RSS

Tag Archives: tex murphy

Under a Killing Moon

We couldn’t believe one CD could be filled up so quickly.

— Aaron Conners

Bountiful, Utah, is the second city of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Legend has it that its patriarch, a herdsman named Perrigrine Sessions, exclaimed, “Here at last is paradise on earth!” on the day in 1847 when he first looked down upon the lush valley where the city stands today.

Like so many Mormon communities, Bountiful seems frozen in time, or rather out of time, a vision of a bucolic 1950s small-town America that barely ever existed in reality. The city’s newsletters have a weirdly anachronistic tone, regardless of their cover date. An issue from 1993 notes with alarm that a gang (!) has been formed, whilst going on to add a little reluctantly that it doesn’t appear to have committed any actual crimes yet. (“We hope that gang activity can be stopped before it takes a foothold.”) The same issue looks forward to “patriotic Americana” in the city park with “Utah Voices and the 23rd Army Band.” Somewhere in Bountiful, one senses, a middle-aged matron is still shaking her head disapprovingly over Elvis Presley and those gyrating hips of his — “and yet he seems such a nice, well-spoken young man otherwise…”

She was doubtless doing the same in the late 1960s, when a handful of Bountiful kids started to shoot their own movies on the new Kodak film format of Super 8. Chris Jones, Doug Vandegrift, and a collection of assorted siblings, cousins, and friends spoofed the things they were watching at the local cinema and on television: Batman, Tarzan, Mission: Impossible. Judging from the few fragments of their movies that have survived, they were hopelessly square — it’s hard to believe that they’re contemporaneous with the likes of Woodstock and Easy Rider — but also clever and endearingly cheeky. Typical Bountiful art, in other words.

Inspired by these experiments, Vandegrift went off to university to study acting, while Jones, being of a more practical bent, went out for finance. After university, Vandegrift switched from acting for a camera to drawing for one, landing a job with Hanna-Barbera illustrating Saturday-morning cartoons. He parlayed that gig into an impressive career; he won an Emmy Award in 1988 for his work on Muppet Babies. Meanwhile Jones wound up an accountant at an engineering firm in Salt Lake City.

Jones had a friend named Bruce Carver, who in 1982 bought one of the first Commodore 64s ever sold in Utah. He discovered a latent genius in himself as soon as he began to program it, and founded Access Software to publish his work. Jones initially joined the venture, whose offices would move back and forth between Salt Lake City and Bountiful as it grew, as its part-time sales representative and accountant, but he quickly grew fascinated with the creative potential of the new medium his friend was exploring. Thus he sketched out the scenario for a multi-part action game called Beach-Head, which Carver then proceeded to implement in code. Like virtually everything else Jones would ever do on a computer, this first game was inspired by his love of movies — in this case, by rah-rah World War II movies starring John Wayne and similarly lantern-jawed leading men. Thanks to Carver’s programming chops and Jones’s instinct for cinematic drama, Beach-Head became the breakout hit that put Access on the map upon its release in October of 1983. Raid Over Moscow and Beach-Head II, more games in the same style, did almost as well in 1984 and 1985.

After that, however, Bruce Carver stumbled upon the subject matter that would sustain Access for almost two decades. He and his brother Roger Carver made a golf game called Leader Board in 1986, which begot World Class Leader Board the following year, which in turn begot the long-running Links series in 1990. These games were very, very good for Access in general, but something of a mixed blessing for Chris Jones, who was now working full-time for the company, keeping track of all the money they were bringing in. The reality was that he just didn’t have much to contribute creatively to a golf simulation.

So, he decided to get the old gang back together and make another movie instead. Vandegrift had recently returned to Bountiful to take a job as Access’s art director, and was more than up for Jones’s plan. The two had dreams of showing at Sundance as they wrote a script that combined The Maltese Falcon with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Jones took the starring role of a private detective born in the wrong time, who channeled not only Humphrey Bogart but also Roy Rogers, what with his penchant for yodeling cowboy tunes. The detective-cum-cowboy’s name was Tex Murphy.

Tex Murphy the yodeling cowboy, as seen in Plan Ten from Outer Space.

But the film went disastrously wrong. All Sundance ambitions went out the window when someone stole the gang’s brand-new 16-millimeter camera, forcing them to switch back to Super 8, then to videotape because, hey, film gets expensive. Most of the soundtrack got lost, forcing everyone to re-dub their lines. The project devolved into Plan Ten from Outer Space, a ludicrous farce whose only obvious advantage over the awful Ed Wood film it purports to spoof is the fact that it knows how terrible it is. And yet it’s also really, genuinely funny, even when it’s abundantly clear that its creators have no idea what they’re doing. It’s smart in its amateurishness, bursting with a joie de vivre that just can’t be faked. In this, it has much in common with what came later from many of the same creators.

Disappointed to have made a film that could only be shown to family and friends, however much fun he’d had with it, Jones proposed adapting it into a computer game built out of spare parts that happened to be lying around the Access offices. Bruce Carver had been blending real-world photography with computer graphics since making the first Leader Board a couple of years before; for that game and its sequel, he had captured Roger Carver swinging a golf club on videotape and imported selected frames using primitive digitization technology, all in order to give a smooth, realistic depiction of the subject. And Access also had a vaguely Starglider-like outer-space shoot-em-up called Echelon on the shelf, which Bruce Carver had worked very hard on but which had given a poor return on his investment; the game had never sold very well. Now, he agreed to let Jones make an adventure game relying heavily on digitized images, its puzzle-solving scenes glued together by a flight-simulator game that re-purposed some of the old Echelon code. It would move Tex Murphy into the dystopian world of the year 2033, largely dropping his Roy Rogers persona but doubling down on Humphrey Bogart. Cheerfully appropriating the name of a classic Martin Scorsese film without giving it a second thought, Jones dubbed the game Mean Streets.

Today Jones regards Mean Streets, like Plan Ten from Outer Space, as non-canonical, a piece of Tex Murphy juvenilia, and that’s probably a fair assessment. But, as with the movie, auguries of what came later are all over this work. Mean Streets mixes wildly disparate interfaces and modes of play with giddy abandon: the flight simulator you use to fly Tex’s speeder from place to place, the side-scrolling shoot-em-up you get dumped into when negotiations go south, the adventure game of searching locations for clues, the menu-driven conversations with some two dozen witnesses and suspects in the crime you’re trying to solve. It stitches this crazy quilt together using cutting-edge technical tricks from its time: all of the characters you meet are presented as 256-color digitized photographs — Jones once again plays Tex — and snippets of digitized speech pop up here and there, thanks to another of Bruce Carver’s brilliant innovations, a technology called Real Sound that let a game play back just what the name would imply on an MS-DOS computer without an add-on sound card.

Such an overweening focus on trendy gimmicks seldom yields a classic game; no surprise, then, that Mean Streets doesn’t quite earn that label. And yet Jones, working with Doug Vandegrift as art director, managed to bring it closer to that status than one might expect, thanks to yet another quality that would show up again in the future: a thoroughgoing willingness among the developers to put themselves in the player’s shoes, to try to play with her rather than against her. In Mean Streets, you can fly your speeder manually everywhere if that’s what you enjoy, or you can turn on the autopilot and zip to your destination; you can screw around in the desert outside of town shooting bounty hunters all day, or you can diligently pursue the resolution of the mystery with the help of the notepad thoughtfully included in the box. Even when it comes to the gimmicks, one never gets the impression the developers were thinking, “Including real pictures in our game will surely make us market leaders and sell a million copies!” No, it’s rather, “Gee, real pictures… in a game! How cool is that? Let’s do it!”

The “cast” of Mean Streets consisted of colleagues and friends, along with a smattering of fashion models recruited from a local agency. This character, whose name is Sylvia Linsky, would later show up in Under a Killing Moon as Tex Murphy’s ex-wife. (The course of love is never straight and true…) Even these few lines of text are enough to demonstrate the awkward writing that dogged these early games, which would be remedied only by the arrival of Aaron Conners on the scene. “If only I knew how she felt for me…” About me, maybe?

Released in late 1989, Mean Streets sold well enough to justify continuing with adventure games as a sideline to Access’s main business of golf simulations. In fact, Jones, Vandegrift and their colleagues made no fewer than three more games in the same general style as Mean Streets, minus only the flight simulator and shoot-em-up sequences, which most players of the first game had agreed were a bridge too far. The games in question were called Countdown, Martian Memorandum, and Amazon: Guardians of Eden, of which trio only the middle entry starred Tex Murphy. Then, the era of juvenilia ended as Jones and company took things to another level entirely.

Access was flying higher than ever at the time, but the reasons for their success still had much more to do with their golf games than their adventure games. In 1992, the year that Chris Jones made Amazon, Bruce Carver made Links 386 Pro, the first major game of any stripe to require a high-resolution “Super VGA” graphics card. It became a smashing hit, selling to many gamers who couldn’t care less about the sport of golf but just wanted to take in the mouth-watering details of the game’s meticulously recreated real-world courses. With Access thus flusher than ever with cash, Jones sought and won permission to, as he put it, “make the Links 386 of adventure games,” employing not only the new technology of SVGA but also CD-ROM. It was a tremendous gamble — the industry had been waiting in vain for CD-ROM to break through for literally years already — but the money flowing in from Links put Access in a position where they could afford to take such risks.

