only growing up with games, but also being part of the post, like, Golden Age of Hollywood, new Hollywood, whatever it was, that little bubble, working with, like, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and Coppola when their careers were exploding.

But, yeah, Hal Barwood, great guy, and the leader of this project. And so LucasArts, there was no new indie movie to adapt. And they were like, okay, well, there are some unused scripts for Indiana Jones sequels. And one was written by Chris Columbus. And it was called Indiana Jones and the Monkey King can read this online. It exists. It was written like in the mid-80s, but Barwood was like, this script sucks, and the game that it would be based on would also suck, so we want to develop our own idea.

And it's great that they were allowed, they were trusted to be like, yeah, just write your own Indiana Jones Adventure, who cares? You never touched this series before, but we trust you. So the team visited the library at Skywalker Ranch and that if you've ever played Maniac Mansion, the library in that game is based on the Skywalker Ranch library, complete with the spiral staircase that's out of order and what they did was despite all of the archive material

they had on hand what they did was they opened up like a cheap time life like mysteries of the universe kind of hardcover book which used to be a big deal like in the 80s and 90s like friends of mine their parents had them their fun look through like oh ancient aliens and Bigfoot and all those those things you would order you get the first one for 1995

and the rest come in the mail or whatever it was a mail order scheme but they found you know an entry on Atlantis and what they really took away from it was not just that, but like the idea of like three concentric circles that was basically the layout of the city of Atlantis. And that got the gears in their head turning like, okay, these three circles could be puzzles. And there's a lot of lore to Atlantis. We can dig into like Plato's writings on it. And just the various like pop culture movements surrounding

Atlantis in the past. There's just so much to draw from just the various ideas developed about this ancient city that might have existed. It's such a good natural fit for Indy. It is, yeah, and it even draws in ideas like aliens, which was what's considered too far-fetched for the Indiana Jones series. But to my understanding, that is what the most recent movie, recent being like 13 years ago, was about. Yes. So this game had a fairly long development time of two years. But at this time, Lucas Arts, which was, so LucasArts in 1990 was Lucasfilm Games. And because they were a division of a much larger, much more profitable company,

they were like, just do whatever you want. Whatever you do, don't lose money. And apparently the three-path system in this game, which we'll talk about soon, that added six months of development time, and they would only be allowed to do that before the company became an independent entity known as LucasArts. Like, under Lucasfilm games, you can kind of do whatever you want within reason, and this is one of the ideas that could only be developed with that sort of philosophy in mind. Yeah, it's like I can understand the appeal of it at the time, especially, you know, if you

are trying to sell adventure games and people are saying, yeah, these are expensive, but you really only play through them once. Having something like this that has replay value built into it, and people have three times as many opportunities to call the hint line. Yes. It seems like it would have been an easier sale than it actually ended up being. I never thought of that, Cole. Like, yeah, the hint line was a big deal.

1-800 Star Wars, I think it was. That's what you call on Monkey Island, too. And, yeah, the hint book, there are more puzzles in this game. Therefore, you need more hints and you need to buy a hint book. The one that comes in the game isn't going to cut it. I think it only gets you through like the first third of the puzzles. So we know these games as LucasArts games, even though they were once Lucasfilm. But LucasArts was the era the people working there hated.

That's when the executives changed. It's when they were a company with different priorities. That's when there was like a lot of Exodus like Dave Grossman left. And Ron Gilbert was one of the earliest people who left the company. So like that changeover was a big deal for them. But this game was still developed with that like do whatever you want, have fun kind of mindset. that really made their adventure games pop. And this is also the first talkie game of the LucasArts adventure game series,

although the talkie version did not come out until like 11 months later, and this game was not developed with a talky version in mind, which is why I talked to Tim Schaefer about the A Tenticle a long time ago, and he was like, yeah, we found out towards the end of development, this is going to be a talkie game. If we had known that, we would have rewritten a lot of the dialogue, knowing people would be having to say these words. it would have if we would have written it to be to be spoken out loud that is a different kind of writing

than writing a joke to be read just silently and because the the quality is so charmingly low bitrate on the on the voices I would have the subtitles on at the same time and I and I wouldn't make note like oh the actor changed this line clearly like the the words on screen are different they're like I'm not going to say this this is a better way to say it and they were allowed to do that so you can see how in the booth they were changing it on the fly. Yeah. And that's just a sign of a good director and I guess maybe like a bad QA process

that didn't rectify. It's like rectify the on screen text. Almost 30 years later that is still in the game. So it's still, it's still very cute to see that. And I did want to ask you like how you felt about the voice acting. It's a very, uh, it's not up to the quality that you would expect.

And of course, the bit rate is so just like appallingly low. But I do like the charm of voices from this era even with all the flaws like Sophia is clearly recorded in a different room than indie so when they're in a conversation it's just like it's very surreal and we get a lot of the fun

it's a it's a tour of fun accents done by white people because Nick Jameson is in this game he plays Max in Sam and Max and of course like he is also in the critic and all the foreigners in this game talk like Jay Sherman's friend Vladah like hello mr sherman

apologies for that accent I just wanted to throw it out there that's what that's what Nick Jameson is doing in this he's doing a Mr. Sherman kind of thing and it is it is I mean even the Nazis are played to the hilt like how how

play to the rafters rather they're like super broad like I know nothing kind of thing like they're going for hammy it's offensive in some ways it's not in others but it is it is quaint I will say how did you feel about the voice acting in the game call yeah so the

hamminess and over-the-topness I look at it just as being part of the of the pulpiness to it like if it was actually accurate to the way people talked it would feel it would feel too muted I like the voice acting in this quite

a bit actually I you know I even like the Harrison Ford impersonator that they bring in even though he does put a little bit more oomph into the lines than Ford himself probably would have I like Sophia's performance on this as well

Yeah, it's it's good and charming And I think it's I think it's necessary You know, I think I so I played this first And when I went back and played the last crusade I was a little bit kind of bummed out It felt like something was missing without Without having a vocal performance You know, associated with these characters

It's weird because I played this first Before I watched the movies to sit like seriously sit down and watch them. So when I see Indiana Jones on screen, I think of this voice actor. I don't think of Harrison Ford. And what I do like about him is that he's not doing a Harrison Ford impersonation. At least that's not what I think he's doing. I think he's doing his, like, this is my interpretation of Indiana Jones. And they hired me because I have like a more masculine voice like Harrison Ford. But it's a different performance. And if it was just an impression, I think it would be distracting. But yeah, it is their first effort of voice acting, which would become a common feature in their games.

Loom was a voice acted eventually with the CD-ROM version, but LucasArts did not produce that internally, and we talked about that in our Loom episode with your buddy Gary. Yeah. So there are other adaptations of this story. So The Last Crusade, that game had an adventure game, which is why the official title is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, colon the graphic adventure game, just so you know what you're getting.

There is a Fate of Atlantis action game, which I only knew about through doing research for this podcast. And it looks incredibly bad. I don't know if you looked at the video of this or read up on a Cole. I did. I literally just learned about this yesterday when I was paging through the Wikipedia article. I went and I looked at a, I looked at the video of it. Over on DuckFeed, we do a, we do a show called Adjic Suffering about bad games.

It looks like a really good candidate for that. It is a particular kind of like just, we call it an explosion at the asset factory. Yes. Yeah, you know, kind of thing going on, but like just a very typical stilted, isometric action game that is way more complex than it needs to be and suffers greatly for it is what it looks like. It looks like it's a nightmare to control and it's very unclear what you're supposed to be accomplishing. You know it's bad when there's not even a single long play of it on the internet. No one has finished this game on record, it seems. And yeah, it looks terrible.

