8-Bit Replay | Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1988) for NES

The hat! The whip! The mine carts! Released four years after the movie that inspired it, the NES video game adaptation of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom features all those signature elements in 8-bit form plus an adorable chiptune rendition of John Williams’ iconic theme music on its soundtrack. Unfortunately, beyond those very meager pleasures, the game has almost nothing else to commend.

Allegedly based on a 1985 arcade game (that it bears no apparent resemblance to), the NES Temple of Doom is such a dud I almost can’t believe two different publishers took credit for it. Initially, the title was released by a label called Tengen that had split from Nintendo yet continued to put out unlicensed games compatible with the NES console. After Nintendo sued, the rights to Temple of Doom were officially licensed to Mindscape, which reissued the same software in new packaging but otherwise unchanged in graphics or playability.

Indiana Jones Temple of Doom NES - Rescue children
Title:Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Year of Release: 1988
Publisher: Tengen / Mindscape
Gaming Platform: NES

The NES Temple of Doom is a very simplistic, albeit maddeningly confusing and difficult, puzzle-based platformer in which your little Indiana Jones sprite runs through a series of underground mines to rescue children captured by the Thuggee cult. The maze-like levels (called “waves” for some reason) are depicted with very crude graphics and, in complete defiance of space-time continuity, will loop back around from one end to the other if you travel too far in any one direction. The stages are connected by doors or hidden “warp” tunnels that can only be uncovered if you know where to throw a bomb. Rarely does the game offer any indication to help you figure this out.

Your primary weapon is of course a whip, which you can use to knock bad guys into streams of lava or, in certain places, to swing across open gaps in the terrain. By rescuing children, you collect knives, pistol ammunition, and bombs. (You’d think if the kids already had these things, they might try to escape on their own.) Knowing which combination of buttons to press to switch between your weapons is not at all intuitive. I needed to look up a PDF of the original instruction booklet to figure that out.

The game controls are imprecise and, frankly, terrible. The slightest tap of the directional pad can cause you to fall off a ladder or a ledge into a pool of lava. If you forget to hold down the direction arrow when you jump, the character always defaults to jumping downward – again, typically into a pool of lava – regardless of which direction you were facing.

Indiana Jones Temple of Doom NES video game (1988) - Mine carts

In addition to the Thuggee jerks, Indy will be periodically attacked by snakes, spiders, and bats. When a bat comes out, forget it, you’re dead. The damn things are very difficult to hit with your whip, and will just keep battering themselves into you until they knock you into lava.

Many stages feature mine carts that roll along broken tracks. Be careful not to jump into one if a bad guy’s already in there unless you whip him first. The tracks are always laid out horizontally. Control of the mine carts is limited to speeding up, slowing down, or leaning either upward or downward to shift the cart onto connecting tracks. Go too fast and you’ll crash and die. Go too slow and another cart will slam into you from behind and kill you. Jump out of the cart at the wrong point and you’ll fall into lava. (The game has an abundance of lava, far more than is seen in the movie.)

This Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom looks and plays like it was designed for an early PC and then ported to the NES, rather than made for a gaming console directly. The graphics stink, the gameplay stinks, and it’s overly repetitve and needlessly difficult. I didn’t find it much fun and gave up about halfway through, before ever getting to the big confrontation with Mola Ram on a rope bridge. Having looked that up in walkthrough videos on YouTube, I don’t feel I’m missing much.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom NES box art - Tengen vs. Mindscape

I have great affection for retro-gaming on the old NES platform, but licensed games based on movies or other pop culture properties were almost always terrible. Even knowing that, I still have an almost masochistic compulsion to play them anyway. Some are more tolerable than others. I think I’ve had about as much of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as I need and doubt I’ll ever come back to it.

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One thought on “8-Bit Replay | Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1988) for NES”

  1. “Initially, the title was released by a label called Tengen that had split from Nintendo yet continued to put out unlicensed games compatible with the NES console. After Nintendo sued, the rights to Temple of Doom were officially licensed to Mindscape, which reissued the same software in new packaging but otherwise unchanged in graphics or playability.”

    Ah, the 80s. When you also had Colecovision releasing an Atari adapter. Imagine if you tried to pull a stunt like that nowadays. You’d get sued into oblivion.

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