“This is probably gonna be the most culturally accurate Indiana Jones property ever,” says Kate Edwards, “more than any of the films have ever been.” It’s a bold claim, but a well-supported one.
At this year’s GDC Festival of Gaming, Edwards, CEO of culturalization consultancy Geogrify, industry veteran, and self-confessed Indiana Jones megafan, delivered an insightful talk that explored the research that underpins Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
Edwards describes her work as a gene splicing exercise. The goal is to preserve the creative vision of a game while understanding what might need to change in order to make sure it’s compatible with players and cultures around the world. Edwards calls it culturalization, a discipline she distinguishes from localisation.
“I’ve basically been exploring this interaction between what is real, which is the real geography outside these walls, and then what is represented,” Edwards explains. “So what do we actually build in our game worlds, whether it’s a fictional world or real world? And then most importantly to me is how it’s perceived.”
Edwards says that the last point is key, as players read intentions into every symbol, colour and allegory. The stakes are high precisely because, despite the occasional Holy Grail and Crystal Skull, Indiana Jones keeps one foot firmly in the real world.
“We’re replicating real cultures, real places, real history,” she says.
Navigating history
Edwards saw Raiders of the Lost Ark when it was released in 1981. The film was an immediate obsession and she still has the original ticket stub. When publisher Bethesda came knocking, her answer was immediate: “Hell, yes!”
It was a commitment to accuracy that proved to Edwards that developer MachineGames was the right team for the job. She was initially brought onto the project to make sure the maps were accurate for 1937, a task that sounds relatively straightforward but was anything but. European borders were shifting frequently at the time, and the base map the team had wasn’t correct for the period. Even the maps hanging on the walls of Indy’s office as background decoration were checked, and some anachronistic assets were fixed.
The flyover maps, those iconic animated sequences tracing Indy’s route across a vintage-style world map, required their own obsessive attention. The studio had sourced the exact font used on the maps in Raiders of the Lost Ark, ITF Serif Gothic, and built it into their version from the start. “Nobody can call us out,” Edwards says. “No one’s gonna screenshot us and say, ha ha ha, I got you. We were kind of conscious of that, almost to an obsession.”
Reality vs. fiction
Away from cartography, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has received praise for its physical representations of the world in 1937. The environments span Vatican City, Thailand, Egypt, and beyond, each reconstructed with a level of care that Edwards says borders on archaeology. The Giza Plateau level involved, at peak, four Egyptologists working simultaneously on the project.
Replicating real environments brings its own considerations. “You do sometimes have to be careful if there’s particular religious artifacts or other culturally significant artifacts in the environment that they may not want to portray,” Edwards says. “So you can still replicate the environment, but you have to think about, is there anything here that they don’t want us to put in the game that people might interact with or maybe destroy.”
The hieroglyphics throughout the Egyptian environments were also translated by Egyptologists and rendered accurately, with transliterations broken down into their correct phonetic components.
That degree of consultation occasionally created challenges. In one instance, the narrative team had designed a puzzle mechanism for the Egyptian level that a consultant rejected on the basis that ancient Egyptians simply didn’t have that technology. A solution was found that satisfied both the storytelling needs and historical plausibility.
The same rigour extended to Thailand, where another archaeological consultant pointed out that underground temples of the kind the story required weren’t really feasible given the local water table. “A little bit of creative liberty was taken for the sake of the narrative,” Edwards acknowledges, but it was a conscious, informed decision, not an oversight.
This, she explains, is the central tension of the whole project. The franchise operates within real-world constraints for the most part, but it puts a little toe in fiction where something supernatural or interesting happens.
“The world of Indiana Jones, it cannot rely really on cultural allegories or ambiguity,” she says. “It needs to be very straightforward, real culture, pretty much up until the very point at which that fictional element of the story is employed.”
The Great Circle itself is the perfect example. “This is not true, okay? I’m sorry,” says Edwards. “But it’s a cool idea. It’s a cool fiction.”
Rock solid research
Perhaps the most unexpected subplot in Edwards’ talk involves geology. The game features 17 fictional relics, each assigned a mineral type by the narrative team and chosen largely for their visual variety.
“There were many, many discussions about, is it plausible that this mineral type could get from here to here during that time period?” Edwards says. It triggered analysis of ancient trade routes, consultation with geologists, and in a couple of cases, changing the minerals entirely. Any replacement also needed to be the right colour, structurally stable, and geologically plausible for the region.
Edwards’ first call for guidance was to her father, a retired geology professor. “My dad is 88 years old,” she says with more than a pinch of pride, “and he and I got to work on a video game together.” He eventually referred her to a field geologist for the more esoteric questions, but the father-daughter collaboration is a neat echo of Indy and his father working together in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Answering every question
“The closer you get to the real world,” Edwards explains, “the more intentional your creative process has to become.”
Edwards is clear about who she was ultimately working for. It’s not the average player sprinting past the hieroglyphs, but the Egyptian player who won’t. Shortly after launch, an article in Egypt praised the game’s portrayal of Egyptian Arabic, and there were similar comments about the game’s handling of the Vatican. “The people who are representing, they will know,” Edwards says. “And that’s what’s important. That’s why you do the work.”
The danger, Edwards warns, is what she calls random backfilling. “If you’re building a world and you just start throwing stuff into the environment just to kind of fill it out, that’s usually where the biggest risk is,” she says. All those maps, buildings, artifacts and NPCs are what Edwards describes as the pieces of evidence that attest to the culture that is in the game.
“What purpose does it serve in the world? Does it have any real reason to be there? Does it even fit the culture, whether it’s real-world culture or does it fit the fictional culture that you’ve designed?”
On Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, every one of those questions was answered. “Everything was intentional,” Edwards says. “Everything was thought through.”
Read more reports from GDC Festival of Gaming 2026.