It was not developed internally. if you look at like the character's arts like Sophia is a blonde in this game and like the little icon for indie is just this very mangled looking man it's uh I just check out a video of it you have never heard of this you've never played it but it's so weird that this exists

I guess they felt like oh this one needs an action game too let's just do an action game version of this but it follows the plot of the adventure game very loosely I think all it is is like you got to get the three stones or rescue Sophia I think that's basically it that's all it really does and also uh dark horse comics adapted fate of Atlantis into a four-part

mini-series comic book series and that was released in the first omnibus Indiana Jones collection in 2008 so there is a comic book version of this I'd love to read it to see how they adapt like puzzles and stuff and which paths they take and stuff but yeah this is

a comic book for Dark Horse as well I'd be really curious to read that yeah I think it's still in print when I checked on Amazon three months after before you're hearing this. There was one in stock, so I hope nobody grabbed it. Maybe Cole grabbed it.

Maybe it's on Dark Horse's app, possibly. It could be, yeah. Yeah, I don't know how much of this is on digital, but there is an adaptation of this. So, future games for Indiana Jones. This would be the last Indiana Jones adventure game by LucasArts, which is a real shame because, again, this format feels so great for Indy. And they did publish

a few more Indiana Jones games. There's Indiana Jones and his desktop adventures, which is sort of like it's part of the Yoda stories kind of thing they were doing where it's like little isolated Zelda style things you could just pop up on your desktop and play with between you know jobs at work or whatever just a fun little diversion that you can play with I like these quite a bit I played more of the Yoda stories version of this but yeah those are really fun um really fun randomized uh kind of top down

adventure game kind of deals where all of your goals and pickups and stuff are are around Yeah, I actually would like to fire those back up again because I'm suddenly getting very nostalgic for my time spent with those. I'm not sure if that's on Gog. I know this is on Gog and Steam. And yeah, those could be available if not they're abandoned wear and they should be easy to find. But yeah, Hal Barwood worked on that. He also worked on the two Tomb Raider games, which I believe they have to have aged poorly. But there's the Infernal Machine and the Emperor's Tomb.

One was in 99. The other one was like in 2003. And those were basically Indiana Jones saying, hey, Tomb Raider exists, but we were the first Tomb Raiders. So, hey, we're going to try to get a piece of that pie. And I think I played the demo of the first game way back in the day. But this era of 3D gaming aged incredibly poorly. I can't imagine these games being any fun these days. No, no.

I remember even when they came out, like they reviewed very poorly. My tip to anybody making a game is do not put out something with a title, like the infer, the infernal machine where somebody's tagline can be more like infernal game yeah uh you don't want to like have a softball to anger reviewers that that's a good tip make it hard make it hard for them so there were a few like uh canceled sequels to this believe it or not so uh indiana jones and the iron phoenix sounds fascinating so this was going to be a mid 90 sequel for indiana jones a post post world war two adventure um where he's chasing down nazis in bolivia who were trying to resurrect Hitler with the philosopher's stone.

So this is in development for 15 months, and there were a lot of development problems, but sort of the straw that broke the camel's back was them taking this to a European computer trade show and showing it off and basically being told, like, you could not sell a game about the resurrection of Hitler in Germany. It's not going to happen. And then them going, you know what? We're having problems with this game, and Germany is a surprisingly huge audience for us. So we're just not going to do this anymore.

And that is what happened to that game. And if you go to that Mix and Mojo website, they have an entire, like, feature on this game, including, like, you know, roughs for storyboards and interviews with developers. And, yeah, it was just an incredible mess. And this could have been a potential adventure game for Indiana Jones, like around the era of, like, the dig and Grim Fandango.

That's a real shame because I would have loved to have seen what they had been able to do, having learned the lessons from, um, from the fate of Atlantis in addition to a more focused experience because I don't imagine that they were working on they were either

they either got rid of the paths system or they added four more depending you know that's generally how stuff went in the late 90s I think so it's like we can triple the paths triple our sales but yeah so let's make this completely

unviable we have a genre to kill this this game though I feel like it would have been great. I understand why. Actually, it is odd playing a game in 2020 where it's like, Nazis are in the news again. And these used to just be like, oh, it's just like a monster on overseas. But now it's just like, all right, they're just walking around outside now.

And I don't know how to deal with this anymore. But. Yeah, I miss when this was just a fantasy. Yeah. And in fact, like, I think this could be apocryphal, but I believe like after Schindler's lists, Spielberg was like, I'm not going to make Nazis villains anymore,

cartoonish villains, because we need to take Nazi seriously. And maybe that could have been another factor as to why this Nazi adventure didn't happen. Because the Nazis in this game, Fate of Atlanta's are like cartoony, like especially the ones you run into with like their silly voices and they're just,

they're bumbling oafs, you know. Yeah. And it's all, I mean, not to get into the ideology or politics of this, whatever, but they're focusing on the occult side of Nazism. Like, oh, we are, we are Superman and we're going to make ourselves into God or whatever.

It's just that uncomfortable presentation of the goofy side of it with literally nothing said about the actual horrible things that they did. Yeah. And, you know, the more vile parts of their philosophy. I don't even, maybe they edited these out of the game over time, but I don't even see like a single swastika in the game. Yeah, it's all Iron Crosses. Yeah, I don't recall single swastika. So they are still being careful in 1992. And it's not like the reality of Hitler and what he's doing.

And this is like the eve of World War II. So Hitler is just sort of like conquering Europe and we're not involved yet. So yeah, they are being careful. But it is weird to be like, I only see Nazis in games if it's like Wolfenstein when it's like, we are going to do the Nazi thing again and we're going to do it right. Like before the stereotype was, oh, there's so many Nazis in games. And now it's just like, we're going to be very careful about our use of Nazis now. Yeah.

And yeah, it might not surprise. you, but this game also got a four-part Dark Horse miniseries where they toned down the stories a bit. And, yeah, this is also available in one of those Indiana Jones collections. So you can read what would have been a game in the mid-90s for indie. I would be very curious to see that, actually. Me too, yeah. Now, I might pick up one of these omnibuses just to see, like, what could this have been? Spear of Destiny.

That was also the name of an expansion pack for Wolfenstein. Yeah, and it's funny, like, Wolfenstein 3D came out this year. So, like, that started the clock ticking for adventure games in the 90s when it's like, oh, look at the kind of experience you can have on your PC seems pretty cool, eh? And, yeah, I guess a lot of Nazi-based Nazi killing entertainment was happening in 1992. But, yeah, Spear of Destiny, there's some, like, contention here is, like, was this a game or was it not a game? I think people assumed it was a game because the writer of the comics said it came from a scrapped idea for a game. So maybe it was like in like pre-production at LucasArts. But yeah, this I think was going to be a game that would be outsource.

But it's not 100% clear as if this, if this game was actually in production. But potentially this could have been another Indiana Jones adventure game. So let's talk about the staff of the game. Hal Barwood, we mentioned him up front. He is the director of the game. And from a very young age, he was born in 1940. So I guess when he became like 30 or like in his mid-20s, like the concept of a video video game was being written about in like computer magazines and stuff like that it was still

like ultra nerdy stuff he always had a fascination with this stuff and in an interview with him i read that like he once drove over 100 miles to play computer space which was it's considered the first uh freestanding arcade game computer space like so in 1971 he drove 100 miles just to play this game that's how like uh crazy he was about video games back when they were just like basically a radar pattern on a screen. Have you seen the cabinets for computer space? Yes, I believe a PRGE, they usually

have one, and it is just like, it looks like it fell out of Austin Powers living room. It is so, it is gorgeous. I love how dorky it looks. Doesn't it have that, that molded plastic? And like, with like little flex of sparkly stuff in it, I'm imagining that, or did that actually happen? Like the little flex inside the plastic?

Yeah, it almost makes it look like opalescent. It looks like it's weird of bowling ball material. Exactly. To a certain degree. It is like 60 space age, but like right at the beginning of 1970. But very, I would say it is a very sexy arcade cabinet. It's shapely. I normally wouldn't say that.

