Before Indiana Jones and the Great Circle swung onto the scene, LucasArts' Fate of Atlanti s was widely hailed as the best Indiana Jones game ever made. Indeed, Fate of Atlantis ' popularity is so great that many fans still mourn its cancelled sequel today, more than 30 years after its release.
Sure, Lucasfilm has greenlighted plenty of Indy-headlined games post- Fate of Atlantis . Aside from The Great Circle , there's The Infernal Machine , The Emperor's Tomb , Staff of Kings , and two Lego-themed outings. But none of these games is a continuation of Fate of Atlantis ' story or design philosophy;他们是独立的Indy冒险。不过，这并不总是计划。 As alluded to above, LucasArts did commission a direct follow-up to Fate of Atlantis : Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix .然而，它最终从未实现。我们得到的最好的是《黑马漫画改编》。
为什么？ As is often the case when a game gets axed, there are a bunch of reasons why Fate of Atlantis ' sequel didn't happen;您需要一份带着圣杯日记的文档来跟踪所有文件。 But three major factors in particular – personnel problems, technical troubles, and censorship struggles – conspired to derail Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix .
Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix was an ambitious project.被取消的续集的60页设计文档可在线获得，因此我们对生产共同领导Aric Wilmunder和Bill Stoneham对其故事和游戏玩法的愿景有一个很好的主意。它将在1947年举行，并要求玩家防止传说中的哲学家的石头落入纳粹逃犯的手中，以使希特勒复活。将会有很多环球旅行（在南美达到顶峰），以及与印地纳粹狩猎苏联伴侣纳迪亚·基洛夫（Nadia Kirov）浪漫的可能性。 In short, it had all the ingredients for another thrilling Indiana Jones epic.
The Iron Phoenix team wasn't focused solely on living up to Fate of Atlantis ' story, though.他们也渴望超越游戏的水平设计和游戏机制。 The Iron Phoenix was meant to break new ground for LucasArt's point-and-click adventure-oriented SCUMM engine.房间将利用滚动技术扩大其维度。动作序列也将变得更大，更动态。 For example, in The International House of Mojo's exhaustive Iron Phoenix post-mortem, lead animator Anson Jew describes a blockbuster brawl in a plane's cockpit.
In light of the above, Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix clearly had the potential to do justice to its predecessor. Even its riskiest move – dropping the original game's replayability-boosting tri-path design – was seemingly offset with a well-considered substitute (adding Monkey Island 2 -style quest flexibility).但是，即使是印第安人本人也无法克服使续集摆脱行动的障碍。
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The first sign that Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix 's development wouldn't run smoothly came early. Months (at most) into the Fate of Atlantis sequel's production, original project lead Joe Pinney exited (the exact reasons for his departure remain unclear). LucasArts quickly replaced Pinney with Wilmunder and Stoneham, but this back-of-house dysfunction was a bad omen for Iron Phoenix 's future. Further down the line, LucasArts would force Wilmunder to split his time between Iron Phoenix and another of the studio's titles, The Dig .更重要的是，也坚持认为加拿大的第三方服装的权力应对大部分工作。
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This proved a miscalculation on par with Walter Donovan's Holy Grail selection in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade .加拿大工作室没有开发点击游戏的经验。毫不奇怪，它们的输出缓慢且基本上无法使用。 In the International House of Mojo piece, Wilmunder complains about the Canadian studio's inadequate headcount and expertise, and theorizes that the test animation that won them the Iron Phoenix gig was actually produced by a one-off freelancer. Whatever the truth of the matter, LucasArts eventually severed ties with Iron Phoenix 's international development crew – but not before a lot of time and money was wasted.
Meanwhile, Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix 's in-house team was grappling with the technical limitations of the SCUMM engine. With the release of 1993's Day of the Tentacle , LucasArts pivoted away from the small character sprites employed by Fate of Atlantis towards larger sprites more than twice their size. This worked great for Day of the Tentacle 's cartoony aesthetic, but for the more realistic Indiana Jones franchise?不多。更糟糕的是，Scumm引擎调色板的性质意味着任何用于字符模型的颜色都不能用于背景（反之亦然）。 So, Jew had to come up with a more stylized look for Iron Phoenix that he was never fully happy with.
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威尔蒙德（Wilmunder）和斯通汉（Stoneham）显然也没有以这种方法出售。 As production rolled on, the duo experimented with digitizing live-action actors for Iron Phoenix 's sprites.根据威尔蒙德（Wilmunder）的说法，这种混合技术从未比几个简短的，据称是壮观的测试镜头夹的进步。 But spectacular or not, the fact that Iron Phoenix didn't have a locked-in aesthetic (much less any completed animation or gameplay sequences) further underscores the sequel's technical and artistic strife. At the same time, as with the outsourcing dramas, these issues weren't the Mola Ram heart-ripper that eventually put paid to Indiana Jones and the Iron Phoenix .
Instead, what ultimately killed Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis ' sequel was something far less exciting: censorship.事实证明，威尔蒙德，斯通汉和球队并未考虑德国的法律，禁止在（除其他）视频游戏中使用纳粹图像。 Other Indiana Jones games before and since have sidestepped this restriction by tweaking dialogue and artwork to remove explicit nods to Nazism. This wouldn't fly in Iron Phoenix , though.希特勒本人最终出现了，因此低估了第三帝国是一个启动者。
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Once LucasArts realized that Iron Phoenix was essentially unsellable in one of its key European markets, whatever enthusiasm studio bosses had for the sequel evaporated. By early 1995, The Iron Phoenix was quietly shelved. Development on another Indiana Jones game, The Infernal Machine , kicked off a few years later, however, by then industry trends (and gamers' tastes) had shifted. 2D点击冒险出了； Tomb Raider -type 3D action platformers were in. That's the nature of the medium: the old makes way for the new.但这真是一个耻辱。 Indiana Jones ' best game deserved a great sequel – and The Iron Phoenix seemed destined to be just that.
印第安纳·琼斯（Indiana Jones）和亚特兰蒂斯（Atlantis）的命运可在Steam上获得。