Although Doug Vandegrift had provided welcome assistance, all of Access’s adventure games to date had been Chris Jones’s babies at bottom, a fact that was perhaps not completely to their benefit. Jones was many things, but he wasn’t a terribly accomplished writer, and it often showed. Luckily, Access had recently hired as a technical writer a fellow named Aaron Conners, holder of a degree in English literature from the University of Utah. He’d become chummy with Jones when he was assigned to write hints for Amazon. Now, Jones asked him to write a full-length script for a third Tex Murphy game that would pull out all the stops.

It was the best move he ever made; Conners brought a whole new dimension to the character, adding not just more layers of humor but a degree of pathos as well. Conners:

He’s a man out of time, which works well because we can put him in an environment that none of us are familiar with, and he doesn’t seem to be familiar with it either. So, we can relate to him.

At the same time, he’s got the sensibilities of the 1940s, which is nostalgic to us. I think it ties in really well together, but it’s inherently humorous because he’s constantly out of place, no matter where he goes. He’s a [private detective], and he doesn’t really have any peers [in the future]. When he goes to the people who hire him, they’re generally higher class and think he’s scum. And yet he thinks that everyone at his level or lower is scum.

Tex’s basic attitude reminds me of the George Carlin line: “When you’re out driving, anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac.” That’s kind of the way Tex is. He doesn’t seem to fit in with anyone. Tex has an inherent dislike of people who are born privileged. So he just has to poke them all the time. That’s how I see Tex’s character, fueled by this natural irreverence.

In November of 1992, three months after being given the assignment, Conners handed Jones the story for Under a Killing Moon, then stepped up to join him as co-designer. The two have been professionally inseparable ever since.

The story takes place in the San Francisco of 2042, ten years after Mean Streets. The people of the city, who live out their lives in a Blade Runner-esque nocturnal setting, have been segregated into “norms” who don’t evince radiation-induced mutations and “mutes” who do. Tex himself is a norm, but he feels more comfortable among the mutes who inhabit the ghettos of the city. In the course of the game, his investigation of a petty robbery at a local pawnshop puts him on the trail of a worldwide eugenicist conspiracy to cleanse the earth of mutants and re-constitute the human race from pure stock.

Doug Vandegrift crafted the look of the setting, blending film noir with science fiction in a way whose only obvious antecedents were his and Jones’s own earlier works and the aforementioned Blade Runner. Jones:

The model was old-style, rundown, down and out, seedy, making it feel like the [Great] Depression. In Tex’s neighborhood it could be 1938. Dirty, dark alleys and streets, wrecked buildings, that post-apocalypse feel. Then in the new city, Tex moves through beautiful condominiums and high-tech office complexes and facilities.

Like the Access adventure games that had come before it, Under a Killing Moon would knit together all of the trendiest new techniques in game development. But, in a telling sign of the changing times, the nature of those techniques was now such that this game would necessarily be ambitious — and expensive — on an almost unprecedented scale. At its core, it would be built around two seemingly wildly disparate approaches: a 3D-rendered virtual reality and full-motion video starring real actors.

At the time that Under a Killing Moon was first being conceived, the potential for 3D rendering outside the context of vehicular simulations was best demonstrated by two games with polar-opposite personalities: Blue Sky Productions’s CRPG Ultima Underworld and id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D. The former was by far the more complete implementation of a 3D environment, but paid the price for it by running rather slowly even on machines that met its steep system requirements. Wolfenstein 3D, on the other hand, was much more limited — it was more of an illusion of a 3D environment than the real thing — but it ran like blazes on almost any computer made during the last five years. Ultima Underworld let you do all sorts of things in its world, from swimming to flying to casting spells; Wolfenstein 3D let you run through suspiciously uniform corridors and shoot Nazis. As the decade progressed, all games that employed 3D rendering would sort themselves on a continuum between these two archetypes.

Under a Killing Moon boasted some of the most impressive 3D environments yet seen on a computer. This part of the game was a technological marvel in its own right.

Jones and Conners, for their part, were interested in using 3D not as a test of reflexes but to bring their world to life in a way that third-person graphic adventures, including Access’s own earlier ones, did not. Although Tex Murphy must sometimes use stealth to hide from enemies in the 3D sequences, he never shoots anyone at all within them. Even all these years later, Under a Killing Moon and its eventual sequels still stand out as unusual, noble efforts to use the potential of 3D in the service of something other than what the politicians would soon be labeling “murder simulators.” Jones:

When we sat down to create this experience, we asked ourselves, “If I’m a private investigator, what do I want to do?” Hey, I want to look in drawers! I want to crawl around, look at footprints on the floor, pull things out and examine them! And I want to do that stuff myself. I want to control the action. I don’t want some mouse click to take me on a path over there. Give me all the freedom that you can, then let me interact with that environment.

In talking about “some mouse click to take me on a path over there,” Jones is implicitly comparing his game to The 7th Guest, the industry’s first big CD-ROM-exclusive hit, which appeared in March of 1993 and paved the way for Under a Killing Moon by unleashing at last the long-anticipated wave of CD-ROM uptake among consumers. And indeed, at a casual glance The 7th Guest seems like a very similar game to Access’s effort: it too blends 3D environments with full-motion-video clips of real actors, and it too is among the earliest games to require an SVGA graphics card.

Look closer, however, and the differences become stark. The 7th Guest uses a node-based movement system; thus Jones’s disparaging reference above. Your movements from node to node inside the haunted mansion where it takes place are presented via pre-rendered 3D animations. Under a Killing Moon, on the other hand, does its rendering on the fly, giving you a glorious free-scrolling environment to roam as you will — crouching, bending, looking on top of things and under things and inside things. It’s an extraordinary achievement, especially given that it’s almost entirely the work of a single programmer, a longtime Access stalwart named Bruce Johnson. In order to get the speed he needed from the hardware available at the time, he had to write it in pure assembly language — an approach which even as storied a programmer as id’s John Carmack had abandoned by that point as just too much trouble. Access Software is seldom mentioned as a 3D pioneer on the level of Looking Glass Technologies (née Blue Sky Productions) and id Software, but perhaps that’s unjust. Their reputation in this field may have been ironically undermined by their other ambitions — for, instead of being content merely to redefine the state of the art in 3D environments, Jones and Conners used 3D as just one component in their game.

The other side of the equation is, as mentioned, full-motion video, which is used for cut scenes that advance the story along and for your menu-driven conversations with others. Like virtually all such productions from the 1990s, Under a Killing Moon leaves much to be desired by the cineastes among us. Even the most experienced professional actors would surely have struggled to deliver good, natural-feeling performances when forced to ply their trade in front of a plain blue screen, waving around clumsy props that would later be painted over by Access’s artists, being directed by Jones and Conners themselves, who, clever and creative though they were, had never been to film school. But then, much of the cast of Under a Killing Moon are not professional actors, and, believe me, it shows.

A conversation with Beek Nariz, who was played by Doug Vandegrift. He “nose” a lot about goings-on in the criminal underworld, and what he doesn’t know he can sniff out.

Whether that quality of rank amateurishness is ultimately to the game’s detriment, however, is a different question. Under a Killing Moon‘s secret sauce, which makes it work even where it really ought not to, is its sheer likability. Chris Jones deadpans his way through the role of Tex in a fashion that will never win him any acting awards, but it does win the viewer’s sympathy. The same applies to virtually every other amateur who appears onscreen, often in ludicrous homemade prosthesis and makeup appropriate for their mutant personae. Whether childhood friends of Jones and Vandegrift or people who just happened to work at Access, they’re clearly having a great deal of fun with their roles, and they clearly want us to have fun watching too.

Deep into production, Jones learned during a chance conversation with his brother that the latter knew a Hollywood talent agent who was in Salt Lake City casting for a movie. Doug Vandegrift:

She said, “If you guys want to hire Hollywood actors, I can arrange that.” But we really didn’t take it seriously until she called up one day and said, “I’ve got Margot Kidder. She’s got to go to the airport in three hours, but right now she’s sitting in Salt Lake City doing nothing. If you’d like for her to come, you can have her for three hours.” Aaron quickly wrote something, she showed up, and had great fun doing it.

We thought, well, if we can get her, maybe we can get somebody else. Before we knew it, Brian Keith came in for a day.

In an amusing reminder of Access’s essential Mormon-ness, Brian Keith, whose gruff persona in television shows like Hardcastle and McCormick apparently wasn’t affected, became in Aaron Conners’s recollection the first person ever to “drop an F-bomb” in the office. This must mark some sort of record; normally the F-bombs flow like soda inside a games studio…

Russell Means, a supporting player in the recent movie The Last of the Mohicans, also joined the cast. These “stars” who came on such short notice and left just as quickly stand out from the amateur thespians considerably less than one might expect. Like so many Hollywood actors who slummed it in CD-ROM during the heyday of the full-motion-video craze, they used Under a Killing Moon as an opportunity to chew up some scenery and have a little fun playing out-sized versions of the roles for which they were best known. “I don’t think she was really quite sure of what we were doing,” says Chris Jones about Margot Kidder. “Her reference point was Nintendo and Sega.”

Undoubtedly Access’s biggest coup was the casting of James Earl Jones, the iconic voice of Darth Vader himself, as narrator. It was really on a lark that they even rang up his agent — and sure enough, the initial response was, to say the least, not positive: “No way, no way will we do this, no way.” In the end, though, James Earl Jones did agree to do the job, and for a fraction of his normal rate at that, because his son had played and loved Access’s earlier adventure games and had been following the progress on this one closely: “Dad, you’ve got to do this!” Consider: LucasArts had just started making Star Wars games at the time, and yet with all their connections were forced to settle for a soundalike in the role of their Darth Vader. But here he was, performing for Access. Under a Killing Moon truly was a charmed project.

