In a recent copy of Retro Gamer they had a feature on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure.
It was an early(ish) LucasFilm game (before they were known as LucasArts) created by some big names such as Ron Gilbert (Monkey Island), Noah Falstein (Fate of Atlantic) and Steve Purcell (Sam & Max)
The original release used 16 colour EGA graphics, which places it firmly in the 286/386 era of PC gaming. Although a later rerelease refreshed it with full 256 colour VGA visuals.
By the time my friends were swapping copies of LucasArt games is was during the golden era of point and click adventure games. Such as The Fate of Atlantis, Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle.
When I did later hear about the Last Crusade I dismissed it as LucasArts before their prime and didn’t think it was worth investing the time to play and explore it. That was until I read the Retro Gamer article which really opened my eyes to the effort and love poured into the creation of the game.
With that renewed interest and eagerness to play it I decided it would be era appropriate to play it on my trusty ICL 386 machine, complete with mechanical keyboard and VGA CRT monitor.
I decided to do it by the book and purchase a legitimate copy from GOG. It was at this point I found myself running into the problem Wouter from Brain Baking discovered, which is that GOG doesn’t really stand for Good Old Games anymore.
ALT
Upon opening my legitimate download I discover GOG had packaged it up to run through ScummVM. Certainly a good choice to make the game reliably run on modern machines, but of no use for those of us who need an original executable to play it on original hardware.
So with regret I had to resort to searching the abandonware sites looking for an EGA or VGA PC version, which was a little harder than I expected.
Thankfully I did manage to track down a version (which hopefully didn’t contain a virus) and load it up onto my 386, ready for a Christmas 2022 playthrough. Quite appropriate given Indy’s return to the cinema in early 2023.