Okay. Yeah. Nolan Bushnell. So yeah. He was way into video games as a hobby, but like there was no path into it. It was like a place for technicians and engineers to play around in. So he was mostly in the movie business and one of his first role. was working with George Lucas on the movie

THX-11338. He was an animator on that, and he would eventually get a writing partner named Matthew Robbins together. They rewrote Stephen Spielberg's first movie, Sugar Land Express, and they also did a ton of uncredited work on the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So working with Spielberg as he is a rising director,

working with Lucas as he was taking off just in this post-Hollywood kind of bubble in the Bay Area where all this cool stuff was happening. And he was there. A couple of really good stars to hitch their wagon, too, at the very least. Yeah, like a lot of good friends at this time. So he would also, he'd do a lot of screenwriting,

a lot of work in movies. He would even direct a movie called Warning Sign, which I've never heard of. But it's like a horror, sci-fi thriller. That sounds pretty cool. It's a Sam Waterston movie. And it looked pretty neat, but I've never heard of it, never seen it on cable.

Maybe Gilbert Gottfried hosted it on USA Up All Night in, like, 1991. I don't know. But he had directed a movie. But, yeah, based on all this work, based on who he knew, I'm sure Spielberg vouched for him, he was hired to work on this game. And seemingly after this, he just left Hollywood behind and was a game developer until 2008, when I think he tapped out because he was almost 70. But he would stay at LucasArts until 2003 and then develop his own video game company and continue making adventure games. Nice. I see the last game that he made here in 2008, Matahari.

I had never heard of that. But it's awesome that he was able to eventually come around and work professionally in the field that was like his passion and his hobby when he was a kid. It's funny. He had to wait until he was like 40 for there to be a like a path into video games because they were just things people tinkered with and you know things that engineers tinkered with and now there was like at LucasArts, the cool thing about it is and we've talked about it, is that, like, you could enter the company as someone who didn't know

anything about computers and learn how to build puzzles, learn how to build a game, and that's what the SCUM engine was good for. Like, he was doing work in the SCUM engine as this guy who just fell out of Hollywood. He was making rooms and making puzzles and even working on, like, art assets. Like, it was such an approachable set of tools for anyone to use at this company. Have they released, like, the training modules and documentation that they used at LucasArts to get people on board on SCUM? Oh, wow. If, if, scum became open source that would be amazing i don't know if it has but i think there's something called like adventure game engine that is similar and it might be more have more like uh you know

features to it yeah it's more modern adventure game studio like a lot of um uh stuff that oh gosh uh why jidae games are made are made in that it's really fully featured i just occasionally when you read about the development of these you hear about like oh yeah we use this as a as a as a as a training asset. Oh, Sam and Max, right? Those sprites were originally made or they were first made into games as like training exercises, just because Steve Purcell put them in as things to get people on board on scum.

Yeah, and we previously have covered one of the Grime games, which is the 3D engine and Escape from Monkey Island. Nina and I were on that podcast. We hated it. I think we talked for two hours about it. And I feel like I'm not a big fan of Grim Fandango. I love the story and characters.

The gameplay is rough and Escape from Monkey Island is even worse and I had to ask like did this 3D engine make for less tinkering? Like with SCUM you can go in at the last minute and move things around and change puzzles

but when you're working in 3D with like pre-rendered backgrounds I feel like it's a lot more work to tinker and maybe that's why like puzzles had to be locked down from the very beginning where you could just improvise until you're done with the game

when it comes to the 2D SCUMP games. It had to be really hard to like do quick prototyping when you were dealing with 3D pre-rendered backgrounds. Yeah. Because you would have to, at that time, like, send them out to actually be rendered, right? And if you wanted to, like, give the character an item, like, okay, he needs to hold a gun in this, in this scene.

Okay, just draw on like seven pixels. He's got a gun. Instead of like, okay, we need to model a gun, animate him taking it out, like, do all this extra work. Like, I feel like with this low level of tech, the ability to improve on puzzles until the very end of the game was what made these games really sing. Yeah. They can just keep testing and iterating and refining as they want. And the other designer on this game is Noah Falstein, another old-timer in the industry, but a very important guy. So he is one of the original employees of Lucasfilm Games.

And before that, he was the project lead and co-designer of the classic arcade game Sinistar. And so Barwood was the main director, and Falstein was the additional guy who would like do design and think of ideas. But he was helping out Barwood. And before this, Falstein mainly working. on all the Lucasville games that no one ever talks about like their pre-adventure game legacy so like things like Coronaus Rift and then all of their weird like naval

combat simulators and like air combat simulators that nobody ever talks about ever yeah yeah um did they didn't the silent service wasn't that and that was like way before this yeah I like all of their naval and air

simulators are named after like whatever the the starship is so they have just very clumsy long names but yeah he was the guy on those because he came from like an arcade background um but he was a co-project lead and a co-designer on the last crusade game so that kind of got his foot in the indie door and uh so he left lucas arts in the mid-90s mainly was just a consultant after that but did work at like things like dreamworks games and the three o company and his most recent uh role was chief game designer at google and i was also thinking like did google make games am i missing something they had to have done something of their own with stadia maybe yes yeah i think you're right about that it's uh it's sort

of like those things were like oh yeah amazon had a games company and but like all of their games were canceled for it i i don't know worse than that they were put out like they were actually released um as retail code and then they they bumped them back into beta and i think even one of them backslid into alpha okay thanks for telling me that because when i was still in the press uh i went to the grand opening of amazon game studios in la this huge like massive expensive party and then that was like one of three times I previewed a competitive fbs called breakaway which never came out I went to three different preview events for it but that was an amazon game studios like the star the star of their like e-sports uh you know show that they're putting

on so what a weird time to be alive but yeah he was recently at google and uh yeah just like a very important figure in the games industry uh and he's still kicking around there and doing consulting and stuff so that's Noah Falstein and the other notable talent on the game so the trio of composers that do most music for these games so Peter McConnell Clint Bojackian and Michael Land are all doing the soundtrack here I don't think it's bad I do think it's a little weak and not because it relies on the indie theme as much as you think it would I think they're going for more of like an ambient background sound which I think it's a little technologically challenged to make that effective that like they don't have to really thin there you go yeah that's the word i was looking

for like how did you feel about it cole um it it suffices let's say and you know they're using the i muse system um was that the first one that uh the first game that did the i muse uh monkey island two is the one that really did a lot with it but i believe monkey island one might have been the first one gotcha yeah so you can you can see you know the compositions evolving as you accomplish particular things are go deeper into areas and that is always impressive when you play a game from from this era i muse is just indispensable as part of these lucas arts games or lucas film games um yeah it's definitely thin and it doesn't have the bombast that i would expect out of this uh you know out of indiana jones i i really associate

Indiana Jones with Bombast There's also Like they kind of came up with their own little Their own little sting like their own little fanfare That for all the world Sounds like a track from Star Fox Oh okay I don't know if that'll be in our in our music between

Our conversation but I'll have to look that up Because I didn't hit me the same way it hit you Yeah But I just did I was like oh yeah that's that is almost exactly Star Fox I guess also in 1990, oh, that was a 1983 game, so maybe Star Fox, who knows what they were playing over there, Argonaut Software. But, yeah, like, I do feel that Monkey Island 2 and the day the tentacle, they both sandwich this game. They both have the same composers, but in each of those games, the, like, the character themes are much stronger, and just the music is much more memorable than it is here. But I think they're trying to do something different here, but, like, the level of technology can't really do it for them.

and when I would have this game as a kid a friend of mine always made fun of how I guess whiny the Indiana Jones theme sounded because when you started up it's like it's not it's not the power you expect from Indiana Jones scene it's just like this little warbly wobbly sound not quite as powerful as you would expect it to be

Indiana Jones played through a kazoo exactly it's one of those ones that were just a comb with a piece of wax paper it's not a quality kazoo either imitating the sound of hover bikes exactly and also there's a ton of people on this but I want to pull out also

Steve Purcell and his future wife Colette Michaud we talked about a lot on Sam and Max they got married during the development of that presumably they were a couple at this point but they were a few of the artists and animators on this project and many of the animations of Indy and Sophia are

a rotoscope from footage of them including them kissing so if you're looking at the screen just imagine like that is Steve Purcell being drawn over basically by an artist. That's very sweet. Yeah, I do like that. So that is all the background information I have for now, but we're going to take a brief break and come back to talk about our experience with Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis. Hello, my name is Jonathan Dunn, and I'm inviting you to listen to Our Three Sense, a weekly podcast where myself and two of my very best gaming chums are counting down our top 100 favorite video games of all time.