But if its makers were lucky, they earned their luck by doing everything they could to make sure that everyone who played it got more fun than frustration out of the experience. For example, it’s impossible to lock yourself out of victory without knowing it. Another telling sign that this game is on its player’s side is its interactive hint system, which you’re free to use as much or as little as you want. There’s even an “easy play” mode that lets you skip the puzzles completely and just explore the story. The designers plainly aren’t entirely comfortable with the idea — “you’ll enjoy a new level of entertainment” if you only use easy mode to “become familiar with the controls” and then move on to the real thing, says the manual — but, hey, if you really want to play that way, that too ought to be your right.

The travel interface, to which locations are added as time goes on and you learn about them. Under a Killing Moon uses plot time instead of clock time: time advances only in response to you making progress in your investigations. This technique, which had been pioneered by Infocom in Ballyhoo and used to good effect in the first Gabriel Knight adventure in the year before this game was released, was by this point becoming a staple of the adventure genre. And small wonder: it allows for a dynamic, unfolding plot without letting said plot run away without the player. What it sacrifices in realism, in other words, it recoups in practicality and mercy.

Yet another innovation for the player’s sake — perhaps the most enduring of all — is found in the conversation system. Menu-based conversations had been a staple of graphic adventures for quite some time, but Jones and Conners noted how awkward it felt to click on a line of dialog for Tex and then hear him parrot the very same line back. Aaron Conners:

Almost every game at the time would show the full line of dialog. We said, “This is so tedious.” A lot of the wordy games, including some of the best ones, like Monkey Island — fantastic, wonderful humor… but even with that I got tired of reading it and then hearing it. I had to come up with some other way to do it.

So, they implemented a mood-based conversation menu: instead of seeing exactly what Tex will say, you see options like (in the case of a potential love interest) “subtle innuendo,” “lovesick puppy,” and “charmingly curious.” This way, you still feel like you’re directing the course of the conversation, but some element of surprise is preserved. This system went on to influence no less a gaming blockbuster than the Mass Effect franchise, whose development teams included some avowed fans of the Tex Murphy games.

There’s an honesty about Under a Killing Moon, a commitment to its plot and premise that is lacking from most contemporary interactive movies. Again, a comparison to The 7th Guest is unavoidable. The earlier game is the poster child for puzzles that exist purely to give the player something to do, that have no connection whatsoever to a game’s fiction. But, in the words of Chris Jones, “there are no 7th Guest-type things” in Under a Killing Moon: “You know, ‘Here’s a puzzle to solve so you can move to the next room. Move these little marbles around here or whatever. None of that. In Under a Killing Moon, everything is interrelated.” The things you do in the game are mostly the things that a real private detective might be expected to do in order to solve a crime: interviewing people, searching premises for clues, piecing together the evidence to come another step toward the solution. Even those that are thoroughly goofy and would certainly never appear in a detective movie still bear directly on the case you’re trying to solve. And even those puzzles that might initially seem like roadblocks for the sake of roadblocks — like Tex’s urgent need for a new fax machine to replace his broken one — turn out to be useful as background, in this case by establishing just how down and out our hero actually is. At the time of its release, Under a Killing Moon was simply the best, most honest interactive implementation of a mystery — arguably the fictional genre most naturally amenable to becoming an adventure game — to appear since The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.

By the time it was released just in time for the Christmas of 1994, Under a Killing Moon had taken two years and some $5 million to create, making it one of the two most expensive computer games ever made to that point. It was also one of the two biggest games yet made in terms of sheer number of bits: it grew from one CD to two to three to four over the course of its development. In both departments, it was equaled only by the near-simultaneously released Wing Commander III from Origin Systems, another, very different take on the full-motion-video interactive movie. How strange to think that just a year or two earlier developers had been fretting over how they would ever manage to fill up a single CD! Not content with blowing past the one-gigabyte barrier in 1994, these two games had already exceeded two gigabytes in size. It was as frenzied a period of technological change as gaming has ever known.

Under a Killing Moon was greeted with a brutal review in Computer Gaming World, courtesy of Charles Ardai, that magazine’s resident curmudgeon as well as my favorite gaming scribe of the 1990s. His take-down is odd not least because he had previously given Countdown and Martian Memorandum fairly glowing reviews. Nevertheless, his review of Under a Killing Moon makes some very valid points, so much so that I want to quote from it here as the flip-side to my positive take on the game.

With the plot about the cult and the crusade for genetic purity, [the developers] appear to be trying to tell a serious story, with serious threats and grim implications. Yet every time the story threatens to go in an interesting direction, they cut it off at the knees by throwing in lame, inappropriate jokes and cheap slapstick, such as scenes that involve Tex falling over in his chair or walking into walls or getting captured by villains who do Three Stooges-style eye-poking shtick.

This undisciplined willingness to sacrifice the story in order to stick gags in where they don’t belong is typical of amateur writers, and it is deeply unsatisfying. Jones and Conners seem to be hoping that they can make a single game be both a serious thriller and a goofy comedy, both Chinatown and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, and it just doesn’t work.

Ardai isn’t precisely wrong about any of this; the game’s tone really is all over the map, in that way all too typical of adventure-game writers — and, yes, amateur writers of all stripes — who lack the courage of their convictions, and seek to head off criticism of their productions’ manifest weaknesses by suddenly playing them for laughs. Normally, this sort of thing irritates me as badly as it does Ardai.

In this case, however, it doesn’t; I recognize the game’s disjointedness, not only in terms of its fiction but in the disparate gallery of techniques and interfaces it uses to present its story, but I’m just not that bothered by it. For me, Under a Killing Moon is a shaggy beast for sure, but also a thoroughly lovable one. When I ask myself why this should be, I find myself tempted to fall back on those vague platitudes that are the hallmark of the amateur critic: that the game has “soul”; that it is, God help us, “greater than the sum of its parts.”

Since that will obviously never do, let me note that it has at least three saving graces. One is a certain cultural sophistication which peeks through the game’s pastiche, telling us that its creators were a bit older than the norm and had a taste for things beyond Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars: the street where Tex Murphy lives is called Chandler Avenue after the beloved crime novelist; the central Mcguffin of the game is a bird statuette, a nod to The Maltese Falcon. Another is its bold spirit of innovation, its willingness to try not just one new thing but a whole pile of them, despite working in the terminally conservative ludic genre of the adventure game, which usually departs from the tried and true only with the utmost reluctance. And a third — probably the most important of all — is one that I’ve already mentioned: its exuberant likability. Just being nice — being the kind of person that other people enjoy being around — will get you a surprisingly long way in life. If Under a Killing Moon is any evidence, the same is true in games.

Here, then, is the ultimate difference maker between Under a Killing Moon and a game like The 7th Guest: the former is generous to its player while the latter is stingy. Although Under a Killing Moon gleefully employs every piece of trendy technology its developers can get their hands on, it’s all done for the purpose of making a fun game of the sort that said developers themselves would like to play; it’s not done merely to make a statement about the alleged multimedia zeitgeist, much less to rake in beaucoups of cash. The money, one senses, was always secondary when it came to Tex Murphy. (Why else invest millions into risky interactive movies at all instead of wallowing contently in the ocean of guaranteed profit from the Links franchise?)

There’s an open-hearted joy about Under a Killing Moon that makes up for a multitude of acting and even writing sins. It’s still bursting with that excitement which Jones and Vandegrift felt as kids — “We’re making a movie!” It’s just that now it’s an interactive movie. Under a Killing Moon is a wonderful tonic in a cynical world. If that sounds odd, given that the game takes place in such a dystopian setting, it serves only to point out how special its personality really is. The game tells us that the best parts of us, the things we sometimes call our basic humanity, will always survive. Chris Jones:

Okay, this world’s worn-out and ugly and partially destroyed, but people are people. People still have their sense of humor. People still have an outlook they can hang onto. Even if the world’s going to hell, it’s the only world they’ve got. To be dragged down in the mud attitude-wise or [imagine] things never improving… well, maybe they will never improve, but there’s got to be some hope that they will.

It strikes me that the most under-discussed aspect of Under a Killing Moon, as well as quite possibly our key to understanding all this, is the Mormon community from which it sprang. There are all sorts of reasons for the silence on the subject, starting with many would-be game historians’ apparent belief that individual games can be understood without taking account of the real-world beliefs and biases that went into them, passing through the way that the people who made this particular game studiously avoid the subject, ending with how loaded any discussion at all of religion has become in our societies. Not everyone who worked on Under a Killing Moon was Mormon — even a community like Bountiful is “only” 75 percent Mormon, with a substantial Catholic minority among its other believers and non-believers — and the game never, ever proselytizes; it wants to entertain you, not convert you. Nevertheless, it has a distinct Mormon sensibility, and is all the better for it.

There is, I think, a tendency among many non-believers who lack experience with religious communities to imagine them as unduly grim milieus, where everyone marches in lockstep as Soldiers of God, where there is no room for warmth or humor or whimsy, no space for secular culture of any stripe. But, as Under a Killing Moon amply demonstrates, that’s not always or even usually the case at all.

Of course, like any dogmatic religion, Mormonism comes complete with a set of Lines That Shall Not Be Crossed, whose nature I won’t belabor here. Yet it’s more forward-looking than many religions, with surprisingly little aversion to modernity within its strict lines of demarcation. Based on my own limited experience, this orientation translates into a genuine desire to see the faithful live up to their individual talents here in the world. You can see this quality manifested in Under a Killing Moon, along with much else that will strike a chord of recognition with anyone who has ever lived among or around Mormons. I recently discussed the subject with Jeff Roberts of RAD Game Tools, a longtime friend of this site who did some contract work on the game’s video-compression system:

Yeah, I joke about how LDS the humor seems to me. It’s super chaste, awkward humor. Very dad-joke humor. I grew up in Utah as a non-Mormon, so I sense that feeling immediately (Book of Mormon nails that perfectly). But yeah, any clips of Access games immediately trigger a “whoa…” in me to this day. They did a “comical” golf game a few years later that really pegs the Mormon meter for me: “Extreme” something… yikes, so bad.

