I can still clearly remember the first time I watched Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark with my brothers. I was young and nestled between them, and I felt safe in the knowledge they would protect me from anything too scary for five-year-old me. I also had my teddy just in case. I needn’t have worried, though. Within moments, I was transfixed, partly by the sweltering Peruvian jungle but mostly by the handsome man in a fedora with a whip. I wanted to be just like him. I wanted his confidence, his strength, his sense of adventure, and I wanted his wardrobe too.

This was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with Indiana Jones, from the 80s films to the Young Indiana Jones books, which I devoured and have since passed on to my son, and to the many games that have come since. Most recently, that was Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and when I loaded it for the first time, my jaw dropped. “This is Raiders!” I said out loud to no one, before taking screenshot after screenshot to send to my brothers. “Can you believe this is a game?!” I asked them. “No!” came my middle brother’s immediate response. My older brother caved and vowed to play the game soon after.

This was on my mind when I chatted recently with Troy Baker, the actor who brought Indy to life in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, so I asked him about that Raiders of the Lost Ark opening and if he felt any trepidation recreating such a beloved moment from the series’ – and cinema’s – history. In answering, Baker took me back to when he first found out about the game, getting cast, and then making it a reality.

It all started when Tom Keegan – the performance capture and voice over director for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – called Baker, way back in December 2021, to tell him MachineGames was making an Indiana Jones game. “He said, ‘Hey I like you for this role,'” Baker recalls, “and I was like, ‘OK I have a question for you.'” Baker had seen a teaser trailer and that MachineGames was auditioning a lot of people. “So, I said, ‘Do they want Harrison Ford?’ And Tom went, ‘They want 1981 Harrison Ford!'”

Baker immediately suggested two names he thought would be perfect for the role, but while Keegan was appreciative of the suggestions, it wasn’t waht he’d phoned Baker for. “I’m the one casting this,” Baker was told, and Keegan wanted him. So Baker made a deal with Keegan. He’d do an audition tape for Keegan – and Keegan alone – and only if it was deemed good enough could Keegan send it to the rest of the Great Circle team. If it wasn’t, Keegan was instructed by to “burn the tape” so it could never be found by anyone ever again.

The casting went ahead, but something Baker hadn’t anticipated was that not only was he going to have to replicate Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones for a new story, he was also going to have to recreate one of the most iconic cinematic openings of all time: the opening to Raiders of the Lost Ark. This is the moment when we first meet Indy, as he makes his way through the perilous and sweltering South American jungle and into a booby-trapped temple in search of a golden idol. Needless to say, things don’t go as planned, and Indy soon has to run for his life as a giant boulder rolls towards him, threatening to flatten him.

“I really want to point out our process in this, because it was very unique,” Baker says of the game’s opening. “Obviously, [Indiana Jones and the Great Circle] needed to feel like it came a year after Raiders. It had to stand shoulder to shoulder right in between Raiders and [The] Last Crusade so we needed to have the same aesthetic. So because the camera language is so important, we brought in an amazing director of photography called Kyle Klütz, and he had everything story boarded out.”

“I said, ‘Do they want Harrison Ford?’ And Tom went, ‘They want 1981 Harrison Ford!” -Troy Baker

The game’s team also used “two Arri cameras” on either a jib or dolly track – Arri is a famous manufacturer of video cameras – to make it look as though the late British cinematographer Douglas Slocombe – who shot the original Indiana Jones trilogy of films – had filmed it. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, you see, was filmed using an Arriflex 35 IIC Camera, Panavision Panaflex-X Camera and Panavision C Series Anamorphic Lenses. “A lot of the performances, I feel, were enhanced because we had the benefit of that camera being there on the day,” Baker says. “That is why you see the one-to-one happening on that scene.”

The Raiders of the Lost Ark-infused tutorial was the first thing the Great Circle team filmed, and despite only being a relatively small part of the final game, the process took two weeks. “We took our time,” Baker says. “We spent an entire day of rehearsal rehearsing not only the blocking, but also the camera blocking as well, because we had to get it exact. But, what a great way to tutorialise the player as well. It is something that is familiar to you, so you will be like ‘oh my god I remember this’, but also, here is how you lift a log, here’s how you use the whip.”

And sure, repurposing Raiders’ opening scenes for the tutorial was “a very, very daunting process” for Baker, which is not surprising given its place in cinema’s history, but it “made so much sense” to do it this way. “It helped set the pace and the template for how this thing was going to work,” he says. “You’ve got to trust the process, and that sounds like such a cliché but it was true. Trust that what we are doing on the stage is going to translate when it gets into the hands of the rest of the team.”

Was he ever anxious that using Raiders in this way was going to backfire with long-time series fans? “My fear doesn’t matter,” he says. “That’s the gig. It’s ‘Here’s the challenge that’s presented to you’.” And in the end, the gamble paid off, as even Harrison Ford – Indiana Jones himself – was left impressed by Baker’s portrayal of the whip-weidling professor.

“We were both backstage and onstage at The Game Awards last year, and Harrison said, ‘If I had known you were going to do this, I would have done it myself’,” Baker says. “There were a lot of people we wanted to make proud: we wanted to make the player feel like this was an authentic experience that could stand shoulder to shoulder with its film counterparts. But no one would lie to you and not say the one person they really wanted to make proud was Harrison Ford. “And, we did,” he says with a smile. “We did a good job.”