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So we're back to talk about our fun times we had with the fate of Atlantis. So again, this game was released in June of 1992, the CD-Rom-Tockey game, released in 1993. And again, you can get this. It's easily playable on things like Steam and good old games. I recommend if you get the Steam. version than just to run that separately in scum vm because the launcher they give you it's uh it puts this weird filter over everything and it's not it's not ideal and scum vm always of course gives you a lot of other options to use so i recommend just downloading that separately and running it through uh through that

yeah also i couldn't find a way to uh to make the screen uh to make the window any bigger launching it out of steam yeah yeah it's weird look i feel like it is using scum vm to run those games but you don't have access to the actual features of scum vm it's it's bizarre Yeah, it's like getting a DOS box distribution. Exactly, yeah. So looking at like the SCUM engine and like how this game plays compared to Monkey Island 2, it's exactly the same in that the advancement in Monkey Island 2 is like your items are now also icons in your inventory. It's not just a list of items. And also you build sentences with the nine verbs on the screen and they're in the exact same order as they are in Monkey Island 1.

And yeah, they're just basically using, sorry, Monkey Island 2. They're basically just using that format again, which is great. Yeah. I like the icons. I like basically any time they strip back the number of verbs. Even here, it felt like there were maybe too many. And that also complicated. When we talk about the puzzles and the pixel hunt kind of stuff, there was a little bit of a lot of trial and error trying to figure out which verb you wanted to use. Yeah, especially with like push and pull and use when one should always work, but one doesn't. Yeah. And I also feel like in this era, like they would figure this out with I think data tentacle but like it's weird that you have a look at command but often like indie will just be like I don't see anything special about that like everything you see on the screen should have one line of dialogue associated with it like but they weren't thinking of that like that at the time and I understand why but it is it is weird to have a a voice character just speaking the same canned line of dialogue about like I don't care about this thing you just showed me so yeah they're not they're not quite there yet um um Oh, a game that we had done for Watchoff for Fireballs, that was actually really, really good about that. Callahan's Cross Time Adventure or Cross Time Saloon,

rather, Callahan's Cross Time Saloon, every single thing has a voiced line of dialogue for that. It was a Herkulean effort to accomplish that, but everything kind of pales in comparison to that implementation. That is great, yeah. I do appreciate that, but I also feel like a compulsion to hear every line of dialogue, so it can be overwhelming. that's why I don't play as many

JRPGs as I used to. It's like I need to talk to every town member again because somebody wrote this dialogue. It's very important that I read it. So yeah, this carries over an idea from the last indie game. It is such a Sierra online game idea and that

you have this, you have a score in this game. It's completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Most of the time you will just forget that you can see it while you play. But yeah, it's called IQ or indie quotient. Ha ha, ha, very clever. And the point is to get all 1,000 points by solving every puzzle in every possible way across all three paths of the game. And yes, the score is cumulative and that it carries across saves.

And you don't have to replay the Atlantis part of the game because there is only one way to solve every puzzle there. And you solve every puzzle the same way every time. So mercifully, they don't make you replay that section of the game, which is a huge drag we'll talk about. But that is the indie quotient. And I don't know, my indie score is like 536. It just seems just so arbitrary to me. Yeah, I don't pay attention to score in adventure games, even when I do, you know, when I play a Sierra game that I like. Like, it's super weird that there's a score in, that there's a score in Gabriel Knight.

When in reality, it's almost like, it would almost suffice to have a checklist, especially because you're, you know, it's saying, hey, solve every puzzle. It doesn't matter how you solve them. really you know just solve them on this path um as you go i think having it be having it be a score just kind of makes it makes it possible that you're going to get to 990 and uh lose your mind about about those last 10 points i mean we often complain about them i've kind of come around to it like uh i feel like achievements are a better version of this where like it's just the a direct command like do this and we you will be a good person you will feel satisfaction you'll a little jpeg will pop up until you're a good boy this is just like well you can look at a number

and one day it'll be a bigger number if you work hard enough so yeah you won't know why exactly yeah if like points came out of things when you saw puzzles that might even be more satisfying than just having this invisible score that you can just access sometimes but yeah we mentioned it earlier but yeah this game has something called the path system it was a big selling point so after this after the first third of the game you play through it um and then sophia basically gives you a choice of three different paths, fists, wits, and team. And each path features unique areas and unique puzzle solutions, so you need to play through all of them to see the entire game. And for this one, I took the team path and I asked Cole to take the wits path. Fis path, this seems like the

worst way to play this game, although it is possible. But yeah, it is interesting in that only the middle third of the game is different depending on how you play it. So like it's bookended by these mandatory sections, but the middle and how you get these three different stones will differ depending on which option you choose when Sophia asks you. Yeah, I wish that they made it more clear that that was the option, that that was the choice you were making because she just kind of asked like, okay, so what is our next step and your options are like, oh, this will be dangerous. It'll be easier for me to, you know, to solve the puzzles and find these alone, or I definitely need you are the three options that you get.

and most other dialogue choices in the in the LucasArts tradition you know when you have a bunch of things like that there's only one of them that is correct and the others are joke opportunities so to have it be unsigned posted feels very strange I like I made sure to look up and remember which which dialogue choice mattered because I didn't know I didn't want to accidentally get put into fistland exactly yeah I wish I mean I know they're trying to make it seem natural this dialogue as to like you choosing a path but I wish it would have been like totally gaming like have me click on a big icon of a fist if I wanted to or like a brain or something because like it is such an important decision and it is treated as if you are doing a dialogue puzzle or something like that

and if you don't know this is what the next third of the game hinges on you might screw yourself out of the path that you want to take right I'll just talk about the past in general and I did watch like you two playthroughs or the other two paths just to see like what happens in them fists basically Fist is more of like a brute force path for Indy Sophia does not come with you she's often kidnapped off screen when you're not with her

and with Fis it's basically you engaging with this ambitious but not satisfying at all fighting game system that is oddly complex it's like you have three different kinds of blocks three different kinds of attacks and you have basically a sucker punch button that you could just cheat your way through the game with but if you do that then you won't get your indie quotient points and a lot of the fights hinge upon

like what you say to the Germans before the fight so they try to make a complex but again engaging with this fighting system is not ideal and scum was not made to be a fighting game engine and like I played the one possibly mandatory fight in the game

and I was like I don't want to do this ever again how did you feel about this one call yeah the the fighting is not good it's you know I was going to ask you played more of the scum games recently than I have has scum ever been good for action and i'll include grime uh and and that as well have any of these adventure games actually had like serviceable action put in them i will say like to be charitable serviceable is what i would call in curse of monkey island there is this um there's ship combat and it is simple enough right yeah and it is simple enough that's like turning your ship and firing uh it's it's it feels right and I'd rather it not be there, but it feels way better than anything else they've tried to

do before or since, especially a full throttle. Yeah, full throttle is the one that I, that I always go to. It just, by that point, it kind of seems like they would have, they would have understood that it was not, it was not a good use of their resources to try and make that happen. Yeah. And to me, it feels like a lack of confidence in having an adventure game and just like, guys, I didn't sign on for this. I signed on to point and click on things. Stop it. You're not good at this. either this is not the right this is not the time or the place gentlemen like we can't be doing this right now so many games where i can punch a dude yeah exactly and maybe they're like oh street fighter exists and it's very popular what if indy did those sort of things but yeah yeah it's not

very good but it's a potential path and you can take it and uh wits is what you took cole and i feel like wits in team are uh poorly described with these words because it's hard to indicate what exactly they are i mean wits is just like yeah you use your brain but you kind of use your brain to solve puzzles in every adventure game even in the fist path. So Witts is what you did. And what did you take away from that before we go on to describe specific puzzles? Yeah.