I remember a funny story about Bruce [Johnson] being a henchman that has to grab a girl that was being abducted, but Bruce was embarrassed and it kept filming badly, which led to the actor playing the girl finally just saying, “Look, can you just grab me, so I can go home?”

Tex looks very uncomfortable in this situation…

Under a Killing Moon is the videogame equivalent of Mitt Romney, the whitest man in the world, marching gawkily along with a Black Lives Matter protest, just because, gosh darn it — and Mitt Romney would actually say, “Gosh, darn it,” in 2020 — it’s the right thing to do. As far as the game is concerned, the Right Thing is to try its own earnest, gawky best to give its players the best time ever.

Fortunately for Access, most gamers hewed more to my verdict on Under a Killing Moon than to Charles Ardai’s. In spite of a coveted segment on the television show Entertainment Tonight, the game didn’t become a breakaway mainstream icon of the early CD-ROM era like The 7th Guest or Myst. But it did do well among the slowly expanding audience of core gamers, enough to earn back its development budget and justify another Tex Murphy game. So, one of the most likable series in the history of adventure gaming got to continue on its goofy way, and thus will be making another appearance as part of these histories before all is said and done. In the meantime, give the game a shot if you haven’t already. You might be surprised at how much wholesome fun a post-apocalyptic dystopia can be.

(Sources: the book Under a Killing Moon: The Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba; Computer Gaming World of January 1990, January 1991, January 1992, August 1994, and January 1995; Electronic Entertainment of November 1994 and January 1995; Commodore Magazine of July 1987 and August 1987; Provo Daily Herald of January 25 1989, August 1 1990, August 21 1990, June 23 1992, September 19 1993, and October 8 1994; various Bountiful city newsletters. Video sources include the original film of Plan Ten from Outer Space, with commentary from the makers; the documentary The Making of Tex Murphy; and Chris Jones, Aaron Conners, and Mat Van Rhoon on the Back Seat Designers podcast. And I owe a huge thank you to Jeff Roberts for sharing his impressions of working with Access Software.

Under a Killing Moon is available for digital purchase on GOG.com.)

 

Tags: , , , ,

The Pandora Directive

When we started out with Mean Streets, we wanted a vintage, hard-boiled detective from the 1930s and 1940s. You know, the Humphrey Bogart, Raymond Chandler classic character. But since then, we’ve changed our picture of [our detective] Tex [Murphy]. We want to see some human vulnerability. We don’t want the superhero. Too much of the videogame genre is just these invincible characters. They aren’t real; they don’t have texture; they don’t have any kind of fabric to their personality. It’s not very interesting really, dealing strictly with such a one-dimensional character.

For us, the idea was to make this person seem more real. Whether he’s fumbling around or whatever — okay, let’s give him a talent, but let’s put a few defects in his character. He’s still a good guy, but he screws up a lot and says the wrong thing. He’s really from a different time period. We set it in the future because we wanted to give it the gadgets and get it out of today. So we take this man out of time. The general focus of Tex is this: I’m this guy who’s got these problems, who tries to date women but has a hard time with it, and ends up dating the wrong women. If someone good actually likes Tex, well, he figures there must be something wrong with them.

But now, to take Tex down three different paths… this is very interesting.

— Chris Jones in 1995, speaking about plans for The Pandora Directive

Under a Killing Moon, the first interactive full-motion-video film noir to feature the perpetually down-on-his-luck detective-out-of-time Tex Murphy, didn’t become one of that first tier of mid-1990s adventure games that sold over a million copies, captured mainstream headlines, and fomented widespread belief in a new era of interactive mainstream entertainment. It did become, however, a leading light of the second tier, selling almost half a million copies for its Salt Lake City-based developer and publisher Access Software over the course of the year after its release in late 1994. Such numbers were enough to establish Tex Murphy as something more than just a sideline to Links, Access’s enormously profitable series of golf simulations. Indeed, they made a compelling case for a sequel, especially in light of the fact that the second game ought to cost considerably less to make than the $5 million that had been invested in the first, what with the sequel being able to reuse an impressive game engine whose creation had eaten up a good chunk of that budget. The sequel was officially underway already by the beginning of 1995.

The masterminds of the project were once again Chris Jones and Aaron Conners — the former being the man who had invented the character of Tex Murphy and who still played him onscreen when not moonlighting as Access’s chief financial officer (or vice versa), the latter being the writer who had breathed new life into him for Under a Killing Moon. The sequel was to be an outlier in the novelty-driven world of game development, representing a creative and writerly evolution rather than a technological one. For the fact was that the free-roaming 3D adventuring engine used in Under a Killing Moon was still very nearly unique.

Conners concocted a new script, called The Pandora Directive, that was weightier and just plain bigger than what had come before; it was projected to require about half again as much time to play through. It took place in the same post-apocalyptic future and evinced the same Raymond Chandler-meets-Blade Runner aesthetic, but it also betrayed a marked new source of inspiration: the hit television series The X-Files, whose murky postmodern vision of sinister aliens and labyrinthine government conspiracies was creeping into more and more games during this era. Conners was forthright about its influence in interviews, revealing at the same time something of the endearingly gawky wholesomeness of The Pandora Directive‘s close-knit, largely Mormon developers, which sometimes sat a little awkwardly alongside the subject matter of their games. Watching The X-Files in secret, away from the prying eyes of spouses and children, was about as edgy as this bunch ever got in their personal lives.

Everyone else in the development team is a family man, and X-Files is a little heavy for the kids. So they all ask me to record it. I bring it in and we watch it during lunch. I really like the show. It’s been nice because we watch carefully to see what they do with music and lighting to portray a mood. Their production is closer to what we do than to a cinematic feature — tighter budget, working faster. So we found the show very informative.

If anything, The X-Files‘s influence on The Pandora Directive‘s plot is a little too on-the-nose. Like its television inspiration, the game revolves around the UFO that allegedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, the wellspring of a thousand overlapping conspiracy theories in both real life and fiction. If the one in the game is ultimately less intricately confounding than its television counterpart, that is only, one senses, because Conners had less space to develop his mythology. It’s all complete nonsense, of course, but The Pandora Directive is hardly the only game to mine escapist fun from the overwrought fever dreams of the conspiracy theorists.

But Jones and Conners were as eager to experiment with the form of their game as its content. Like the vast majority of adventure games, Under a Killing Moon had draped only a thin skein of player agency over a plot whose broad beats were as fixed as those of any traditional novel or film. You could tinker with the logistical details, in other words — maybe do certain things in a different order from some other player — but the overall arc of the story remained fixed. Conners’s script for The Pandora Directive aimed to change that, at least partially. While your path to unraveling the conspiracy would remain mostly set in stone, you would be able to determine Tex’s moral arc, if you will. If you played him as a paragon of virtue, he might just win true love and find himself on the threshold of an altogether better life by the end of the game. Cut just a few ethical corners here and there, and Tex would finish the game more or less where he’d always been, just about managing to keep his head above water and make ends meet, in a financial and ethical sense. But play him as a complete jerk, and he’d wind up dissipated and alone. Chris Jones on the bad path, which was clearly a challenge for this particular group of people to implement:

It’s a gradual fall. Bit by bit. Bad decision here, another there. As Tex sees it and the surroundings begin to change, he realizes that he blew it. His opportunity’s gone; this other girl is dead because of his mistake. And that darkens the character. So if each step gets you just a little darker, then it’s believable. It starts to have a real texture to it. That’s what we’re trying to do. Tex makes choices, tripping down the dark path, and starts to question himself: “Do I want to save myself? Or maybe this is what I want.” And then eventually you’re trapped. And that’s when it gets very interesting. We start to give Tex some options where the player will say, “Whoa! Can I make this choice?” By the end of the game, he turns into a real cynical bastard. If he chooses to stay on the darker side — each choice is just a shade of gray really, but all those shades of gray add up to a pretty dark character by the time you’re done. Just like in life.

I’m a bit uncomfortable about the way the [dark] path turns out. That was never my vision of what Tex could be. On the other hand, we have this medium which allows you to do such a thing. It is our competitive advantage over movies and television to be able to say to our audience, “Sit in this seat, make different decisions, and see how it turns out.” If we can pull it off with our characterizations and acting… well, now, that’s a very powerful medium. And so I feel like we have a responsibility to do that, to provide these kinds of choices. As I said, as an actor, I feel uncomfortable with this portrayal of Tex. But I feel it would shortchange people who buy the game to say, no, this is Tex, do it my way. If you’re kind of leaning down the dark path, take it and see what happens. You become the character. I’m in your hands.

In addition to the artistic impulse behind it, the more broad-brushed interactivity was intended to allay one of the most notable weaknesses of adventure games as a commercial proposition: the fact that they cost as much or more than other types of games to buy, but, unlike them, were generally interesting to play through only once. Jones and Conners hoped that their players would want to experience their game two or three times, in order to explore the possibility space of Tex’s differing moral arcs.

