Indiana Jones and the Monkey King (game)

The subject of this article was cancelled.

This article covers an Indiana Jones medium that was cancelled or replaced by another product. Cancelled material is not usually canon; however, aspects of such material sometimes find their way into later products and thus become canon.

VIDEO GAME
Indiana Jones and the Monkey King
Publisher	LucasArts
Released	N/A

"Management thought it might work as a game, but I thought it was substandard. I guess everyone else did too, but I was the only real screenwriter in the company, and when I turned up my nose everyone breathed a sigh of relief."

―Hal Barwood

Over the years, there have been a number of attempts to adapt material from Indiana Jones and the Monkey King, an unused Indiana Jones screenplay written by Chris Columbus for the third Indiana Jones film, as a video game.

Behind the scenes

Whereas Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom largely had the same narrative from script to screen, development for the third Indiana Jones movie marked the first time that an entire storyline was dropped in favor of starting over.

Chris Columbus, author of Indiana Jones and the Monkey King.

In 1984, Chris Columbus was hired by Indiana Jones creator George Lucas to write the third film in the series based on a story treatment by Lucas himself centered around the Monkey King legend, resulting in the Indiana Jones and the Monkey King draft. Deborah Fine gave Columbus some notes regarding the plot's background elements, prompting Columbus to write another draft, but in the end, Lucas wasn't satisfied with the story seeing it as too unrealistic. He hired Menno Meyjes to write a new treatment focused on the Holy Grail instead, setting into motion the framework of what became Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Following the 1989 success of LucasArts' video game adaptation of Last Crusade, a further Indiana Jones graphic adventure was sought as a follow-up, one not based on a pre-existing movie. Despite just having created two computer games beforehand, Hal Barwood was brought to the project due to his filmmaking experiences, with LucasArts wanting Barwood to adapt the unproduced Indiana Jones and the Monkey King screenplay into a game so they could take Indiana Jones to look for Chinese artifacts in Africa, as the company's management thought Columbus' story could work as a game instead for Barwood to build and design.

Hal Barwood deemed the Monkey King story "substandard".

Much like Lucas and Steven Spielberg though, Barwood deemed the idea as "substandard" after reading the script, so he, alongside co-worker Noah Falstein, asked if they could create an entirely original story for the proposed game instead. They found inspiration in the Atlantis legend which formed the eventual development of the successful Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992).

A decade later, another opportunity to adapt Indiana Jones and the Monkey King into a video game presented itself after the release of Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb (2003) by The Collective. In 2004, LucasArts began developing a new Indiana Jones video game internally, with president Jim Ward assigning a group of roughly 25 staff members to work on the game as part of a pair of projects, the other being the Star Wars video game The Force Unleashed (2008). Vice President of Product Development Peter Hirschmann's designer group raised a number of potential ideas, among them basing the new Indiana Jones game on Indiana Jones and the Monkey King script. Ultimately, however, the LucasArts team decided upon a story about the Staff of Moses instead, resulting in the realization of Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings (2009).