So Wits, you're definitely doing a lot of like what I would call high school chemistry class or high school physics class labs. Lab kind of stuff. You know, so some fun puzzles where you have to like

make a hot air balloon for yourself. things that are that are kind of like that it's fine my preferred playthru on this is to go through is to go through on team just because I like the interactions between between indy and sophia yeah it's it's a big bummer that they made team be the only option in which sophia can come with you because sophia is such an important part of the game and when i was watching other playthrus of this through different paths i was like and he seems just so lonely with no one to talk to yep yeah um i don't like sophia as a character like that like her the the conflict between her and indy indy who is i think by this point seen the arc of the arc of the covenant but is still skeptical about the supernatural that is true he should be a changed man yeah yeah but just like kind of kind of their conflict in the way that you can that you can shape indy's kind of impression of

Sophia who kind of has left the realm of legitimate science in Indy's eyes for kind of a new age psychic kind of deal talking about ghosts and spirits and you know she has a you know she has a direct line to an Atlantean ghost god yeah like seemingly a flim flam artist but actually she is in touch with like ancient deities and things like that so yeah you know I will take it back like I feel like fists and teams uh that's not like in a description of uh your in the game, it's like how indie is solving the problems. Because with the wits path, I saw like to find this guy early in the game in this crowded like Mediterranean marketplace or North African marketplace, you have to first like

give him a red hat and then follow that red hat through a teaming mass of people to find where he's going. Is that correct for that puzzle? Yeah. It's really clever and it reminded me of like a Gabriel Knight kind of kind of thing. I did like that one. And the team when I believe you and Sophia like. talk to him and it's more of like you working with Sophia to solve the puzzle and I forget I think when in Fiss you just go to his house and beat him up or something but or lock him in a closet but uh yeah like I played team and uh what let me down so I loved having Sophia on the team and she's fun to play off of Andy and it's fun to talk to her but like I expected there to be more interplay especially with the gameplay of the game uh from what I recall you only switch to Sophia once to control independently and it's only to talk to another

character and that's it i would have loved like maniac mansion style splitting up and exploring places in different ways maybe that would have made for more annoying puzzles but uh i feel like i was slightly misled although it's team and spirit in that like often a few times like sophia will distract someone while indy does something but i really wanted more like independent gameplay with me as sophia but it only happens once yeah so it again everything hinges on these on these one-word descriptions like wits seems more focused on mechanical puzzles you know whereas team is like it seems like dialogue puzzles most mostly to me or like dialogue um and kind of just a like social uh yeah yeah social kind of maneuvering um and honestly that's most of what i'm in adventure

games for is that is those social those social kind of maneuverings me too and it feels like they wanted a snappy way to describe it but so like fists and wits kind of rhyme but then you throw in team so even their like scheme they have for naming the three things is kind of clunky to begin with so yeah they tried but again uh it makes that middle third of the game different and it's fun how like often you're going to the same places but you're getting things in a different way because you don't have certain assets available to you yeah yeah um i like that you can you can pick the kind of game that you want um and that is that is good it almost feels like a little bit like um like a different implementation of what quest for glory um

ended up doing where you would pick your class at the beginning like oh i want to be a thief but i'm going you know i want to do i want to do break-ins and um stealth kind of stuff or i want to be a warrior i want to engage with the fighting system this is like a non-stat version of that yeah and it tries to predict in a clunky way in a way that i appreciate but it's still kind of clunky it's like here is the best path for you based on previous actions and it all hinges upon this first puzzle in the game where you have to break into this theater that Sophia is doing her lecture series in and depending on how you solve that puzzle that is what Sophia recommends but because just through like exploring options I got into a fight with the bouncer made my way in and

Sophia's like you should try the fist path she doesn't say it like that but that's what the game is saying but just because I ran into that first as my first solution doesn't mean I want to opt into the fighting game portion of this game because I really don't but that's it's a fun kind of way like oh the game plays you kind of thing but it doesn't really work out the way they want to yeah yeah uh especially because the wits way to get into that theater is to clear a path by pushing boxes that's true and i guess the the team path is dialogue based and then you talk your way in to the uh to the thing but yeah uh it's cool and i like that it's there but it could mislead players in a way that they don't want to go so uh yeah i i would read up on these past

before you play just to decide what you want but I think Cole and I both agree that team is ideal for your first play through. Yeah, I would agree with that. But yeah, ultimately you are doing this middle section to get these three stones and that is how you access Atlantis. So other things in this game, we mentioned it before,

but the deaths are a part of this game. And feeling very out of place for Luxart's game, I wish that they weren't here. I believe Barwood or Falstein says, like, well, with Indiana Jones, you need some element of danger. So we can't make a game where you can't die. My only fix of that would be like, let Indy die,

but then kick me back to right before that choice was made. Like you have the technology. Don't make me rely on a save because you are either, you know, frustrating me or making me go back further because I forgot to save. Yeah, and if you're playing this like a LucasArts game, you are not saving in the same way as if you're playing a Sierra game. Exactly, yeah. And I will say like for Maniac Mansion,

you have to work pretty hard to die to the point where the deaths are kind of like Easter eggs. You don't have to work as hard in this game. but I was taken by surprise a few times when I was like, I wonder what will happen if I go, oh, that they found me and I'm dead. So there are, especially at the end, you can just die a lot in the end. So, yeah, that's, it's clunky. And again, I wish they would just boot you back to before that choice was made. But again, please save a bunch if you're going to play this.

Save as often as you can. But the deaths should be pretty obvious. They warn you a lot of the time, too. Like if somebody is going to take a shot at you, they'll say, hey you go walk the other way yeah exactly yeah you can't be as a guy brush three-poody by like openly insulting armed Nazis in this game though if you think you can yeah the fun part of monkey island was like I can be as rude as I want to and I'm like I can't get a game over I can choose like the comedy root option but Indiana Jones can't do that in this game but I want to go over the plot really

quick so this story takes place like shortly after the last crusade so indie is back to his teaching gig and the story opens with him finding this old artifact for a visitor named Mr. Smith and Mr. Smith turns out to be a Nazi named Klaus Kerner in search of the Atlantean treasures to seemingly unlock the power of atomic weapons though we learn over time

his goals are much bigger. He's working for this guy named Dr. Ubaman, which is the perfect evil Nazi scientist name ever right? And it is that has such first draft energy to me. Yes, it's like

okay we're going to call him that as a place older we'll find something more subtle no we're not gonna okay we're gonna go with uberman cool it's sort of like uh naming poochies like so uberman okay with everybody yeah uh so yeah so they're trying to get these atlantean treasures and so this kicks off an adventure in that indy gets wrapped up with an old flame from his like first expedition and uh they want to stop the nazis before they use the power of atlantis to potentially conquer the world so i love this setting i love this like the brink of war kind of thing we're not quite in war you yet, but Hitler's a big bad guy that we don't know what he's going to do to us yet.

So, yeah, I do love this setting, this late 30s setting. Yep, that's good. I'm really happy that they didn't end up, that the plot didn't ultimately end up being about Oricaalcum as an energy source, just because I feel like scientists find unethical way to get unlimited energy is just the basis for every story. Yeah, it's like... kind of the default option that comes out of the box. So when they ultimately decided to make it about, you know, becoming gods, that was, that was better to me.