They implemented a user-selectable difficulty level, another rarity in adventure games, for the same reason. The “Entertainment” level gives access to a hint system; the “Game Players” level removes that, whilst also removing some in-game nudges, adding some red herrings to throw you off the scent, making some of the puzzles more complex, and adding time limits here and there. Again, Jones and Conners imagined that many players would want to go through the story once at Entertainment level, then try to beat the game on Game Players.

But the most obvious way that Access raised the bar over Under a Killing Moon was the cast and crew that they hired for the cinematic cut scenes and dialogs that intersperse your first-person explorations as Tex Murphy. While the first games had employed such Hollywood actors as Margot Kidder, Brian Keith, Russell Means, and even the voice of James Earl Jones as its narrator, it had done so only as an afterthought, once Jones and Conners had already built the spine of their game around local Salt Lake City worthies. This time they chose to invest a good part of the money they had saved from their tools budget into not just “real” actors but a real, professional director.

The official resumé which Access’s press releases provided for Adrian Carr, the man chosen for the latter role, was written on a curve typical of interactive movies, treating the five episodes he had directed of the cheesy children’s show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, his most prominent American credit to date, like others might a prestigious feature film. “He has directed, written, and/or edited work in almost every genre, from features to documentaries, television drama to commercials,” Access wrote breathlessly. All kidding aside, Carr really was an experienced journeyman, who had directed two low-budget features in his native Australia and edited a number of films for Hollywood. He had never seriously played a computer game in his life, but that didn’t strike Jones and Conners as a major problem; they were confident that they had a handle on that side of the house. Carr was brought in not least because professional actors of the sort that he’d seen before on television or movie screens tended to intimidate Chris Jones, who’d directed Under a Killing Moon himself. He “didn’t know how to handle them exactly,” allowed Conners.

Whatever the initial impulse behind it, it proved to be a very smart move. Adrian Carr may not have been the film industry’s ideal of an auteur, but he was more than capable of giving The Pandora Directive a distinctive look that wasn’t just an artifact of the technology behind the production — a look which, once again, stemmed principally from The X-Files, from that television show’s way of portraying its shadowy conspiracies using an equally shadowy visual aesthetic. Carr:

We started lighting darker, and putting in Venetian blinds and shadows and reflections to create texture. And the poor people who render the backgrounds moaned, “But it’s so dark!” And I’d say, “But it’s a movie!”

This has been one of my contributions, I guess. The technicians have been learning about mood. Like when Tex comes home and the room is only lit from outside, or there’s just one lamp on — see, guys, the murkiness is actually good, it creates a certain texture for the mood that we want.

Gordon Fitzpatrick (Kevin McCarthy) and Tex Murphy (Chris Jones).

The cast as a whole remained a mixture of amateurs and professionals; those returning characters that had been played by locals in the previous game were still played by them in this one. Among these was Tex Murphy himself, played by Chris Jones, the man whom everyone agreed really was Tex in some existential sense; he probably wasn’t much of an actor in the abstract, probably would have been a disaster in any other role, but he was just perfect for this one. Likewise, Tex’s longtime crush Chelsee Bando and the other misfits that surround his office on Chandler Avenue all came back to make up for in enthusiasm what they lacked in acting-school credentials.

Chelsee Bando (Suzanne Barnes) is literally the girl next door; she runs a newspaper stand just outside of Tex’s office and apartment.

On the other hand, none of the professional actors make a return appearance. (I must admit that I sorely miss the dulcet tones of James Earl Jones.) The cast instead includes Tanya Roberts, who was one of Charlie’s Angels (in the show’s last season only), a Bond girl, and a Playboy centerfold during the earlier, more successful years of her career; here she plays Regan Madsen, the sultry femme fatale who may just be able to make Tex forget his unrequited love for Chelsee. Also present is Kevin McCarthy, who had been a Hollywood perennial with his name in every casting director’s Rolodex for almost half a century by the time this game was made, with his role in the 1956 B-movie classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers standing out as the one real star turn on his voluminous resumé; here he plays Dr. Gordon Fitzpatrick, the former Roswell scientist who draws Tex into the case. And then there’s John Agar, who first captured international headlines back in 1945, when he married the seventeen-year-old former child star Shirley Temple. He never got quite that much attention again, but he did put together another long and fruitful career as a Hollywood supporting player; he appears here as Thomas Malloy, another would-be Roswell whistleblower.

Tex Murphy and Regan Madsen (Tanya Roberts).

But the Pandora Directive actor that absolutely everyone remembers is Barry Corbin, in the role of Jackson Cross, the government heavy who is prepared to shut down any and all investigations into the goings-on at Roswell by any and all means necessary. Whereas McCarthy and Agar built careers out of being handsome but not overly memorable presences on the screen — a quality which served them well in their multitude of supporting roles, in which they were expected to be competent enough to fulfill their character’s purpose but never so brilliant as to overshadow the real stars — Corbin was and is a character actor of a different, delightfully idiosyncratic type, with a look, voice, and affect so singular that millions of viewers who have never learned his name nevertheless recognize him as soon as he appears on their screen: “Oh, it’s that guy again…” At the time of The Pandora Directive, he was just coming off his most longstanding and, to my mind anyway, defining role: that of the former astronaut Maurice Minnifield, town patriarch of Cicely, Alaska, in the weird and beautiful television show Northern Exposure. In Corbin’s capable hands, Maurice became a living interrogation of red-blooded American manhood of the stoic John Wayne stripe, neglecting neither its nobility nor its toxicity, its comedy nor its pathos.

Give Barry Corbin a great script, and he’ll knock the delivery out of the park (to choose a sports metaphor of which Maurice Minnifield would approve).

Although The Pandora Directive didn’t give Corbin an opportunity to embody a character of such well-nigh Shakespearean dimensions, it did give him a chance to have some fun. For unlike Maurice Minnifield, Jackson Cross is exactly what he appears to be on the surface: a villain’s villain of the first order. Corbin delighted in chewing up the scenery and spitting it in the face of the hapless Chris Jones — a.k.a, Tex Murphy. Jones, revealing that he wasn’t completely over his inferiority complex when it came to professional actors even after giving up the director’s job:

It’s already a little intimidating to work with people who are just consummate professionals. Then the first scene we shot together, Tex was supposed to be grilled by Barry’s character, Jackson Cross. I’m sitting in this chair, and he just came up and scared the hell out of me. Really, he looked through me and I just melted. Fortunately, that’s what my character was supposed to do. I truly felt like I was going to die if I didn’t answer him right. It was frightening.

The Pandora Directive couldn’t offer Corbin writing on the level of Northern Exposure at its best, but he clearly had fun with it anyway.

The Pandora Directive was released with high hopes all around on July 31, 1996, about 21 months after Under a Killing Moon. It shipped on no fewer than six CDs, two more than its predecessor, a fairly accurate gauge of its additional scope and playing time.

Alas, its arrival coincided with the year of reckoning for the interactive movie as a viable commercial proposition. Despite the improved production values and the prominent placement of Barry Corbin’s unmistakable mug on the box, The Pandora Directive sold only about a third as many copies as Under a Killing Moon. Instead of pointing the way toward a new generation of interactive mainstream entertainment, it was doomed to go down in media history as an oddball artifact that could only have been created within a tiny window of time in the mid-1990s. Much like Jane Jensen in the case of The Beast Within, Chris Jones and Aaron Conners were afforded exactly one opportunity in their careers to make an interactive movie on such a scale and with such unfettered freedom as this, before the realities of a changing games industry sharply limited their options once again.

Small wonder, then, that both still speak of The Pandora Directive in wistful tones today. Developed in an atmosphere of overweening optimism, it is and will probably always remain The One for them, the game that came closest to realizing their dreams for the medium, having been created at a time when a merger of Silicon Valley and Hollywood still seemed like a real possibility, glittering and beckoning just over the far horizon.

And how well does The Pandora Directive stand up today, divorced from its intended role as a lodestar for this future of media that never came to be? Pretty darn well for such an undeniable period piece, I would say, with only a few reservations. If I could only choose one of them, I think I would be forced to go with Under a Killing Moon over this game, just because The Pandora Directive can occasionally feel a bit smothered under the weight of its makers’ ambitions, at the expense of some of its predecessor’s campy fun. That said, it’s most definitely a close-run thing; this game too has a lot to recommend it.

Certainly there’s more than a whiff of camp about it as well. As the video clip just above amply attests, not even the talented actors in the cast were taking their roles overly seriously. In fact, just like Under a Killing Moon, this game leaves me in a bit of a pickle as a critic. I’ve dinged quite a few other games on this site for “lacking the courage of their convictions,” as I’ve tended to put it, for using comedy as a crutch, a fallback position when they can’t sustain their drama for reasons of acting, writing, or technology — or, most commonly, all three. I can’t in good faith absolve The Pandora Directive of that sin, any more than I can Under a Killing Moon. And yet it doesn’t irritate me here like it usually does. I think this is because there’s such a likeability to these Tex Murphy games. They positively radiate creative joy and generosity; one never doubts for a moment that they were made by nice people. And niceness is, as I’ve also written from time to time on this site, a very undervalued quality, in art as in life. The Tex Murphy games are just good company, the kind you’re happy to invite into your home. Playing them is like watching a piece of community theater put on by your favorite neighbors. You want them to succeed so badly that you end up willing them over the rough patches with the power of your imagination.

