Throwback Review: The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game (1984)
TSR’s The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game, published in 1984 and designed by David “Zeb” Cook and John Byrne, is remembered for so much outside of the game itself. The license is irresistible, the presentation is pure mid-80s TSR boxed-set energy, and the idea of playing in the world of Indiana Jones should have been a slam dunk. Instead, what we got was a game that is more interesting as a piece of RPG history than a good game.
There is still something charming about the whole thing. This was TSR taking a shot at turning one of the biggest adventure properties in pop culture into a tabletop RPG just a few years after Raiders of the Lost Ark hit theaters. The box was packed with maps, cardboard standees, pregenerated characters, and material aimed at recreating the feel of the films. You can see exactly what they were going for. This was supposed to be fast, cinematic pulp action, full of chases, fistfights, traps, shootouts, and narrow escapes. On paper, that sounds perfect.
The problem is that the game never fully figures out how to let players make Indiana Jones stories feel like their own. One of its biggest limitations is right there in the setup: instead of making your own characters, you mostly pick from a roster of film characters like Indy, Marion, Sallah, Willie Scott, Short Round, Jock, and Wu Han. That may have seemed like a safe licensed-game move in 1984, but it boxed the game in immediately. It is hard to feel like you are stepping into a living adventure world when the basic pitch is “fight over who gets to be Indiana Jones.”
TSR was not trying to build a sprawling campaign engine here. It was trying to package movie adventure. The game included physical aids and scene-based material that pushed it toward a boardgame-adjacent experience, which is part of why it has such a strange reputation now. It sits in that blurry old-school space where publishers were still experimenting with what licensed RPGs could look like. You can feel the tension between roleplaying game and boxed adventure product in almost every part of it. That makes it awkward, but also kind of compelling if you like these odd corners of hobby history.
Through all of this, it became one of those legendary hobby artifacts. Its commercial failure and eventual destruction after the Lucasfilm license expired became part of tabletop folklore. The company burnt all copies they still had, but the remains of a burned unsold copy were encased in a resin pyramid, with only “Diana Jones” left visible on the title, and that object became the basis for the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming. That is one of the strangest afterlives any RPG has ever had. A failed licensed game ended up inspiring one of the hobby’s best-known awards.
That connection almost overshadows the game itself now, which is a little unfair but also understandable. The Diana Jones story is just too good. It turned a commercial disappointment into a symbol of excellence and endurance in gaming culture. The original RPG may not have lived up to its license, but it still left a mark on the hobby, just in a way nobody would have predicted in 1984.
Looking back at The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game now, I don’t think it is a secret masterpiece. I do not even think it is an especially good RPG compared to stronger designs from that era. But I do think it’s a genuinely fun piece of history to revisit. It captures a moment when the hobby was still experimenting, when a huge license could be handed to a publisher that was clearly still learning how to translate cinematic adventure into tabletop form. It is clunky, limited, and a little odd.
If you’d like to run your own Indiana Jones RPG, I’d recommend the D6 system, or Savage Worlds. Those two probably fit the adventurous atmosphere of the films best.
The original Indiana Jones RPG is not a lost classic. But it is absolutely worth talking about. Sometimes a throwback review is about celebrating greatness and sometimes it is about looking at a game that missed the mark and appreciating the strange trail it left behind. This is one of those games. And in its own roundabout way, it wound up more important than almost anyone expected.
