We’ve come back up from the catacombs with a new discovery from gaming’s past: Indiana Jones and the Quest for Paradise VGA, a never-before-seen Indiana Jones adventure from the golden age of Lucasfilm Games!
Before you get too excited: this isn’t actually a complete game. It’s a non-interactive movie that uses Lucasfilm’s famous SCUMM adventure game engine, and assets originally made for its Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade adventure game. We found this demo while helping to sort through the personal archives of Aric Wilmunder, who maintained SCUMM at Lucasfilm for a long time.
Specifically, this demo uses assets from the version of Last Crusade made for VGA graphics cards, which increased the colors from 16 to 256. At this time, in 1990, VGA cards were still a luxury item that most IBM computer users didn’t own. Western Digital, the creator of the Paradise VGA card, had a marketing deal with Lucasfilm to bundle copies of a VGA version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusader with its cards to entice people to upgrade.
The deal made a ton of sense for Lucasfilm: they had already been paid by Fujitsu to make 256-color versions of its games for the FM Towns machine in Japan, so they already had 256-color assets available to use as the basis for a new VGA version of SCUMM. Between that deal and the one with Western Digital, they were essentially paid two times over to upgrade their own tech to the inevitability that was VGA.
Obviously, this was created as a tie-in for the bundled game, but we actually have no idea how this was meant to be shown. If I had to guess, this was either at a trade show, or sent out to computer stores to advertise the card, though I’d think if that were the case a disk would have materialized before now.
It’s entirely possible that this demo was never seen at all! We have no documentation on it, no one we’ve spoken to remembers even working on it, and the fact that Lucasfilm Games is misspelled as “Lucasflim Games” on-screen for the entire adventure makes me wonder if this was even considered finished.
We’ve uploaded this demo to the the Internet Archive and embedded a video of Indiana Jones and the Quest for Paradise VGA below. You absolutely have our permission to watch it at 2x speed.