The archetypal Access Software story for me involves a Pandora Directive character named Archie Ellis, a hapless young UFO researcher who, in the original draft of the script, stepped where he didn’t belong and got himself killed in grisly fashion by Jackson Cross. Barry Corbin “just dominates that scene,” said Aaron Conners later. “It was like we let this evil essence into the studio.” Everyone was shocked by what had been unleashed: “The mood on the set was just so oppressive.” So, Conner scurried off to doctor the script, to give the player some way to save poor little Archie, feeling as he did that what he had just witnessed was simply too “traumatic” to leave an inevitability. You can call this an abject failure on his part to stick to his dramatic guns, but it’s hard to dislike him or his game for it, any more than you can, say, make yourself dislike Steve Meretzky for bringing the lovable little robot Floyd back to life at the end of Planetfall, thereby undercutting what had been the most compelling demonstration to date of the power of games to move as well as entertain their players.

I won’t belabor the finer points of The Pandora Directive‘s gameplay and interface here because they don’t depart at all from Under a Killing Moon. The first-person 3D exploration, which lets you move freely about a space, looking up and down and peering into and over things, remains as welcome as ever; I would love it if more adventure games had been done in this style. And once again there are a bevy of set-piece puzzles to solve, from piecing torn-up notes back together to manipulating alien mechanisms. Nothing ever outstays its welcome. On the contrary, The Pandora Directive does a consistently great job of switching things up: cut scenes yield to explorations, set-piece visual puzzles yield to dialog menus. There are even action elements here, especially if you choose the Game Player mode; your furtive wanderings through the long-abandoned Roswell complex itself, dodging the malevolent alien entity who now lives here, are genuinely frightening. This 3D space and one or two others are far bigger than anything we saw in the last game, just as the puzzle chains have gotten longer and knottier. And yet there’s still nothing unfair in this game, even in Game Player mode; it’s eminently soluble if you pay attention to the details and apply yourself, and contains no hidden dead ends. Say it with me one more time: the folks who made this game were just too nice to mistreat their players in the way of so many other adventure games.

Exploring Tex’s bedroom in first-person 3D. His choice of wall art is… interesting.

I would like to write a few more words about the game’s one big formal innovation, letting the player determine Tex’s moral arc. Jones and Conners deserve a measure of credit for even attempting such a thing in the face of technological restrictions that militated emphatically against it. Live-action video clips filled a huge amount of space and cost a lot of money to produce, such that to offer a game with branching paths, thus leaving a good chunk of the content on the CDs unseen by many players, must have cut Chris Jones’s accountant’s heart to the quick. Points for effort, then.

As tends to the be the case with many such experiments, however, I’m not sure how much it truly adds to the player’s final experience. One of the big problems here is the vagueness of the dialog choices you’re given. Rather than showing you exactly what Tex will say, the menus offer options like “insensitive but cheerful” or “pretend nothing’s wrong,” which are open to quite a range of overlapping interpretations. In not making Tex’s next line of dialog explicit, the designers were trying to solve another problem, that of the inherent anticlimax of clicking on a sentence and then listening to Tex dutifully parrot it back. Unfortunately, though, the two solutions conflict with one another. Far too often, you click an option thinking it means one thing, only to realize that Tex has taken it in a completely different way. This doesn’t have to happen very often before the vision of Tex the game is depicting has diverged in a big way from the one you’re trying to inhabit, making the whole exercise rather moot if not actively frustrating.

Aaron Conners himself admitted that “95 percent of the people who play will end up on the B path,” meaning the one where Tex doesn’t prove himself to be a paragon of virtue and thus doesn’t get his lady love Chelsee — not yet, anyway — but doesn’t fall into a complete moral abyss either. And indeed, this was the ending I saw after trying to play as a reasonably standup guy. (For what it’s worth, I didn’t succeed in saving poor Archie either.) Predictably enough, the Internet was filled within days of the game’s release with precise instructions on how to hack your way through the thicket of dialog choices to arrive at the best ending (or the worst one, for that matter). All of which is well and good — fans gotta fan, after all — but is nevertheless the polar opposite of the organic experience that Jones and Conners intended. Why bother adding stuff that only 5 percent of your players will see without reading the necessary choices from a walkthrough? The whole thing strikes me as an example — thankfully, a rare one — of Jones and Conners rather outsmarting themselves, delivering a feature which sounded better in interviews about the amazing potential of interactive movies than it works in practice.

Then again, the caveat and saving grace which ought to be attached to my complaints is that none of it really matters all that much when all is said and done; the B ending that most of us will see is arguably the truest to the spirit of the Tex Murphy character anyway. And today, of course, you can pick and choose in the dialogs in whatever way feels best to you, then go hunt down the alternate endings on YouTube if you like.

It may sound strange to say in relation to a game about sinister government conspiracies, set in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, but playing The Pandora Directive today feels like taking a trip back to a less troubled time. It’s just about the most 1990s thing ever, thanks not only to its passé use of video clips of real actors but to its X-Files-derived visual aesthetic, its subject matter (oh, for a time when the most popular conspiracy theories were harmless fantasies about aliens!), and even the presence of Barry Corbin, featured player in one of the decade’s iconic television programs. So, go play it, I say; go revel in its Mormon niceness. The post-millennial real world, more complicated and vexing than a thousand Roswell conspiracy theories, will still be here waiting for you when you return.

(Sources: the book The Pandora Directive: The Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba; Electronic Entertainment of July 1995; Computer Gaming World of March 1996 and December 1996; Retro Gamer 160. Online sources include the now-defunct Unofficial Tex Murphy Web Site and a documentary film put out by Chris Jones and Aaron Conners in recent years.

The Pandora Directive is available from GOG.com as a digital purchase.)

 
 

Tags: , , , ,

Tex Murphy and the Coming of the DVD (A Shaggy-Dog Story)

In his expatriate memoir Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson describes what a false picture of the world’s geography you would end up with if you were to try to surmise it from British mass media. Britain, you would probably assume from the crazy amount of attention the United States gets in that country’s press, must lie somewhere just off the coast of North America, perhaps about where Cuba lies in reality. It would be the rest of Europe that is separated from Britain by a wide, daunting ocean.

The retro-gaming scene of today can give a similarly false picture of the geography of gaming’s past — one that is not so trivial to correct. Take the case of the fondly remembered studio Dynamix, a major name in gaming from 1984 until 2001. Do you know what Dynamix’s most profitable game of all was? It was not any of the ones that are still discussed today: not Arcticfox or Rise of the Dragon, not The Red Baron, not The Incredible Machine, not Betrayal at Krondor, definitely not Rama. No, it was a little something called Trophy Bass, which sold many more copies from the outdoor sections of Middle American Wal-Mart superstores than it did from computer and gaming stores. As of this writing, Trophy Bass has precisely zero reviews on the central fandom database MobyGames. And yet it was absolutely huge in its day — eclipsed, in fact, only by the unrivaled king of Wal-Mart software: Deer Hunter, the butt of a million hardcore-gamer jokes, whose publisher laughed all the way to the bank.

Indeed, Deer Hunter must be solidly in the running for the title of most profitable single computer game of the twentieth century, easily outdoing such hardcore contemporaries of the late 1990s as Quake, Diablo, and Starcraft in terms of the amount of money it cost to create versus the amount of money it brought in. Its only real challenger by this metric may be the unstoppable juggernaut that was Myst, another game that was made on a shoestring and then proceeded to sell and sell and sell some more, despite being widely scorned by the hardcore crowd. Then again, there is Barbie Fashion Designer to consider as well. Guess how many MobyGames reviews it has… Suffice to say that targeting the people who self-identify as “gamers” has seldom if ever been the best way to make a lot of money in games.

With that in mind, let me spin you a yarn about Access Software, which existed in or close to Salt Lake City, Utah, from 1983 until 1999, at which point it was acquired by that biggest whale of all in the software scene, Microsoft itself. Today, Access is remembered by retro-gamers mostly as the home of Tex Murphy, a trenchcoat-and-sneaker-clad detective of a noirish future who was played onscreen by Access’s chief financial officer Chris Jones in five installments spanning from 1989 to 1998. Yet it wasn’t Tex, whose commercial profile never exceeded the fair-to-middling range during his heyday, who convinced Microsoft that Access was an investment worth its time. That service was performed by Links, a long-running series of golf simulations that got slightly more attractive and sophisticated every year throughout the 1990s, and was rewarded by becoming a staple of another demographic that stayed far away from most computer games: the middle-aged corporate-executive set, the same people who could be seen out on the world’s real golf courses.

From first to last, Tex Murphy was an indulgence which Bruce Carver, the founder of Access, permitted to Chris Jones, his longest tenured and most valued employee, who had been with the company from its earliest days as a maker of Commodore 64 action games. This is not to say that Tex didn’t assemble a fan base of his own, most of them people who would never have touched a golf simulation. He really hit his stride with the third game of the series, 1994’s Under a Killing Moon, which earned its label of “interactive movie” by using live-action video clips of real actors rather than crudely digitized still photographs to carry its narrative water. This was also the point where a fellow named Aaron Conners came aboard as scriptwriter and Jones’s design partner, engendering a quantum leap forward on those fronts as well. Technologically innovative and yet thoroughly lovable in an enthusiastic community-theater sort of way, Under a Killing Moon became the most commercially successful Tex Murphy game ever, selling almost 500,000 copies. Such numbers may have paled beside those put up by Links, but they were sufficient to permit the series to continue to exist as a sideline to Access’s mainline in simulated golf.

Unfortunately, that equation got upended by 1996’s The Pandora Directive. The fourth Tex Murphy game and second full-fledged interactive movie pushed harder and farther along all the trails blazed by its immediate predecessor: its play time was longer, its plot more convoluted, and its formal storytelling ambitions more pronounced, with a welter of different endings on offer depending on how you chose to play the dubiously great detective. All that notwithstanding, once cast adrift in a changing marketplace where interactive movies were now a dime a dozen and already encountering the first worrying signs of a gamer backlash, it sold only about a third as many copies as Under a Killing Moon, not even enough to pay for its own production cost.

