Many of us played the Indiana Jones 3 platformer game on the Commodore 64, but missed out on the SCUMM engine graphic adventure game that 16-bit users got to enjoy.
In 2012, that was set to change thanks to a developer called Brick Bambi (aka Thorsten Harth), who set themselves the very ambitious task of trying to convert the game to the Commodore 64. The attempt was pretty amazing, and a good looking conversion was really coming together after a few years work.
Thorsten produced a series of videos showing the game in action and their progress, but then everything just stopped. On Forum64.de, Oliver Lindau confirmed speaking with the developer at Gamescom 2018 and that they had abandoned the project.
Very sad to hear this overall, and it means that this homebrew conversion goes into the archives. We hope that some day we’ll be able to see something of Thorsten’s work in action and be able to play for ourselves – or even for them to come back to the project and consider finishing. It would of course be an amazing achievement to go alongside the Monkey Island conversion that is underway (as of 2025).
Joachim Wijnhoven confirmed in September 2025 that he was assigned as the musician after being asked by Tim Jakob Chen-Voos back in 2016 if he wanted to do the music. After speaking with Thorsten, Joachim was asked to do The Raiders March for the title screen and ending screen, but also to take several other sounds.
Some examples for the sounds requested were from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsLOqshFwMQ
In particular Joachim was told:
- At 9:49 you will find the “map” sound
- At 10:04 you will find the “Venice” sound
- At 15.00 you will find the “Catacombs” sound.
- At 27:57 you will find the “Schloss Brundwald” sound
- At 56:59 you will find the “check point” sound
- At 57:39 you will find the “Hitlers Marsch” sound
- At 1:01:44 you will find the “Henrys piano” sound
- At 1:15:35 you will find the “grail room” sound
- At 1:20:21 you will find the “final” sound
Joachim was given $A000-$AFFF for sound and sfx. The game used Bitmap and Char-graphics, and so 4K is what Joachim was given, and which he felt was enough. In the meantime, the old U.S. Gold game music was used as placeholder, and Thorsten did his own SFX.
It had been arranged via Joachim for Roland Hermans to help with the SFX – where “Knocking on the ground in the library”, “waterfall” and “falling bookcase” were examples requested. It was also decided that it would be either music or sfx playing in the game and not a combination of both.
In 2017, a cartridge release was discussed for the game, but the response from Thorsten was that the game was so complex that it could take many years – the limitation was not RAM or CPU, but “Time”. He was very busy, managing a family with three small children, and so time to do the game was extremely limited. It seemed this would eventually contribute to the game being abandoned.
However, Thorsten’s aim was to push on and complete the first chapter (Barnet College, Henrys House, Venice, Library, Catacombs – the whole part until castle Brunwald) and release it as a Demo Game for people to check out. Sadly it never quite happened.
Thorsten luckily had sent a preview to Joachim in December 2018, which he has very kindly emailed us to add to the site – so you can check out the promise of this preview for the very first time for yourself, and its an impressively large demo overall with a lot of content and interactions. We’re not sure of what exactly is present and missing, but there is plenty for you to enjoy.
Joachim last had contact with Thorsten in 2021, but there was no further response after that. In 2023, Joachim released the music he produced in a release called “Archimedes’ Dial” (https://csdb.dk/release/?id=234133). We’ve added that here too.
Hopefully in time we’ll learn more from Thorsten and what happened. Perhaps one day someone will have another attempt at doing a conversion, as this clearly proves its possible.
Videos
Contributions: Zarko Zivanov, Joachim Wijnhoven
I know it’s outside the purpose of this site, but Monkey Island conversion for C64? I can’t seem to find news about that, is there some webpage to track progress/get info about it? (The D42 tribute is cool, but it’s not really a conversion, is it…)
No problem at all – not much at the moment, but here is a post from the main artist: https://x.com/j_ljunggren/status/1832373249205833945
Still a lot of work to go, but looking very promising.
Hi!
There are a few videos BrickBambi’s YT channel
https://www.youtube.com/@BrickBambi/videos
Thanks Dani! We linked to BrickBambi’s channel at the bottom of the page.