The Switch 2 has already had its fair share of ports that would have felt impossible on the previous console, and next month, another is joining the ranks.
After launching on Xbox back in 2024 before whipping up a PS5 release the following year, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is bringing fortune and glory to Switch 2 on 12th May. It’s an almighty large project from MachineGames (of Wolfenstein fame), full of intricate, torch-lit puzzles, and densely-packed open areas. In short, bringing it to Switch 2 is quite the crusade.
Keen to learn what went into the new port, we sat down with MachineGames Creative Director Axel Torvenius to talk all things Indy: the game’s inception, Troy Baker, Switch 2 challenges, and working with the late, great Tony Todd.
So, don your fedora and hold onto your potatoes, it’s time to enter the Indy world…
Nintendo Life (Jim Norman): What is your earliest memory of Indiana Jones?
Axel Torvenius (Creative Director): My earliest memory is actually watching Raiders of the Lost Ark, probably a bit too young, with my dad. He had a tendency to show me movies that he thought were cosy and maybe they are! Same with The Shining, I watched that when I was like six or seven, and something broke in me. But regardless, watching [Raiders], having this cosy home cinema movie time, eating homemade pizza, and then the scene with the melting guy at the end… that kind of stuck. [There’s] a little bit of terror to it, but also great excitement, because I surely enjoyed the movie as a whole, right? But that specific scene, yeah…
I think it’s a pretty universal experience of everyone’s dad showing them that film when they’re too young to watch it. That melting face scene is truly one of the most disturbing images in cinema!
It kind of stands out a bit because everything else is pretty lighthearted, and then it becomes ultra gory.
How did it feel when this project came about?
Extremely, extremely cool! Working as a game dev in this industry, I think we are fortunate to do the things we do: making toys, basically, making entertainment, making games. It’s a privilege to be in this situation. And most of the time, that privilege does not come with cherry picking or choosing what you do and what type of games you make. So if someone had asked me years before [about] working on an Indy game, it’d be like, ‘Yeah, obviously, that’s a dream project to be able to work on.’
So when we were approached by Todd Howard, who is obviously a longtime friend of the studio, and he said, “I’ve been talking to Lucasfilm Games, and I have this idea, and they are on board. Here’s the pitch. I want you guys to do it. Are you interested?”, we were very much interested! A very cool day.
How did you set about preserving the tone of those early films?
It is really a matter of perspective. Many other IPs and franchises sometimes reinvent or go for something completely different for the character, ‘We’re gonna make our version of Indiana Jones into something else.’ We were never really interested in that.
We were so attached [to] and in love with the version of Indiana Jones that we got to see for the first time — primarily the first two movies are the ones we’ve been using closest as reference. Throughout the timeline of Indiana Jones, there are different instalments (obviously, a different age, if you look at the later movies), but there’s also a different tone in terms of his character. We just felt that Raiders of the Lost Ark is this perfect adaptation in terms of which version of Indiana Jones we love.
We said early on, let’s stay close to that as a reference point. By doing so, we obviously presented ourselves with this insane challenge to try to match the tone and figure out a lot of the things that make it feel like this early style. But it also, of course, gave us some framework to rotate around, basically.
Troy Baker’s Indy performance is phenomenal. How did you walk the creative tightrope between doing an impression of a character that so many people have a personal attachment to, while also letting Troy make the character his own?
one little thing would have derailed the whole thing
We knew pretty much from the beginning that we wanted to hit likeness, we wanted to hit the voice, we wanted to make sure that we put the player in the shoes of Indiana Jones to get that type of immersion. When we finally saw the audition tapes or the costume tapes with Troy, it was crystal clear: this is our Indy. There were no questions about it because he was knocking it out of the park.
The great challenge was to create something that doesn’t really exist on screen, but to do an adaptation of this very, very beloved character. Everyone knows the smirk, everyone knows how he acts and how Harrison Ford did it. [We had] to get Troy to recreate that, not only to recreate existing content but also to create new content from it. When we were building out the world, which you have to do in a game that has many hours of a campaign, we knew there would be so many new scenes and moments and narrative beats happening. If it wasn’t for the talent of Troy, and our writers writing some of the scenes, and our casting director, and Tom Keegan and all of the people that were involved, one little thing would have derailed the whole thing.
