Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom (Nintendo Entertainment System) - Version History

Version History

The film version of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released in 1984 and starred Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. A year later, in 1985, Atari Games capitalized on the franchise by releasing the initial version of the game on arcade machine. This version was a platform and fighting game and featured theme music and sound clips from the actual film. The game takes place over three zones that are based on the movie's plot, where the objective is to free the slave children and recover the Sankara stones. This version was also the first translated from any of the movies in the Indiana Jones series into an arcade game, although Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600 and Indiana Jones and the Lost Kingdom for the Commodore 64 had come out in 1982 and 1984 respectively.

Nintendo of America's Nintendo Entertainment System was the best selling console system and almost all video game developers and publishers wanted to contribute the video game library. The NES, at its peak, controlled 90% of the 8-bit market in the United States. Companies such as Konami, Capcom and Acclaim Entertainment derived many of their gaming ideas from two sources to better capitalize on the growing industry. The first strategy was to take games that were already popular on arcade, such as Contra, and port them to home console versions. Their second idea was to produce game versions of popular movies and television.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom satisfied both of these categories. Aside from the original arcade version, the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and ZX Spectrum system had released ports of the arcade game in 1987. By December 1988, the Nintendo Entertainment System had already seen two separate editions of the Temple of Doom game. The first version, distributed by Tengen, came in a black cartridge that was different from Nintendo's traditional grey colour format. By this point, however, Tengen had split from Nintendo and was producing unlicensed games that attempted to circumvent the need for a 10NES lockout chip. Nintendo filed suit and Tengen lost, forcing it to remove its NES games from the market. The officially licensed version was released by Mindscape in the form of a standard Nintendo cartridge. Aside from the differences in cover art and cartridge form, however, the actual software of the two games is identical. After the NES version, the game was subsequently released for Atari ST and MSX in 1987, and Amiga, DOS, and Apple in 1989.

There are several differences between the arcade game and its console adaptation. In the original arcade version, the Sankara Stones were not all found in one location at the end of a wave. Instead, Jones had to travel through a temple every two rounds. In addition, the entire style of play is different and bestows upon the player more weapons and items for Jones to collect from the slave children he frees. Jones was also unable to jump in previous incarnations of the game.