Todd Howard was trying to pitch Indiana Jones and the Great Circle for years, but even the devs don't know if he ever wanted to direct it himself at Bethesda: "I don't know if he had actually thought about it"

It's no secret that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the result of Todd Howard's years-long campaign to get his dream game made. With their expertise in Nazi-killing, narrative-heavy shooters like Wolfenstein, developer MachineGames turned out to be a perfect fit for the concept, but one question has remained ever since the game was announced. Did Howard ever want to make the game himself at Bethesda Game Studios?

"I don't think so," MachineGames studio head Jerk Gustafsson says in a new documentary from Noclip. "Maybe he... I don't know if he had actually thought about it. I actually haven't talked to him about this specific thing, but I don't think he felt that the studio was the right studio for it considering their games they do are rather different. The games that we have done over the years showed him we would probably be a good fit for it."

Gustafsson makes an interesting point, as Bethesda's style of open-world RPGs doesn't seem like a great fit for an Indiana Jones game. Like, sure, a Skyrim-style open-world map filled with real-world exotic locations to explore and various ancient treasures to pilfer sounds fun enough, but I'm not sure it would quite get at Indy's sense of adventure.

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Yet it's not impossible that Bethesda Game Studios could've made an Indy game. In a 2021 IGN interview, Howard says he was trying to pitch Lucasfilm on his big Indiana Jones idea around 2010, when the bulk of Bethesda would've been deep at work on Skyrim. "I went out to Lucasfilm and I pitched this game," Howard said. "We almost made it. This was like 10-12 years ago. Obviously, we were doing other things – we didn't really necessarily have the bandwidth. Like, 'Hey, Todd, what team?' Like, 'I'll figure it out.'"

I guess Howard did, ultimately, figure it out in the end, because MachineGames' take on the concept turned out to be excellent. Still, I can't help but wonder what the game would've looked like if Bethesda had indeed taken it on a decade ago.

Bethesda is responsible for many of the best RPGs ever made.