So it’s such an insanely complicated clockwork that just needs to come together. And in the centre of this is Troy Baker and his great talent, adding so much of himself while still staying in character. When you know Troy and you’ve seen some of his other works, you can obviously see that there’s Troy in there, but it blends, and it really works. It was really cool and fun working with Troy because he was extremely dedicated to the project. He showed up to more sessions and more work than he needed to. He was a star.
The late, great Tony Todd played a big part in this game, too. What was your experience like working with him?
I’ve been a huge Tony Todd fan ever since I was like 13 or 14 years old. I’m now 47. You know, watching the first Candyman a long time ago, it’s like, ‘Gosh, this is a really cool guy.’
We were reviewing so many different Locuses. Everyone was kind of doing the same interpretation of the role, “I am a tall guy with a deep voice,” it didn’t feel unique or anything. Then I said, “Well, if we’re going to do someone that is very rich with character and has a really interesting voice, shouldn’t we just see if we can get Tony Todd?” And a couple of days later, it’s like, “Tony Todd is available.” Oh my God.
The audition tapes that he sent in were something completely different from what everyone else was doing. He added so much character to that role. I think Locus became by far one of the most interesting characters in the game.
His passing was immensely sad. We were just devastated at the studio and so grateful for having the opportunity to actually meet him, see his spirit and see him working. So that was fantastically cool.
Yeah, it’s an amazing performance and such a stroke of luck that it happened on this kind of Hail Mary. Was there ever an internal discussion about trying something similar with Harrison Ford?
[Laughs] Not really! When we found Troy in the beginning, we just knew that this would be a very good fit to get him into a mocap suit and do all the running and the acting.
How did this Switch 2 version come about? Was it Machine Games that was handling the port, or did you partner with an external studio?
No, we did it internally. So a lot of hard work from the engineering team here, and it’s not a small ask to do it — the game is massive! As you know, it’s coming on a cartridge as well.
All different platforms come with their own set of challenges and restrictions. One thing that we needed to do for the Switch 2 release was to cap the game at 30 frames per second, but that allows the game to run smoothly and solidly. The other thing that was very important to us was to make sure that the Switch 2 user wouldn’t miss out on any content. So we haven’t scaled back or cut down, we haven’t simplified mechanics. It is just one-to-one. The only change would be the 30 frames per second versus the higher frame rate that you would see on a PS5 or an Xbox. But otherwise, the quality is equal to an Xbox Series S.
There’s only one occasion in the game where we needed to scale back on the number of background characters roaming around, like NPCs moving in the background, just from an optimisation point of view. But other than that, we haven’t scaled back or cut content. It is the same game.
What was the biggest challenge that you found in the Switch 2 development process?
I would say that it was working with the hardware to make sure we could still deliver the same type of quality for the consumer, and doing the optimisation work needed. I always feel sorry for the engineers working specifically on optimisation, because when they do all of their fantastic magic, the stuff happening under the hood, you won’t notice. That’s when it’s done well — the game just runs, and everything still looks great, and things still have shadows, all of these things. That’s where we are with the release of this, it just looks and feels great. It’s down to the engineering team at MachineGames being able to pull that off.
When did you receive Switch 2 dev kits?
we haven’t scaled back or cut down, we haven’t simplified mechanics
I don’t know exactly when, but it was towards the end of the main production that we were made aware of an opportunity to get on to Switch 2. From a MachineGames point of view, we put so much energy, love and passion into this product, so we just want as many people as possible to enjoy the game, right? So whenever we get presented with the opportunity to release on more platforms, we will be the first ones to say yay!
For us, it’s super positive to get the game into the hands of potentially completely new gamers and players out there that haven’t tried it yet.
When you say the end of main production, do you mean main production on the Xbox release, back in 2024?
Yeah, so towards the end of the whole cycle.
