Look I feel I probably should put some unverifiable story here some may appreciate at least as here say but enjoy.
I worked for a couple years in the industry and as such being in CA went to E3 from 2000-2002. At the 2000 show Indiana Jones was at the back corner of the Nintendo super booth area and not really well advertised just with a lame white card, plain black print saying the game name. I went over as a big indyfan, bugged me it was empty but for one dude in a Factor 5 jacket. I introduced myself and learned a few interesting things. For starters he was the last man standing on the project. Lucas being the greedy star wars ball sucking twat he is tried to put this and Battle for Naboo out both for Christmas, but when Naboo was in threat of falling into the next year he fucked over Indy. He took the entire team short of one guy, yeah one dude, and put them on that game and got it to retail. In order to finish Indy they took a team mate who could code a bit, test a bit, create little things a bit with minimal help and gave him an unrealistic date of when to have it out. Ultimately the game well, it was finished, if you can call selling a late BETA as a retail game. The guy was mad, talked to him for like 30min tooling around with the game. Adding insult to injury he already knew come June due to the shafting his work would get little love as it was relegated to a 10000 copy run, most which were rentals. The sad unfortunate thing with the game is that as I said, it's beta, late beta. The game will run around 30-60 at a time, sometimes more if you're lucky or stage based I never figured it, but it will crawl and then die puking up this rainbow barf all over the screen and giving a loud aggravating noise. The lock is so hard, you got to turn the system off as reset gets frozen too on the system button. There are other areas you can 100% reproduce a crash too, one stage the final 'puzzle' is to move a crate from point A to B, get on it, set a piece, and use the 1man iron cart over a ravine. If you push the cart the 3 cart distances from a to b, it crashes, but if you push, pull, push then you can get through every time. Yes, the game has issues this bad, mostly just the random crashes really, the crate thing is the exception I can remember.
Needless to say the sick thing is, it's the best version of the game if you remember to save OFTEN. The PC version also ran 640x480 and the textures weren't as good, the controls and camera were wooden and broken, and the audio was poorly recorded(voices too.) The N64 w/4MB exp runs the same high res with sharper visuals, music and sfx are better and the voices clearer too which is odd, but best yet they jacked Ocarina of Time's control/camera setup and put it to Indy and it works smooth a silk.
That's the checkered history of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine I was made aware of by the Lucasarts employee who got shafted, overworked, and screwed on his game release and the result of it. And yes I know you can find stickered up loosies often, but it still doesn't mean it's not rare, it's just less people care to hold onto it since it's fairly well broken in places. N64 games got far more than 10000 print runs, only rentals, NFRs, and promos got runs that small. It may be cheap now, but given it's Indiana Jones, when those N64 carts get NES in age I would not be surprised if the value went up as more and more are lost to sun damage, morons, age, and time.
