The enormous success of the three Indiana Jones movies directed by Steven Spielberg (The Raiders of the Lost Ark - 1981, The Temple of Doom - 1984 and The Last Crusade - 1989) inspired two adventure games launched at the beginning of the last decade (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis). After the failure from 1996 with Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures, trying to compete with the Tomb Raider series, LucasArts enter in 1999 the realm of 3D action-adventure with Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. The popularity of this game was reduced, mostly because of the weak control. Four years later, LucasArts strikes with Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb developed by The Collective, also known for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Xbox) and Deep Space Nine: The Fallen.

If the action from Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine took place in 1947, at the beginning of the cold war, the story from Emperor's Tomb is placed in 1935, just a little before the events from the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The Nazis, controlled by Albrecht Von Beck and the mob organization Black Dragon Triad are searching for a black pearl, The Heart of the Dragon, which has been buried for more than 2000 years in the tomb of Ch’in Shih-huang-ti, the first emperor of China. The opposing party is represented by Marshal K'ai, a representative of the Chinese government who hires Indiana Jones to help him get the artifact. The stakes are high because the legend says that anyone who possesses the Heart of the Dragon can control people's minds.
The whole 10 chapters adventure takes Indiana Jones through many locations in Europe and Asia: Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Prague, Istanbul, Hong Kong and the South Sea of China. This time Sofia Hapgood is not his companion but the beautiful Mei Ying whose rare interventions shows us that the main character is still Indy. This aspect is accentuated by the fact that you cannot control Mei Ying, as it will happen in the case of Kurtis Trent, the secondary character from the expected Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.