And what did you make of the Switch 2 when you first got to see it in person?
Oh, it’s a super cool device. The biggest benefit, at least in my mind, and when we’re speaking about it internally, is that you can play the game basically everywhere because you can just fit the Switch 2 in your backpack or pocket.
Specifically looking at the gyro controller and the mouse support that we have as well, which adds to how you actually perceive the game with aim assist and all of these things. So it really gives players an opportunity to experience the game in a new way. Hopefully, we’ll see fans who have been playing the game on other platforms, but now have the opportunity to re-experience the game in a slightly different way.
You mentioned there that the Switch 2 brings its unique control schemes to the table. The Staff of Kings on Wii notoriously used some rather rough motion controls in its gameplay. Was there ever a moment where you were looking at Switch 2 and what those Joy-Con are capable of that you thought, ‘maybe we could’?
No, I don’t think we did [laughs]. It was doing an analysis of what we could do with the Switch 2 features that felt relevant, and what would be meaningful for the game or for the consumer. What makes sense and what will enhance the experience?
Yeah, the idea of using a Joy-Con to crack that whip is maybe better than the actual play experience…
It sounds like a tech demo, almost!
Did you take any inspiration from previous Indy games as you were looking at this one?
it feels like something that people in the gaming community would appreciate
It’s a difficult question because when we were developing this, we were looking at an extremely wide variety of Indiana Jones content. Looking at comic books, previous games, fan fiction novels, so many different things just to try to consume as much of the Indiana Jones franchise as we possibly could. I had a huge stack of books, like scripts, storyboards, behind-the-scenes, and the official guides to all of these things. But we didn’t specifically have any other Indiana Jones game in terms of, ‘Oh yeah, in Fate of Atlantis they did exactly this, so let’s try to do that.’
But obviously, all the previous games being part of the great ether of the Indiana Jones franchise, we obviously looked at them, and they’ve been part of the inspiration for just the mood of Indy.
This game is getting a full on-cart release on Switch 2. It’ll be Bethesda’s first game on the system that has that. How important was it for you that the game went this route instead of a Game-Key Card or a code-in-the-box physical release?
Yeah, we thought this was very important. We acknowledged the fact that there is a big portion of the gaming community that actually appreciates having stuff printed, having a piece of plastic to put on the shelves. I’m not a collector of cartridges and game cassettes and whatnot, but I do collect other things like toys. A lot of people in the studio do appreciate having their own physical library with discs and cartridges. Internally, we felt that it was important. If we can do it, we should, because it feels like something that people in the gaming community would appreciate. And so far, what we’ve seen from the response is that most people seem to think it was a good move.
Now that you’ve brought this to Switch 2, has it inspired you to think about other MachineGames projects that you might want to bring our way down the line?
[We’re just] focusing on making sure that the launch and the release on the Switch 2 go as planned, and then we’ll see what the future holds.
I thought I might get that answer, so I imagine that something similar might crop up here! How does it feel to return to the game again, and has it encouraged you to think about where the future of Indy might lie?
It’s rare to be in this position as a game developer. We released late in ’24, and here we are one and a half years later, still talking about it. We went to the BAFTAs the week before last, and we were nominated in five categories, plus Troy for main character as well. So six nominations in relation to the project. And then we have the launch now coming up for Switch 2. I’ve never in my career worked on any title that has that long post-launch, where the product is still active in one way or another. So it feels very good. It feels like we are very fortunate to be in this position. Let’s see what the future has for us.
And I’ve saved the most important question until last: What is the best Indiana Jones film?
It’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I didn’t know whether you were going to throw me a Crystal Skull curveball at the end there!
No, I’m sorry. I’m boring in that way, but I think Raiders is extremely good. I love them all. They all have their charm, that’s for sure!
This interview has been edited for clarity and flow.
Our thanks to Axel for taking the time to talk to us, and to Samuel at Bethesda for setting up the discussion. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle arrives on Switch 2 on 12th May for £59.99 / $69.99, with a complete on-cart physical launching the same day.