And frankly, as Americans, we're living in a glass house when it comes to atomic weapons. We can't, we can't throw those stones anymore. But I do like, I guess some slight spoilers, like Uberman and the doctor. I mean, we only see him, he's sort of like Dr. Fred almost in that, like, he is always in a cutscene somewhere until the end of the game. But he is clearly, he's going over Hitler's head big time. He's like, I'm going to be a god and it's going to rule. you guys can serve under me but it's me i'm at superman like look at the name you know you know what i'm after right yeah it's right there yeah come on you can't act surprised you don't even need to read

between the lines just read the actual lines and you can see it uh but yeah it's super liminal that the it's true uh and the prologue of this game is really neat it's something i'd not have seen before in a lucas arts game and that it is a playable credit sequence i don't think it's meant to train you how to play the game outside of just the idea of pointing and clicking but it is this uh sequence in which Indiana Jones is exploring his archives looking for something. You don't know what it is yet, but essentially you have to click on the right item in every room and eventually Indy will get his ass kick to the next room. Like something will fall over on him, he'll fall down a rope.

He is just a bumbling oaf in this intro, which is like kind of the appeal to this hunky everyman and that he will often like hurt himself or fall in the traps or just be kind of like falling for all these slapstick things. but it's very neat. I did like this playable credit sequence a lot, and I always have. It's a great, the first impression of the game.

I think it sets a very good tone, especially compared to the Last Crusade, which is so straightforward, right? You come into this, and right away, they hit you with a slapstick. And it's very well executed.

It's funny and inventive, the ways that he finds to fall through floors. And I love that, you know, when he falls and he's just laying there motion, and I'm sitting there thinking, oh, is he dead? And it just shows a couple of lines of the credits. And then it gets up and then you do like a little, you do a little adventure game section to go

through and see the next thing. It's a, it's a wonderful way to make a first impression. And I think if you're trained on like Sierra games, you might think, oh, no, I died in the first 30 seconds. I really screwed this up. But no, you can't die here at least. And I do like how later you return to the scene of chaos and there's actually more puzzles that exist in these rooms.

So that's pretty cool, too. and when it comes to overall puzzle design I did appreciate a lot of this and so Monkey Island 2 we did our podcast on that one and I do like Monkey Island 2 a lot but I always feel a bit overwhelmed in that game because at a certain point in the game you can travel to like a bunch

of different locations with a ton of different rooms you carry items from island to island it's possible to forget an item on an island have to go all the way back there to it to get it and overall I feel like this game Barwood he might be thinking about this in terms

of like a movie set or a filmed scene but it's just like usually indie is locked down to one scene at a time you there are very few times in the game where you can backtrack to an old location and uh for the most part like the puzzle solving items you need are all found within the scene before indie moves on and between those scenes the game does a good job of like eliminating items from his inventory that he doesn't need like i took the the chaff items from his uh his office like I took the jar of like mayonnaise you can get I don't know what happened to it but at a certain point in the game it's just not in his pockets anymore so I do like that I honestly feel like barwood is thinking like this is a human actor this human actor's on a set what are they going to do conceivably a human actor is not going to have like a backpack full of items from previous scenes yeah and I think also it's a smart it's a smart move from you know if we're telling this kind of story where there is a propulsion to you know to what is happening you know you can solve most of the puzzles with what you're what is readily available to you, which reduces, you know, what you do in Monkey Island, too, which is a game that I love.

But there's an awful lot of just kind of like gumming at the edges as you do laps around. And, you know, like that is designed for you to make multiple visits to multiple different things, which through effecting the pacing makes that and do a different kind of story. I like the scale of this. I think that this is well done. Yeah. there are a few like ship in a bottle puzzles I love where just like you're on this location and like everything is just in these few rooms like just stumble around try everything on everything and I don't know if this is in the wits path did you have the puzzle with the generator the power generator in the dark yes and like putting getting the fuel out of the car and stuff like that that was such a great puzzle because again like everything you need is just on two screens and the darkness puzzle is really cool because like you go into this into this cave area and it's like very dark dark and then over time your indies eyes get used to it so like like slowly over time like it'll

get like one shade brighter in a very subtle way to the point where I wasn't sure if like my own eyes were getting used to this because I was playing it in the dark it's a good subtle effect yeah but yeah that was one of the puzzles where I just thought it was a very well done in like very modern feeling adventure game and just like everything I need is here there's no like red herrings I don't need to go back to like indies office and then rifle through his desk drawer or whatever to find like the thing I need it just all there on the set indies at at that time yeah it's not like you know sam and max where there's just a whole section of the office that is off to the right side that you can miss yeah clearly they learn nothing from working on this game some of the people

and i'm getting yeah i'm getting the the chronology mixed up um but it just that that that's all the game to mind here i was so i was going to talk about the the darkness uh puzzles because i think they do it a couple too many times yeah um and this this is something that happens in adventure games and it feels like that is a kind of something that would eventually be left behind you just don't see that in later adventure games i think that um specifically when you're messing with the generator they would have benefited by having the generator be a little bit bigger or have fewer interactable parts because it's a little bit pixel-hunty trying to find trying to mouse over it and you know discern that this is the gas cap versus this is the starter button those target

incredibly small yeah it could i felt like i ended up um yeah spending a lot of time uh interacting with the wrong thing yeah that's one element i didn't really care for is that like it's not just pixel huntly pixel hunty but it's also doing it in the dark where it's just like this this small square on the screen that's a generator also has like a cabinet you can open and has like a gas cap and a button on it as well so like you could find it but you're like well how do i put the gas cap on it's just a matter of like feeling around with the mouse cursor which i guess like in terms of what india is doing he's like feeling around in the dark which is fun but it's not as fun to do when you're doing it on a screen there's a compli so there's a little there's too much complexity to it there are also a lot of dependencies you have to do it in the right order you have to use the right verb or something if i it a little bit, and this is a game that came on much, much later, and it was strictly a parody of this kind of thing. It felt kind of like I was playing, don't shit your pants.

Yes, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, that's a fun indie game. You can play in a browser in like two minutes, but just the gotcha on the order of operations, just really call to mind that particular game. And also in this game, we

talked about it a bit earlier, but I want to go more into it, is like, we mercifully in 1992 we were like okay we on the record we have said yeah mazes in adventure games they're just there to pat things out and boy this game has too many

mazes to the point where like some of the mazes are like metaphors where it's just like oh yeah there's a bunch of doors here but like at the end of the game like the world map at the end of the game is like help India find the hamburgers or whatever it's like you're at a restaurant and you have to like help him I don't know chase down the hamburger or whatever

you're just like walking through an explicit maze and then in the scene right before Atlantis takes too long but the scene right before the finale is like here are 20 doors each door leads to a different opening to have fun through trial and error deciding which one yet

that's like it's not fun in any way but this is the last time that I can remember that they would rely this heavily on mazes and their mazes in like almost every of these games even Monkey Island but at least Monkey Island

does something interesting with the mazes yeah and like it's not like the mazes are without charm here Like there are some things So on your path I forget of the team path has you making a compass

Out of out of a rubber comb And some and some like wool and amber That one I did not have that one Yeah so I think it's in the it's in the labyrinth of Crete Like the way that you solve that is you Again it's like a high school physics class or a middle school physics lesson You find a rubber comb and you hang it from a you hang it from a string and you rub different stuff on it to give it a charge

and it points at the right door to like to get you out that is a like that is the good kind of maze in this kind of game where you know like in monkey island you just have to the puzzle isn't getting through it the puzzle is finding the way to have the right answer pointed out to you yeah like finding the gimmick solution but the placemat maze is not yeah the placemat maze sucks

And, yeah, I think for that puzzle, you talked about Cole, the compass comb. I had Sophia with me, and for some reason, we picked up, like, this ori-calcum detector. And that pointed us out. So there was no, there was no need to make a compass there. Yeah. Well, the, the placement may is that is especially egregious because that has a stealth element to it as well. Yeah, like, let's move on to talk about Atlantis, because Atlantis is the last third of the game. Everything converges in Atlanta.

