Indiana Jones Adventure World

» see apps.facebook.com/adventureworld as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

indiana jones for me was raiders on vhs in the 90s and the crystal skull movie at panora avm in 2008. adventure world with the indy paint on it was zynga trying to graft that memory onto a facebook energy loop, which is a different market than i was in at 27 doing a masters project in ankara. anyway, the game shipped as a plain adventure world in september 2011, zynga boston running the studio with ex-conduit labs and floodgate people on the team.

this happened more in the us facebook audience than in the turkish one. the pitch was expedition-map exploration on top of the standard ville-family loop, you managed a map of jungle sites and cleared them for artifacts. still. energy was the gate, coins and adventure cash were the currencies. either way, it was a slightly more elaborate version of the farmville model with a different setting on top.

i was not close to the facebook casual audience for indy games. still, i saw the wall-post noise, the "join my expedition" invites bled into the same notification stream every ville sent. the indiana jones rebrand happened on 29 november 2011, about ten weeks after launch, which is when the game caught a fresh press cycle out of the licensing news.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the licensing arc ~

this part was reported in pocket gamer and adweek at the time. zynga had signed a licensing deal with lucasfilm sometime in mid-2011, the plan was to build an indy tie-in as a chapter inside the adventure world sandbox rather than launch a separate game. the chapter shipped on 29 november 2011 with indy as an npc companion, calendar of the sun as the map name.

the licensing arc got weirder after that. either way, in october 2012 disney bought lucasfilm for four billion dollars, indiana jones and the star wars catalog all landed inside the disney portfolio. by that point the game had already been announced as dying, zynga posted the no-new-content notice on 31 august 2012, closed the game to new players on 15 november 2012. the indy license became a disney asset that zynga was not going to renew anyway.

~ the day it died ~

this part was covered in the same techcrunch article that named the eleven zynga games killed at end of 2012. anyway, adventure world's shutdown was pinned to 14 january 2013 rather than the december wave everyone else got. the game stayed open for existing players through the christmas run, then the servers went dark on the second week of january.

this happened more in the industry-press than in any facebook feed. by then the daily active count was small enough that most of the audience did not notice the game was gone. still. the flash canvas stopped loading, the app was removed from the facebook directory, character data went into the trash. players who had bought adventure cash with real money got a virtual-goods package they could redeem in another zynga game as compensation.

~ the inheritance ~

this part fell to disney and everyone else in the licensing chain. the indiana jones brand went into disney's vault along with lucasfilm's other properties in late 2012, and the next mainstream indy game did not appear until bethesda's indiana jones and the great circle shipped in december 2024, twelve years after adventure world died. either way, zynga's boston studio itself was closed in 2013 as part of the same cost-cut round that killed the game.

adventure world was the moment zynga tried to move past the ville-family formula by grafting a licensed hollywood ip onto the same energy-timer core. it did not work, the indy chapter was mostly a reskin of the existing exploration mechanic, and the license was expensive relative to what the game was pulling in. the failure kept zynga off the licensed-ip pattern for another decade, until the mobile star wars and marvel tie-ins under take-two ownership after 2022.

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