For many avid gamers this holiday season, there’s Indiana Jones – and then everyone else.

After spending billions on developers and publishers over the past three years, Microsoft’s gaming division is now paying off its big bets. In the fourth quarter of 2024, when consumers are primarily looking to buy and gift AAA titles, there is no new generation of consoles – usually the driving force behind game purchases – on the market. And Xbox is in prime position to reap the holiday bonuses with the December 9 release of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, the industry’s biggest new game of the year.

Developed by Bethesda’s MachineGames in collaboration with Lucasfilm, Great Circle was in the works before Microsoft acquired Bethesda parent ZeniMax in 2021 and has been a highly anticipated title in its five years of development.

“I’ve been an Indiana Jones fan my whole life. “When I saw the movie, I believed it was all real, and I’ve been in love with ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ ever since it came out,” said Todd Howard, director and executive producer of Bethesda Game Studios created the concept for “Indiana Jones” and the Great Circle,” said diversity. “This film remains my favorite film of all time. I named my dog ​​Indiana. I have the jacket, I have all the stuff. I loved the character and the world, which I think is important, that kind of pulpy 1930s adventure world, that kind of genre. And I always thought about what kind of game would I like to play in Indiana Jones? And I also like these mysteries of the world. I came across this game called The Great Circle – it’s a thing, I didn’t invent it – and when I read about it I thought this would be great for an Indiana Jones video game and thought what The secret could mean leading to.”

The “Great Circle” at the center of Howard’s Indy game is a collection of locations around the world that mysteriously form a perfect circle when connected together on a map. Howard pitched the idea to then-LucasArts in 2009, and due to complications over who would publish the game, the idea fell through.

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But in 2019, Howard’s project resurfaced when his friend John Drake, who had previously worked as an executive at Sony, moved to Disney’s gaming division and got the Great Circle ball rolling again with Lucasfilm Games.

Now Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is Xbox’s top priority for 2024, following Microsoft’s October 25 release of the latest installment in the Activision-produced Call of Duty series, Black Ops 6 massive Activision Blizzard deal that closed last year.

According to Microsoft, “Black Ops 6” had the biggest opening weekend of any game in the franchise and maintained that status over the past month – No. 1 in total players, hours played and total games played. The company did not disclose sales figures for “Black Ops 6,” but said in release that the “Call of Duty” franchise has now sold more than 500 million copies.

The momentum has put Xbox ahead of long-time rival PlayStation. “From a purely substantive perspective, we have to conclude that Microsoft’s portfolio is now quite a bit stronger than Sony’s,” MoffettNathanson analyst Clay Griffin wrote in a Nov. 26 research note.

Great Circle is the first – and only – Indiana Jones game of this size greenlit by Lucasfilm Games. In the first-person game, set after the events of the 1981 Harrison Ford film Raiders of the Lost Ark, players embark on stealth missions and solve puzzles on a grand scale. All in all, Great Circle is packed with more than three hours of cinematic quality scenes that illustrate the larger plot. It stars gaming industry legend Troy Baker (the voice of Joel in the PlayStation series The Last of Us) as an iconic archaeologist.

“At the end of the year, during the holidays, you can really immerse yourself in the world of Indiana Jones,” said Matt Booty, Microsoft president of gaming content and studios. Compared to the fast-paced multiplayer action of Black Ops, the Indy title is “a more thoughtful adventure game” – which Booty says is well-suited to the holidays when people have more time.

In true Indy fashion, “Great Circle” begins with an impressive stage piece, Howard says: “I wish we could spoil it. All I would say is, if you’re an ‘Indiana Jones’ fan, this is the opening you wanted.” But from there, the title – which is full of references to the entire franchise, including a nod to Disneylands – takes off Indiana Jones Adventure Ride – His Time.

“The game is quite slow because it is primarily an adventure game and we don’t rely that much on action. And I think we have a pace that these cinematics fit in really well,” said Jerk Gustafsson, executive producer of MachineGames and director of “Great Circle.” “The game takes place between ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ and ‘The Last Crusade’, so in this timeline. And we specifically looked at “Raiders” because the character is a little different between the films. What sets him apart in the game is his obsession with his work. Exploring the past and uncovering history led him to where Raiders of the Lost Ark ends and The Great Circle begins. And I think that was one of the key components we worked on for the character.”

As for the character’s voice, 82-year-old “Indiana Jones” star Ford was chosen given the large age difference between him and the young Dr. Jones wasn’t considered as an option in “Raiders” – Lucasfilm had final say when it came to casting Baker.

“This is where we probably have the most input on these games,” said Douglas Reilly, vice president and general manager of Lucasfilm Games. “We don’t tell teams how to do development. We don’t tell them how they should conduct their day-to-day business. But when it comes to IPs, we’re very careful about making them look, feel and sound like Indiana Jones – that’s why we approve the casting. We get through the entire process. We go from concept art to modeling to final art, and of course in a game like this he’s the character and you have to get him right or it doesn’t feel like an Indiana Jones experience. And between the work MachineGames did to physically portray him and the absolutely stunning job Troy did in voicing the character, you forget that it’s not Harrison when you’re playing him. He’s that good.”

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As with “Black Ops 6,” Microsoft is making “Great Circle” available to Xbox Game Pass subscribers at no additional cost – an attempt to emulate Netflix’s model. The Indy game will remain exclusive to Xbox and PC until it releases on PlayStation in spring 2025. The game’s first round of downloadable content (DLC) is scheduled to release at an unspecified date in the new year.

“We make the (exclusivity and window) decisions largely on a game-by-game basis,” Booty said. “And each of our studios is in a slightly different location. Since there is also a game’s production schedule, the decision about the distance is made there first. We want to make sure it’s a great experience for our Xbox players, and the gap between the game (when it becomes available on PlayStation) is as much a production decision as anything else. This is a game that was already in production before the Bethesda acquisition.”

Microsoft has turned away from fighting the console wars “after fighting for decades,” says Griffin. As the analyst puts it: Xbox’s strategy of “climbing up the gaming value chain” with top content like the new Indy game, alongside further development of Game Pass and cloud gaming, is better than that Trying to “outdo Nintendo or Sony.”

If Great Circle performs well, it could not only mean holiday success for Xbox, but also plans for a larger Indiana Jones gaming franchise between Lucasfilm and MachineGames in the future.

“Right now our focus is on getting this game out to the public and getting it to DLC and making it as successful as possible,” Reilly said. “I think we’re always looking for great stories. And the good news is that there’s a lot of space between films where we could tell more and more Indiana Jones stories, which I think would be super interesting.”

Does this mean that “The Great Circle” is considered canon to the entire “Indiana Jones” film universe?

“So canon is such a complicated concept. “It’s an authentic story that takes place between the two films ‘Raiders’ and ‘The Last Crusade,'” said Reilly. “We work closely with studio and franchise management. So yes, in that sense it should be an authentic Indiana Jones experience.”