By all rights, that should have been that for Tex Murphy. Bruce Carver may have been an indulgent man, but he would have had to be a terrible businessman indeed to let his CFO’s passion project go on actively losing his company money. As it happened, though, Tex got thrown a lifeline from a most unexpected source. To understand the circumstances that led to his rescue, we need to take a quick look back at the history of, of all things, the storage media that were used to deliver software to consumers during the first quarter-century of the personal-computer era.



By the mid-1990s, the computer industry had already passed through two fairly earthshaking transitions in storage media: the linear medium of cassette tapes had been replaced by random-access floppy disks, which had in turn been largely superseded by CD-ROMs that could hold over 400 times as much information as what had come before. It’s interesting to note that the first and third links in this chain first came to prominence not in association with computers but as music-delivery technologies. While the application of cassette tapes to the very first personal computers of the late 1970s was a happy accident, the inventors of the CD took to heart from the start a brilliant insight of the early computing researcher and theorist Claude Shannon: that all data is ultimately just data; the difference exists only in the way you interpret it. Thus when the CD made its debut in 1983, Philips and Sony, the Dutch and Japanese electronics giants behind the new format, envisioned music delivery as only the first of a whole range of applications. For, being a digital storage medium, all a CD contained at bottom was a string of ones and zeroes, which could presumably be applied to whatever purpose you liked: computer code and data, video, you name it.

In the end, though, the proud parents’ hopes and schemes for the format were realized only partially. After an agonizingly long gestation period, CD-ROM drives for computers finally broke through to become a ubiquitous reality circa 1993. Yet the territory of home video remained resolutely unconquered by the little silver discs. In 1993, people were still buying and renting movies on VHS videotapes (and, in much smaller numbers, on laser discs, an almost equally aged storage medium despite its futuristic appearance). The principal problem holding the CD back was that of capacity. The 650 MB or so that could be stuffed onto a CD were enough to provide 75 to 80 minutes of high-fidelity music, more than enough for a symphony or even most double record albums. When it came to video, however, the numbers didn’t look so good. It just wasn’t possible to put enough decent-quality video onto a CD to compete with VHS. Not that people didn’t try: a number of initiatives sought to make up the difference through hyper-aggressive compression algorithms, but none of them were very satisfying and none of them went much of anywhere in the developed West.[1]Despite the many compromises inherent to the concept, video CDs did become quite popular in the still-developing regions of Asia and Africa, where they often took the form of bootleg discs sold at street markets and the like. On computers as well, video-centric games like Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive were soon bumping into the limits of the CD; the latter shipped on no fewer than six discs, and yet the quality of its video snippets was far below what you would expect from an ordinary television broadcast.

It didn’t take a genius to see what was needed: a new optical storage medium much like the CD in form and spirit, but much more cavernous. It was so obvious, in fact, that by the end of 1994 two separate successor standards were in development, one from the old CD consortium of Philips and Sony, the other from Toshiba, each with more than half a dozen other major names in home electronics signed on as supporters. The stage seemed to be set for a repeat of the VHS-versus-Betamax format war of the early years of videotape. VHS had finally won that conflict to become the universal standard, but it hadn’t been quick, easy, or cheap. As with most wars, everyone involved would probably have been better off if it could have been avoided.

No one was more worried about the prospect of a Second Video Format War than the big players of the computer industry. They assumed that, just as they had adopted CD technology to their own use-case scenarios, they would do the same with this successor technology. Two dueling formats, however, would be a nightmare for them. They wanted — no, needed — a single standard; the alternative was too chaotic to contemplate. Apple, Compaq, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and Sun therefore came together in April of 1995 to create a working group whose marching orders were to put pressure on the feuding parties in the adjacent home-electronics industry to join forces and come up with a single standard.

In a telling testament to the computer industry’s growing clout in this burgeoning new Internet Age, the pressure campaign was successful in relatively short order. On December 12, 1995, the basic specifications of the DVD were formally agreed upon by everyone concerned. The format inherited parts of both research projects to wind up with an optical disc capable of holding more than 8.5 GB of data, which could constitute up to four hours of crisp video and audio, compressed using the nearly lossless MPEG-2 standard — or, alternatively, the data on the disc could be used for whatever other purpose you had in mind, just as with a CD. The DVD would be slightly thicker than a CD, but would otherwise have the same form factor, such that it would even be possible to read CDs in DVD drives. Like the technology itself, the acronym was a classic product of corporate compromise. It wasn’t really an acronym at all: the parties couldn’t agree whether “DVD” stood for “Digital Video Disc” or “Digital Versatile Disc,” so they decided that a DVD would just be a DVD, full stop.

The standard’s progress from prototypes to products was almost derailed by the Hollywood film studios, who wanted a delivery medium that was, unlike VHS, secure against piracy. A variety of copy-protection mechanisms had to be implemented to placate the studios, including a system of regional locks whereby DVDs could only be played in that part of the world where they had been purchased. At last, on November 1, 1996, the very first DVD players from Matsushita and Toshiba, the honor guard for the hundreds of millions that would follow, went on sale in Tokyo’s legendary Akihabara electronics district. Americans had to wait until the following February for the first units from Panasonic and Pioneer to arrive. Within four months, 30,000 of them had been sold. From there, the numbers swelled exponentially. By the end of 1997, 340,000 standalone DVD players had already been sold in the United States alone, along with a million or more movies on disc to watch with them. It was just the beginning of what would soon be credibly labeled “the most successful consumer-electronics entertainment product of all time.”

On computers, however, the DVD’s forward march was more halting. Singapore’s Creative Labs, which had made its name and its fortune fueling the multimedia-computing revolution with sound cards and CD-ROM drives, introduced its first DVD-ROM upgrade kit in April of 1997, but it was rendered nearly unusable by a lack of driver support in Microsoft Windows. Oddly, considering how hard it had worked to ensure that the DVD standard was a standard, the computer industry seemed caught flat-footed by the actual presence of the technology it had shepherded out in the wild. It seemed not to have adequately considered the complications involved in combining DVDs with personal computers — especially when it came to using DVDs for their most obvious purpose of all, as repositories for high-quality video.

The embarrassing fact was that even most of the high-end microprocessors of the day didn’t have enough horsepower to be able to decompress the MPEG-2 video fast enough as it streamed off the disc. The only viable solution to this problem was the one used by standalone DVD players: another layer of hardware in addition to the interface between the computer and the DVD drive itself, a set of specialized circuits that could decompress the data coming off the DVD fast enough to get it to the screen in real time.

Enter Intel, the maker of most of those CPUs that weren’t quite up to the job of handling DVD video on their own. Although it hadn’t been part of the computer industry’s initial push to force a DVD standard, Intel had grown very bullish indeed on the format since then. During his keynote address at the January 1997 edition of Comdex, the industry’s biggest annual trade show, Intel’s CEO Andy Grove played snippets of Space Jam from a DVD drive connected to a computer. He and his associates envisioned a DVD player as the key component of a multimedia set-top box for the living room, sort of like a games console but also something more — an idea which never seemed to die, despite the failures of many previous entrants into this space, from Commodore to 3DO. As a first step toward this fondly imagined future, Intel set out to make a new line of upgrade kits for existing computers, to consist of a DVD drive and a new video card containing the hardware needed to get MPEG-2 video efficiently to the screen.

Strange though it may sound, these initiatives became Tex Murphy’s momentary savior.

It is a longstanding truism in computing that hardware is useless without software. Translated into the language of consumer electronics, this means that, if you want people to buy your shiny new gadget, you need to make sure they can also acquire compelling things to do with it. This was the reason that it was so important to win Hollywood’s acceptance of the DVD standard — important enough to delay the first DVD players’ release and to redesign the whole specification, just to ensure that exciting, sought-after movies arrived on store shelves alongside those first DVD players. Intel found itself in a similar bind when it considered its foray into interactive DVDs: there was currently no software out there to make use of them. What, any potential customer would ask very reasonably, am I supposed to actually do with this thing?

This was anything but a new problem for the computing and gaming industries. Luckily, it wasn’t an insoluble one either, as long as you had sufficient foresight and money. Two decades previously, Atari had solved it by having its own people make a range of fun games for the Atari VCS console before the latter ever went to market; then, when it did, Atari packed one of the best of those games — the soon-to-be-iconic Combat — right into the box with the console. A decade and a half later, third-party “pack-in” games became standard in the multimedia upgrade kits of companies like Creative, for the same reason Combat had shipped with the Atari VCS: to give people something to do with their new toy right away. When accelerator cards for 3D graphics became available a few years later, the purveyors of same paid game publishers a lot of money to make special versions of hit titles that were optimized for their particular cards. Activision, for example, programmed at least half a dozen separate versions of MechWarrior 2 for the different would-be graphics-accelerator “standards” that were floating around at the time. Such pack-ins could be of enormous importance to everyone concerned: the profits that Activision raked in from MechWarrior 2 helped to set one of gaming’s most venerable brand names back on the road to ubiquity after an ugly bankruptcy at the beginning of the decade.

Now, Intel wanted to prime the pump of interactive DVD with a showcase pack-in title that would demonstrate to everybody what the technology was capable of, and that would give customers something to do while everyone waited for a real software ecosystem to develop around the product. Somebody inside the mega-corporation was evidently a fan of Tex Murphy, thought that Chris Jones and Aaron Conners and their colleagues at Access Software were the perfect people to put interactive DVD through its paces. By no means was it an untenable deduction; no more credible stabs at interactive movies on CD existed than Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive. What might Access be able to do with DVD-quality video?



