lynchie137 wrote:I have to ask. Why were there two different versions of this game?
There are actually three, if you can believe it. When the movie came out in 1989, there were two unrelated computer games based on it, both published by LucasFilm. One was a very good point-and-click adventure game developed in the States by what would soon be LucasArts, and the other was a horrible platform game developed in England by Tiertex, a company responsible for some of the most incompetent arcade ports ever released. The game published by Taito for the NES in 1991 was also developed in England, but it was handled by Software Creations (which put out the infamous NES Silver Surfer game the previous year, although they would soon release Plok! for the SNES). The Ubisoft Last Crusade game from 1993 is actually a port of the Tiertex computer game, four years old at that point.
My best guess for why this happened is that LucasFilm knew that their own game was an odd fit for an Indiana Jones tie-in and licensed a more traditional action game to meet people's expectations. When the Tiertex game turned out to be garbage, they let Software Creations take another crack at it for the NES market. (This would explain why that game wasn't released until 1991.) As for why Ubisoft decided to release the Tiertex game on the NES when the system already had a Last Crusade game, why they decided to do it in 1993 of all years, and how they managed to do such an amazingly lousy job of it... don't ask me!