It's the spring of 1977, and George Lucas is petrified. Having just wrapped work on his third feature film, Star Wars, he retreats to Hawaii, unable to face the early reviews. Yet as he frets in a five-star resort, Lucas bumps into another Hollywood hideaway – Steven Spielberg. The hero's moniker certainly benefited from some finessing, and the action-packed Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) raked in 354m at the box office. Yet as great as Indy's influence was on cinema, it might have had an even bigger one on video games.

History is not exactly littered with glittering Indiana Jones video games. The beautiful LucasArts adventure, The Fate of Atlantis; the pretty good Lego games; the decent Emporer's Tomb; the presentable SNES side-scroller, Greatest Adventures … There have been good games, but few classics that transcend the brand like, say, Knights of the Old Republic. Maybe that's about to change. During Microsoft's latest Developer Direct online event, streamed on Thursday evening, we saw a 12-minute preview of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, a globe-trotting first-person adventure, set between Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Last Crusade. The project was revealed three years ago, but this is the first footage we've seen, and it's promising stuff. It has Nazis, it has a whip, it has Dr Jones in deserts, in tombs and arguing with Denholm Elliott in fusty college buildings; and it has a story involving a stolen artefact that is somehow linked to an international network of ancient monuments all of which align with a circle spanning the world.

Leaf through the history of independent video games and the pages are drenched in horror. It was there in the 1990s shareware era of Doom and Hugo's House of Horrors. It was there too in the Flash games of the early 2000s: Exmortis, the House series, the now lost Hotel 626. And it is here now, in the modern indie age. Lone coders and small development studios have always explored dark stories in haunted houses, lonely forests and seemingly abandoned spacecraft populated by demonic entities.

Near the end of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Nazis attempt to pull off one of the oldest tropes in entertainment: using the movie's titular dial, the Antikythera, to travel back to 1939 and assassinate Adolf Hitler. As their Luftwaffe aircraft bears down on a time warp, the scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), who hopes to install himself as the führer and win the war, turns to Indiana Jones and demands he witness "history's greatest moment--its end." To enter the past, then, is to end history. It's Voller's motto, but also the movie's--a nod to the de-aging technology that has made it possible. Thanks to several tools--AI, CGI, other acronyms--80-year-old Harrison Ford spends roughly 25 minutes of the film looking like the Indiana Jones of the early 1980s.

In 1979, when Steven Spielberg and George Lucas signed with Paramount Pictures to develop a film series based on classic Hollywood adventure serials, the deal they struck was to make five separate movies. The first, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was released in the summer of 1981 and became that year's top-grossing movie, beating even the long-anticipated Superman II and remaining on screens in some cities for more than a year. By 1984, it was Raiders' sequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that had become the year's most anticipated movie, banking that year's biggest opening weekend, and the third entry in the franchise, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, became not only the highest-grossing movie of 1989 but the top-earning Indiana Jones movie yet. Given that track record, and viewed from the perspective of our own IP-crazed times, it seems inconceivable that Spielberg and Lucas decided not to move forward immediately with a fourth Indiana Jones picture (though Lucas did go on to produce a spinoff TV series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles). Lucas' idea, a riff on the 1950s sci-fi films that would have been contemporaneous with a middle-aged Indy, was to introduce extraterrestrial beings into the previously earthbound Raiders universe.

Neuromeka's representative model'Indy' is the first cooperative robot designed and manufactured by Neuromeka. Indy, a collaborative robot that guarantees operator safety based on an innovative collision detection algorithm, supports more intuitive Direct Teaching through impedance control, and allows online and offline programming through an Android tablet-based teaching pendant app.

The Indy Autonomous Challenge has revealed the vehicle participating universities will have to program and race in October 2021: the Dallara IL-15 racecar. IAC has made the announcement during its press conference for CES 2021, where it also hosted discussions about the commercialization of autonomous vehicles and technology in motorsports. The competition, which has a $1.5 million prize purse, challenges universities to build AI algorithms that can power an IL-15 that has been fitted with hardware and controls that enable automation. Back in 2020, IAC announced that 37 universities from 11 countries registered to compete, with teams being composed of members with varying expertise. There are undergraduate and graduate student participants, as well as faculty and industry experts in AI, machine learning and robotics.

It seems like almost everything is getting ported to the Nintendo Switch. Next up are a pair of Ubisoft's internal UbiArt "indie" games, Child of Light and Valiant Hearts: The Great War. Like Kotaku notes, they're a bit older at this point having been released in 2014, but with how much of a runaway success the Switch has been, can you really blame Ubisoft here? Not everyone is willing to pull a Capcom and try out cloud-computing-powered game streaming a la Resident Evil 7 to get their games to run on the comparatively modest hardware. And for a lot of folks buying Switches, these games are new to them anyhow because they probably didn't own an Xbox One or PlayStation 4 prior.

When you think of game development, you might imagine hundreds of people working at huge studios like Sony or EA. But independent developers, or indies, make big games too. These are small teams, often with modest budgets, who make games without creative input from investors. Popular farm simulator Stardew Valley and chaotic co-operative game Overcooked were built on desks in bedrooms - yet both have been recognised by BAFTA . We headed into the woods in central Sweden to visit Stugan, a programme that brings indies from the UK and all over the world to the Nordic countryside to work on projects side-by-side. There we asked three teams one simple question: Can anyone make games?

A year ago, the Nintendo Switch looked like a Hail Mary from a legacy game company that desperately needed a win. A hybrid machine--part living-room console, part handheld-- that turned the Wii U's kinda-portability into a success? Now, of course, the Switch feels like an inevitability. It has already outsold the lifetime sales of the Wii U, and is on pace to match up with the runaway, culture-redefining success of the Wii. Nintendo's latest console was a juggernaut in its first year, largely by becoming precisely what many analysts (including me) suggested it needed to be: a system that buoyed a series of excellent first-party titles with a healthy diet of indie games and ports.