If you've been around as long as I have…wait, hold on a second.

Okay, I'm back. There were some kids on my lawn playing their newfangled PSPs who needed yelling at.

As I was saying, back in my day, there was no such thing as action games, unless you counted side-scrollers, flight sims or Star Wars figures. To get our kicks, we had to hunt pixels and solve puzzles in adventure games. Adventure games like Aaron Conners' and Chris Jones' Tex Murphy series, which they designed and in which Jones himself played Murphy, because back then, there was no way an actual actor was going to appear in a videogame. The last game in the series was Pandora Directive. After seeing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, Connors had these comments on a Tex Murphy fansite about the similarities:

I realize that Area 51, Mayan Temples, rogue Government Agents, the Plains of Nazca, the Roswell Crash, Russian Scientists, Alien Energy Sources, and Spaceships built inside Ancient Structures and worshipped by Tribesmen thought to have vanished centuries ago but who are actually still alive and guarding the Temple, have all been in the public domain for years, just not all connected like that. I suppose it's conceivable that someone else randomly came up with all these same elements...

For those of you who are old-school enough to have played [Amazon: Guardians of Eden], there were a few elements from that game, too - a dead end in Cuzco, a jewel hidden inside the corpse of a dead Conquistador, an entrance to an eternal tomb under a Waterfall. More infernal coincidences.

Bottom line is, all the Indy movies are homages to the old-fashioned adventure serials…That's what we did in the Tex games, too! Hell, Tex wouldn't be who he is if I hadn't gone to the premiere of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 and had my socks blown off.

As for the similarities, you can judge for yourself. Following is a bit of the walkthru for Pandora Directive:

Go left and open the Miscellaneous Storage door. Get the striker hanging down to your right and go behind the shelf and get the acetylene tank. Now, go to the door labeled 100 - 200. Tex let's you know that this is probably where Item #186 is being stored. Combine the acetylene tip and handle. Now, combine the hose with the oxygen tank. Now, combine with the hose and oxygen tank with the acetylene tank and finally with the tip and handle. Now, combine the striker with the Acetylene Kit. Use the Acetylene Kit on the door. Go inside the room.Look at the computer. Review the #186 scrap paper. Enter the 186 and 7AC for the access code.

And now here's a bit of dialog from the Indiana Jones movie:

"Well, the word for 'gold' translates as 'treasure.' But their treasure wasn't gold, it was knowledge. Knowledge was their treasure."

Can it be a coincidence that two supposedly unrelated things are so torpid? At least Pandora Directive a) was set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco inhabited by mutants and b) had less CG. Conners isn't seriously suggesting that Lucas or Spielberg ripped him off, but it's a toss-up whether the movie is creatively bankrupt or influenced by a 12-year-old videogame.

Speaking of ripping off, thanks to Rob Merritt for finding this one for me and thanks to Mobygames for the Pandora Directive screenshot! You don't see a lot of those lying around.