Lost Indiana Jones SCUMM demo recovered by Video Game History Foundation

The Video Game History Foundation has pulled a never-before-seen Indiana Jones adventure out of the catacombs. Indiana Jones and the Quest for Paradise VGA isn’t a lost game; it’s a non-interactive, SCUMM-driven demo built from the 256-color VGA assets of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. VGHF found it while sorting through the personal archives of Aric Wilmunder, who maintained Lucasfilm’s SCUMM engine.

The demo appears to have been a marketing piece tied to Western Digital’s Paradise VGA graphics card. In 1990, VGA was still a luxury, and Western Digital had a deal to bundle a VGA-fied Last Crusade with its cards. Lucasfilm, already paid to produce FM Towns versions in Japan, was essentially double-dipping to fund its own VGA upgrade. No one the foundation has spoken to remembers actually working on the demo, and the on-screen credits misspell Lucasfilm as “Lucasflim Games” the entire time — it’s entirely possible this was never shown to a single customer.

As a preservation artifact, it’s a lovely little time capsule: a two-for-one business arrangement captured in a handful of SCUMM rooms that probably sat on a hard drive for thirty years. The demo has been uploaded to the Internet Archive, and VGHF has posted a video you’re free to watch at 2x speed.