And even if you're on the team path, Sophia gets kidnapped in the dark. So she immediately gets taken away from you. And so the one thing I like about Atlantis is that it's what I like about the puzzles that are good in the game is that it's self-contained and everything you need is locked down to this area. So you have very few variables to sort through relatively to something like Monkey Island too. Like you can kind of brute force your way through these puzzles because there are only so many solutions. What I don't like is that this maze is four screens big and indie is about three pixels tall with several locations, many of them, being like red herrings or dead ends where nothing is there.

And also, we could talk more about this later, but there's like this bead economy where you have to make these beads to power things. And ostensibly, there are infinite beads, but for whatever reason the game doesn't just give you infinite beads once you figure out how to make them. So at a time, and this happened to me, you could be at a place deep into the maze and you have to leave to make more beads

and, like, waste, I don't know, eight to ten minutes doing that. Yeah, don't punish me with inconvenience. especially because when Indy makes the beads with this machine in Atlantis, you have a lot of beads. He says, I've got a handful of beads. You only realize that is a limited amount of beads when you have one left because the icon changes from a bunch to one. And you're like, oh, no. So you can't even like look at it and have them say, I have four beads left. Indy refuses to count the beads.

So that I found was really misleading. And when the icon dwindled down to one bead, I was like, no, no. You gave me infinite beads. They wouldn't do that to me. Come on. And it turns out like, no, now you have to go leave deep in this maze, ride the crab back through all these caverns, go to the lava, fill your cup up, go all the way back to the other screen, dump the, oh, you forgot the gear? Is the gear in the robot? Go back to the robot, grab that gear.

You need to activate the bead making machine. That stuff like that. We learn nothing from Zach McCracken. Exactly. Boy, I will say, like, I'm not fresh after playing Escape from Monkey Island, but I'm about a month away. And Zach McCracken was like, it was like playing like Mario World compared to playing anything. Yeah. No, no.

Boy, Monkey Island. One of those games, or Escape for Monkey Island, rather, that really deserves this reputation. I feel like whenever they bury me, hopefully they'll be dead. But my headstone will say I finish Skate for Monkey Island. And one of, I feel like it's a real achievement. But yeah, Atlanta's cool. It's a bummer. And it's the last third of the game.

and it is so much I believe even Hal Barwood has a term like shoe leather and that's like a lot of needless walking and it's easy to miss locations

in this maze and often you have to like access different parts of the maze in different ways that are irritating and there is a stealth element to it

and your punishment for failing the stealth element is annoyance in that there are Nazis patrolling you can beat up the Nazis it won't remove them permanently from the maze

and whenever you run into them it is a matter of like choosing the I'm going to run away dialogue option and then getting out of there. And you're just punished by having to sit through all that. It's a real bummer.

Yeah. It's a bummer because like when you're on an individual screen, it's beautiful. And as you said, you know, like it's the puzzles from this game. So they are satisfied, you know, relatively small scale. And it's Indiana Jones stuff that you're doing. Like you're powering up ancient devices and, you know, just doing this kind of dungeneering kind of stuff. It's good stuff. Yeah, it's a, this made me realize, like, this is why I never finished this game

because I did not remember most of Atlantis and I'm like, I probably stopped here. Even with a walkthrough, a lot of this walking around is just so tedious and then you're confronted with like another maze after you exit the maze you were just in. It's a lot to deal with. And I can see them concerned like, is this game long enough? Come on, we need to pat this out. But like, if this game was like, I don't know, 30% shorter, it would have been a more satisfying experience and Atlantis is the biggest drag at the end.

It's just there's not a lot of music in Atlantis. It's just like kind of dull and the colors aren't interesting. And I can see they're going for like the tragedy of this ruin civilization, but it's just not a fun place to be for the most part. Yeah. I remember I solved up once the first time that I played this. I petered out most of the way through here when I did a play through for, you know, before I hopped on here.

I remember it being satisfying, but it's not something you need to do multiple times. Yeah, it's the reason why when you're trying to get your 1,000 IQ points if you want to do that, they're like, you can just stop at Atlantis. It's fine. You can just start your game over. You don't need to do this again. Before we talk about the ending, I do want to talk about one other slightly irritating thing in that there are these vehicle sections that I found pretty annoying that you had the hot air balloon one as well, didn't you, Cole? Yeah, where you're trying to, so you need to navigate by either venting hydrogen or dropping ballast. yes and one of them turns you clockwise and one turns you counterclockwise so it's like you can go counterclockwise and drop or clockwise and rise or the other way around but no matter what it just makes for a very unintuitive way to steer around a balloon and land it in the right places yeah especially because you're not really so you're going to fly along and you're not aware that the game is keeping track of your height your altitude rather as you're as you're going on you find the submarine And like, okay, I fly over it. No, okay, I'm going to vent hydrogen.

I'm falling, but also it means that I need to, like, steer a spiraling descent so that I land on top of the, on top of the submarine. It's sort of like playing pilot wings when you're almost blackout drunk. That's what it feels like. It's probably it's pilot wings with a broken controller. Yeah, it's like you have these two buttons. And there's a similar thing. Did you have a submarine driving sequence as well? No, to get out of the submarine.

on wits it was actually pretty funny you have to you have to figure out how to work a torpedo launcher and you have to fire indy uh like he has a torpedo and they're firing officers that's exactly what i thought of actually i did see this puzzle one watching a video of it and it's just like indy would just have his lower half shattered he'd die in a too oh yeah like he just walks up on the beach and he says, I hate being wet. Like, you would have drowned, dog. How, how, like, wouldn't the pressure have crushed him if he's at, like, submarine? I don't know.

There's a lot of questions. I guess if Andy survived in that refrigerator or whatever in that movie, uh, the scene everyone talks about, maybe he could be shot out of a tube. But yeah, for me, for me, I had this, uh, the submarine driving sequence. And again, it was, it was the same issue I had with the hot air balloon in that, like, uh, the hot air balloon, you at first didn't realize altitude was an issue. And with this one, the issue at hand is like how close to the screen the submarine is

because turning around the submarine not only turns it around but it moves it either close to the screen or further away from the screen and like it's all an issue of piling it into this one hole which is where the Atlantis door is and it took me forever to figure out like is this am I far enough away like how do I line up this perspective that that's part of the puzzle I think but it just is not a fun interface to use and I can see I can see them like having good intentions like there's got to be action in an Indiana Jones game but

But not like this, not like this. No, no. Discern 3D positioning from 2D input is a bad puzzle to me. Yeah. It pops up, it pops up kind of frequently around this era. And it doesn't work. You can brute force your way through this, but it's unpleasant. I mean, I wish there was a simpler way to get past these segments, but it's an unpleasant thing.

And then the ending we could talk about, you basically run into Uberman and, uh, in Kerner, and they're there with the Nazis, and you find out, well, yeah, this is all just to become a god, and we're going to use these beads to become a god. And it all unfolds via these dialogue puzzles in which you almost always die, just trying to figure them out. So, you know, make sure you save when you're doing this. But I will say, like, I found the solution to be kind of unintuitive and in a not very satisfying way. And I wish there was something more to this puzzle. What did you think of this ending? I like this ending. I like the puzzle here because the path that you need to take is to remember an important detail about Plato's lost dialogue here when they're talking about the tenfold error saying like, yeah, you know, we may have made a horrible mistake when we were doing the translation, we may have, when we copied the numbers, gotten them off by a magnitude by a magnitude of 10.

so like dealing with what's his name the German general whose name I didn't write down Oh Klaus Kurnner Kurner? Yeah like dealing with him saying like oh you know you're going to you're going to use 10

you were off by 10 so maybe just do one and he turns into a microtore or whatever and falls into the lava and then and then supercharging Uberman by saying well it might be a hundred and having him having him basically explode from the energy I think that's very clever and relies on you, you know, having read and understood the text.

