We're nearing the end of 2024, but one of the biggest video game titles of the year just became available December 9th.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has everything that made the Indiana Jones movies so memorable – whips, slapstick punches and even that cinema stalwart, the Wilhelm scream.
But instead of an 82-year-old Harrison Ford reprising his role yet again, if in just voice and motion capture, Bethesda Softworks and MachineGames enlisted another kind of A-lister: legendary video game actor Troy Baker.
And believe it or not, the new game is as classic an Indy adventure as Raiders of the Lost Ark – due in no small part to Baker's uncanny ability to channel the whip-cracking and wise-cracking hero.
"It's not about whether or not I can convince you that I was Indiana Jones," Baker says. "My job is to convince you that you're Indiana Jones."
A cinematic experience
The Great Circle's development team seemed to take a page straight from Indy's journal. Like the adventurer himself, they weren't afraid to take some risks.
Fans were divided after developers revealed the game would forgo the standard adventure-gaming perspective of third-person for first-person. Something that really hadn't been done with an Indy adventure before. And instead of all-out action, they leaned into stealth, puzzles and story.
That's not to say you won't use your fists, or the occasional gun to to fight for your life against Italian fascists, Nazis and other-worldly baddies. All as Baker delivers uncanny Jones one-liners that sound straight from the mouth of Harrison Ford.
But the developers clearly prioritized that narrative tissue that really holds the action set pieces of Spielberg's classic movies together.
There's a reason why it genuinely feels like a lost movie from the original 1980s franchise and not an exercise in cynically recasting a cinematic icon.
"When you think about Raiders or you think about Temple or Last Crusade… it's shot so beautifully and it's so cinematic. It's epic on every level. So, we brought in Kyle Klutz. He was our DP (director of Photography)."
Klutz has worked on high-profile games including the Last of Us with Baker.
"We needed to make this look like Doug Slocombe shot this in 1981," Baker continues. "So we had [cameras] with anamorphic lenses on dollies and jibs. We used a steadicam or an easy rig to give us that kind of camera work. And just as those cameras were capturing my movement in the suit, they were also capturing the movement and the lens data from the camera. I remember asking Axel Torvenius (creative director), 'hey just curious… how much of those cameras did you actually use?' And he said 'all of them.'"
Baker says what you see in the cutscenes and the gameplay are just as real of a cinematic experience as anything you would watch on the big screen.
A fan of Jones and games for life
Don't confuse Baker for some casual Indy fan either. He remembers being mesmerized after leaving the theater as a five-year-old in 1981.
"My takeaway was not that somebody's face could melt if they're in the presence of god, but that there was this guy onscreen that — I've said this a lot and it sounds cheesy, but it's true — who was a superhero who didn't wear a cape," Baker says.
And despite defeating armies of Nazis multiple times, escaping a death cult and finding the Holy Grail, Baker says Indiana Jones just seemed attainable.
"The first time we see him, after cracking the whip, and knocking the pistol out of the guy's hand… the next thing he does after that is he looks at a map. You realize this is someone so obsessed with an adventure, he will not let anyone deter him. So it's someone who I was like 'hey maybe I can be that,'" Baker says.
Even though he's had other big-name gaming roles, like Booker DeWitt in BioShock Infinite and Joel Miller in the Last of Us series, Baker turned down Indiana Jones when first approached by performance director Tom Keegan. What right did he have to try to fill that fedora?
But the five-year-old kid still in Baker's heart couldn't refuse that call to adventure forever.
"What Harrison did for me in 1981, in that five-year-old kid, is he convinced me that I could be Indiana Jones," Baker says.
So, that's what Baker wanted to do with the game.
He says his voice-acting in the Great Circle isn't cloning Harrison Ford's voice or cadence from Raiders or Temple of Doom, though he says he watched those films almost every morning to prepare and keep him in the headspace during development.
No, this is an entirely new adventure, with Indy saying things in this game that he may not have ever said before. He's seeing new things. Meeting new people. It had to be Indiana Jones, not Harrison Ford.
There are qualities innate to Jones, Baker says, that are found across his roles and across all of adventure gaming.
"All of us are looking for adventure and I think that is because we're all looking for purpose," Baker says. "We're trying to figure out 'what is it that I'm doing here?' And within that is the very foundation of this life — [a] desire to the point of obsession to not only seek out the wonders of the world, but also secure them and preserve them and make sure that they are available to other people like him."
Still, no matter how many iconic roles Baker plays – and it's no stretch to call him one of the most prolific in the business – he doesn't lose sight of why games like the Great Circle can be so important to people.
"Growing up as a kid, we had no money, I had no athleticism. But to me it was like I could disappear for a few hours into a world where the impossible was possible and if I could press B and A fast enough, I could get through anything," Baker says.
The Indiana Jones inheritance
Baker became a father in 2018 and he says he's never looked at games or stories the same since. That sense of escapism, that joy of wonder and lust for adventure – they're all things Baker really wants to pass along to his audience. And to his most important audience member?
"I think about the inheritance that I'm offering my son on a daily basis, and that extends beyond just [the] financial," Baker says. "What patterns [might I] be bequeathing him? As far as the kind of person that he should be in this world, I do want him to be an adventurous person. I do want him to love mystery and wonder and see the amazing things [in] this world… I mean his name is Traveller."
But Baker says there's more to Indiana Jones than just adventure. You have to doggedly go after the treasures of this world without ever losing what makes you, you.
"The thing I'm imparting onto him hopefully is to hear the call of adventure and to answer it and to find the mystery and the wonder, but in the pursuit of all those things, never, ever, ever lose your heart," Baker says.
Baker jokes that maybe he saw Indiana Jones for the first time at too young an age. And, well, there is the whole face-melting thing.
But his son is right around the same age now and Baker promises he'll let Traveller lead the way on his own discovery of this iconic franchise. Whenever it happens.
A franchise that Baker himself has now given voice to.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is available now for Xbox and PC. A PS5 edition is expected next year.
Copyright 2024 NPR