A relatively small element of the final game, the Raiders of the Lost Ark opening of the smash-hit Indiana Jones and the Great Circle didn’t just bed you in the era between 1936 and The Last Crusade in 1939, but it also gave the voice of Indiana Jones Troy Baker the opportunity to recreate one of cinemas great movie sequences, as audiences meet Indiana Jones for the very first time.
The Raiders of the Lost Ark-infused tutorial was the first thing the Great Circle team filmed, and despite only being a relatively small part of the final game, the process took two weeks. “We took our time,” Baker says. “We spent an entire day of rehearsal rehearsing not only the blocking, but also the camera blocking as well, because we had to get it exact. But, what a great way to tutorialise the player as well. It is something that is familiar to you, so you will be like ‘oh my god I remember this’, but also, here is how you lift a log, here’s how you use the whip.”
And sure, repurposing Raiders’ opening scenes for the tutorial was “a very, very daunting process” for Baker, which is not surprising given its place in cinema’s history, but it “made so much sense” to do it this way. “It helped set the pace and the template for how this thing was going to work,” he says. “You’ve got to trust the process, and that sounds like such a cliché but it was true. Trust that what we are doing on the stage is going to translate when it gets into the hands of the rest of the team.”