I think before, so like you, you kill Kerner by, that's the one that I did get on my own. But for the Uberman section, like he wants you to do it next. Like, we're going to see what happens to you now. And you have to refuse enough times. And then once you refuse enough times, you're given dialogue options to talk him into doing it. You have to appeal to his ego. Exactly. Yeah.

And it felt like trying to be like, take a. kind of cowardly way out. I guess it is the smart way, but the cowardly way didn't feel like Indiana Jones to me because Kerner's like, how about you take 10? And he's like, how about I take zero? And he's like, come on, take these. And it's like, no, I won't. You have to keep refusing him. And it feels like a very anti-Indy

thing to do and that it would play out in like a very boring action scene because it takes a while. But I can see where you're going with this. I just feel like I wish there was more like engaging with any of the other systems. It's just dialogue based. Yeah, yeah. And then it ends. And there's not a lot to the credits. It's just Indian

Sophia on this submarine and it's a nice little ending as the sun, the sky subtly changes and what I did like about this is I think they had different plans in mind for the future of this series and that's like I don't have the exact quote but it's like Indiana Jones will return in a future adventure game and perhaps be a little bit younger so

I think in their minds they're like well this TV series is going to be a huge hit and that's going to pave the way for us to make the young Indiana Jones Chronicles the adventure game but clearly nobody cared enough to make that a reality They should have made the TV show better If they wanted to do that

I've never seen it It got good like critical reviews But I think people just didn't want to watch it I don't know what the deal was It got canceled and then It finished off with like some TV movies But it was just kind of a blip on the TV radar In like the early 90s

And not a big impact there But yeah That was our Indiana Jones In The Fate of Atlantis conversation To wrap up Cole I want to ask you like What are your thoughts about this game in general and what do you think of this adventure game

with all of these different pathways and different puzzle solutions like how successful do you think it was? Yeah, so I mean, my final thought is I'm really happy to have gone back and played this because it's definitely one of these point-and-click adventures that I have played, you know, that I haven't played very often.

You know, I tend to, again, go for the stuff from the A-Team, you know, things that like Ron Gilbert was involved in. So to go back and play this game that I really remember liking and to have it stand up, specifically in the dialogue, particular puzzles.

You know, I feel like I accentuate the negative a little bit in talking about this with, you know, pixel hunting in the dark and whatever. There's an awful lot of good stuff here, like from a room of play perspective. Um,

I definitely think that like the different branches is a really good idea. I can understand why they, why they stopped it. I almost, I just, I, I wish that like, Scum as an engine and Lucas starts as a studio wasn't so capable at one particular

mode of puzzle solving and storytelling you know the you know to the point where the team path is so obviously leaning into their strengths because you are getting more dialogue and there's really good writers and you're going to want to play the one that has the most writing in it so like it would have been fun if there it would have been great if there was if they had aptitude, you know, in their personnel to really make the other paths as, as attractive as the team, the team path is, which isn't to say that they're not good puzzles in the, in the wits path. It's just, it's very lopsided and ends up being something that kind of, like, recommends against playing it multiple times. Yeah, there's definitely an ideal way to play it and it is team. And as for me, like, I feel like the game's got more streamlined after this to their, I mean, I think they did improve in terms of design for the most part.

But I do miss the variance you had in this game and the different pathways. But I feel like if you're making an adventure game now with the amount of distractions, you can't even be sure that a person will finish any of the paths, let alone try for all three. But this was made at a time in which there are fewer distractions, barely in internet. And you can conceivably sit with one adventure game for like eight months and get all your indie. points and write it down in a notebook and feel proud of yourself. But I feel like that age is come and gone and it was, it had passed even after this game released shortly after. So it was really cool to see this.

And I'm happy that they hired Barwood. It's cool to see like an outsider's perspective on video game development. And I'm glad he did a lot of stuff with India. It seemed like he had a fun time. Yeah. So it could have been a really fun game to work on. Yeah. It seemed awesome.

Like they had, again, two years of development was almost outlandish for a game at this time. Like I feel like Monkey Island one was like a nine month development cycle. and then they immediately worked on two and that might have been like 10 months or something we did the research back for the original podcast but like less than a year and development of those games was back to back yeah so pretty crazy

unheard of but Cole thanks so much for being on the show we will have you back hopefully I don't know if we'll have another LucasArts game available by the time you come back but I'm sure there's several hundred topics you'd be good for but let everyone know about duckfeed.tv your Patreon and all of the great podcasts that you do with Gary Butterfield

Yeah, so DuckPeed.TV. We primarily do shows about video games. Our main show is Watchoff for Fireballs, which is like a book club, but for games. Every week we pick a game. Used to be retro-focused, but we've kind of expanded the remit to include more recent things as well. We take a really zoomed in, kind of look at it that is kind of like half like audio let's play, half critique kind of thing. That's a lot of fun. We're, um, approaching 300 episodes on that, which is, which is ridiculous to me. Yeah, our 10 year anniversary is, is next year. So that's fun. That really flew by. Yeah, actually, not to make this about me, but I found it interesting that like we all started podcasting around the same time, like in the same year. Yeah, it's a, it's great.

Like, I don't know. I love this job. I really like being able to do it. Me too. Yeah. Yeah. But we've got other shows. We've got, we've got Advic Suffer is ostensibly about bad games, but it's more of a, more of a comedy show. And the Patreon has a bunch of bonus content. That's where you can hear the current iteration of Bonfire Side Chat, which is about the, the Dark Souls series and related, related works. We're wrapping up a show called Unfimable, where we talk about the screen and, yeah, screen adaptations of HBO Lovecraft works. And we're also going to be starting up a new show about about the Venture Brothers called Orb. Awesome. So yeah, we have a we have a bunch of stuff, a bunch of stuff lining up. Yeah, I'm a proud patron and I can tell people what they tell me, you have too many podcasts and they make

me feel bad because I'm so far behind all the time. But I know, I'm kidding, of course. But you guys do so much work. And like whenever I look at my, my duck feed, Patreon feed, there's always like 10 more podcasts. It's the last time I checked it out. Yeah. Yeah.

but it's good if we're you know if we're not making content we uh it's it's a sickness at this point we all have the podcasting disease thankfully it's it's a better disease than COVID and you can survive it makes you stronger if anything but uh thank you so much Cole for being on the show and we will be sure to have you back yeah anytime thank you for having me so thanks again to Cole Ross for being on the show please check out all of his podcast over at duckfeet TV we're a big fan of all the stuff that they do uh Cole and Gary Butterfield also for us if you want to support our shows and get all kinds of good stuff on top of that,

please go to Patreon.com slash Retronauts. Sign up there for three bucks a month. You get all these podcasts one week ahead of time and ad-free. And if you sign up for five bucks a month, you get the ad-free advance podcast that are at a higher bit rate. But also, you get access to two exclusive full-length episodes every month that are not on the free feed. You can hear the previews on the free feed,

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any incentive to give you we try to give you something good in return so please consider being a part of the Patreon we'd love to have you on board so as for me personally you can find me on Twitter

as Bob Servo and you probably know about my other podcast but if not they are Talking Simpsons a chronological exploration of the Simpsons and also I do what a cartoon with Henry Gilbert as well and that is a exploration of a different cartoon from different series every week. Those are wherever you find your podcast.

But if you go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, you can get the advanced episodes there and also access to all of our mini series and a ton of exclusive podcasts over there. And we just, as of this recording, as of this posting rather, we just wrapped up all of Talking Futurama season two part two. So that's on the Patreon along with all the previous. Talking Futurama episodes, and so many other things are happening there. If you like those podcasts, there is so much more to listen to at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons.

So that's it for us this week. We will see you next time for another episode of Retronauts. Take care. I'm not yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Thank you.