Thus one day a lifeline for Tex Murphy fell out of the clear blue sky, when Intel came to Access with an offer that would have been difficult for anyone to refuse. Intel would pay all of the production costs of a third Tex Murphy interactive movie. The only requirements were that the finished game had to run from DVD and had to be given to Intel to include as a pack-in with any and all of its interactive-DVD products. Access, for its part, would be allowed to sell the game on its own in a conventional retail box, keeping whatever revenues it generated thereby; if it chose, it could also make a version that ran from CD and sell that as well. Intel wasn’t even all that worried one way or the other about how much the game would cost to make, given that, whatever the final budget wound up being, it was guaranteed to be chump change for the biggest maker of computer chips on the planet. There was just one sticking point: Intel needed the game within one year. Time, in other words, was more important than money.

Being in no position to look a gift horse like this one in the mouth, Jones and Conners accepted all these terms without a second thought. Only after they had signed the contract did they sit down to consider just what it was they had agreed to. The last two Tex Murphy games had each taken twice as long to make as the amount of time Intel was giving them to make this one. They had sketched out only a rough outline of a plot for a possible next game in the series. Their chances of turning this into a finished script and then turning that script into a finished game they could be proud of within a single year seemed nonexistent.

At this point, Chris Jones came with a suggestion. Why not remake Mean Streets, the very first game in the series from 1989? They could dust off the old design document, flesh it out here and there, and present it as the origin story of the current incarnation of Tex Murphy, Private Investigator. Aaron Conners, who had never even played Mean Streets, said it sounded fine to him.

He was less sanguine when he did try the game, an awkward melange of flight simulator and point-and-click adventure which made it abundantly clear why Jones had felt the need to find a proper writer to join him for Under a Killing Moon. The first no-brainer decision was to throw the flight simulator right out. And then, says Conners:

I went to [Chris] and I said, “We can’t redo this game. This is terrible. You’ve got more jokes from third grade in here than I’ve ever seen in a game.”

I took the basic thread of the story and rewrote everything around that. I rewrote the script from top to bottom. And so, when people say Tex Murphy: Overseer was just a redo of Mean Streets, I want to throttle them, because I worked harder on that than I did on Pandora.

Adrian Carr, who had directed the live-action video in The Pandora Directive, returned to do the same for Tex Murphy: Overseer. (The new name reflected Access’s belated realization that borrowing the title of one of Martin Scorsese’s most beloved films was a recipe for consumer confusion if not legal peril…) The casts of both of the previous games had been a blend of Salt Lake City locals with a handful of moderately recognizable film actors — people like Margot Kidder, Barry Corbin, Kevin McCarthy, Tanya Roberts; even James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader, had agreed to join Under a Killing Moon as the narrator. Overseer continued this tradition, leaning perhaps a little harder than before on the Hollywood crowd at the expense of the locals. (It was, after all, being made on Intel’s dime.) The big coup this time was the highly respected veteran of stage and screen Michael York, who even as the game was in production was making a splash with a whole new generation of moviegoers thanks to his role in the hit James Bond spoof Austin Powers. Here he played the villain, albeit an unusually complex and tortured one, whose final monologue might just be the best thing Aaron Conners ever wrote.

Everyone involved with Overseer speaks of it as a more regimented project than the ones before, a case of making a plan and sticking to it. With so little time to work with, there was hardly any other way to approach it. The filming in particular took on the rhythm of a conventional Hollywood shoot, with the actors cycling through like clockwork to do their scenes one after another over the course of about a month. (The only actor present throughout the shoot was the star of the production, the unlikely amateur Chris Jones.) In all facets of the project, the Access folks kept the faith and worked like dogs. And they got it done, delivering Tex Murphy: Overseer right on schedule in the first weeks of 1998.

The game’s fiction stays on familiar territory. The setup is pure film noir: Tex is visited in his office by a femme fatale named Sylvia Linsky, who will, as those of us who played the other games know, eventually become his wife and then his ex-wife. Right now, though, she explains that she is suspicious about her father’s recent untimely death; he is supposed to have thrown himself off the Golden Gate Bridge in a fit of despair, despite having never displayed any signs of depression or suicidal tendencies before. Tex’s investigation leads him down the standard rabbit hole of a world-spanning and potentially world-ending conspiracy, involving secret brain implants that can be used to control the minds of millions of people. All of this may be par for the course for a Tex Murphy game, but this is by no means a bad execution of the standard formula. As usual, comedy and drama sit side by side in a way that would be awkward in most storytelling situations, but something in the Tex Murphy special sauce allows it to work far better here than it has any right to. And then, as I already mentioned, there’s some real pathos and gravitas to the villain’s arc, qualities which are elevated that much further by the performance of Michael York, one of those Shakespearean-trained British actors who would sound pretty great reading the phone book aloud.

It is true that Overseer lacks the divergent paths and multiple endings of The Pandora Directive. That said, I must also say that I’m a bit of a curmudgeon about such formal experiments in otherwise traditional adventure games anyway, rarely finding them worth the additional disc space and development time they entail. I’m perfectly happy with one satisfying story line, which is plenty hard enough to offer up. Overseer manages that feat, and that’s good enough for me.

In lieu of a branching plot, there is one really interesting wrinkle in the game’s approach to its narrative. It’s explicitly framed as a story which the present-day Tex, a more jaded figure than his earlier incarnation, is telling to his current love interest Chelsee over the course of an evening out. If you screw up or get Tex killed — which are usually one and the same, come to think of it — you see a little clip of his present-day self telling Chelsee, “No, that’s not really how it happened!” In his review for Computer Gaming World magazine, Charles Ardai took exception to the approach, complaining that the existence of Tex in this later time means that “the outcome is not in doubt. Tex must prevail, or he wouldn’t be sitting here talking to Chelsee.” That’s true as far as it goes, but I must say that it doesn’t go all that far with me. Has anybody ever played any Tex Murphy game under the misapprehension that the hero might not win out in the end? Not since Infocom’s Infidel created a backlash in 1983 had anyone dared to make an adventure game with a non-telegraphed tragic ending. Personally, far from being dissatisfied with it, I only wish that Overseer leaned into its storytelling conceit a little more. It could, for example, automatically send you back to the juncture in the story where you messed up after you reach one of the bad endings, rather than dumping you back to the menu to manually load the saved state you hopefully remembered to create. This game is ultimately all about its story, so why not make it as effortless as possible for us to play with the stuff of the story?

The gameplay itself is tried and true for this series. Once again, you spend most of your time either interrogating suspects via a menu of conversation topics or exploring locations and solving puzzles from a free-roaming first-person perspective — no Myst-style fixed movement nodes here! Whether you’re alternately crouching and standing on tiptoes in order to search every hidden corner of a room for clues or dodging hit men or killer robots in a surprisingly dynamic possibility space, the stuff you do when you aren’t watching canned video clips is what elevates the Tex Murphy series above almost all of its interactive-movie peers. For these are interactive movies that truly work as games — as rich, generous adventure games, with challenging but meticulously fair puzzles and even a modicum of emergent qualities when the action starts to heat up.

Although Overseer doesn’t reinvent any of its predecessors’ wheels, the evolution of computer technology has made the presentation everywhere that much sharper and crisper in comparison to what came before, especially in the video snippets — only appropriately, given that they were the whole point of the endeavor from Intel’s point of view. Indeed, I find I want to say that Overseer is actually better than its rather middling reputation within modern Tex Murphy fandom. It’s a little shorter than Under a Killing Moon or especially The Pandora Directive, but it’s not all that short in the abstract; there are still a good five to eight hours of fun to be had here.

The worst thing I can say about Overseer is that it’s just a little bit less Tex Murphy than its predecessors in senses other than length. The more conventionally professional performances and even presentation can be a double-edged sword, detracting just slightly from that giddy community-theater quality that made the earlier games so ridiculously charming. There aren’t many games or game series about which I would make such a statement — camp is most emphatically not my thing in general — but Tex Murphy has always been special in that regard, simply because there’s so darn much amateurish “we’re making an (interactive) movie!” joy to be found there, because the whole thing is so darn open-hearted and guileless. With Overseer, though, there is just a hint of ennui threatening somewhere out there on the horizon.

Still, and for all that this isn’t the place I’d recommend that anyone start with Tex Murphy — you should definitely play the classic 1990s trilogy in release order, beginning with Under a Killing Moon — Overseer remains from first to last an entertaining, well-crafted, and thoroughly enjoyable adventure game, just like its companion pieces. I’m happy to give it a place alongside them in my personal Hall of Fame. If more 1990s interactive movies had been like these ones, the world may or may not have been a better place, but adventure-game fans would for sure have had a lot more fun in it.


Michael York plays the tortured, tragic villain, the wheelchair-bound billionaire J. Saint Gideon. Aaron Conner counts York saying to him out of the blue one day that the role of Gideon was a little bit “Shakespearean” as one of the great thrills of his life.

The journeyman Australian stuntman and martial artist Richard Norton played Big Jim Slade, a more hands-on sort of heavy than Gideon. Norton was a great find, portraying Slade with a humorous panache that Conner hadn’t really written into his script. Many of his best lines were ad-libbed on the spot.

The name of Delores Lightbody, the former fiancée of Sylvia Linsky’s deceased father, is a piece of third-grade humor from Mean Streets that somehow survived into Overseer. The tired fat-shaming tropes on display here are among the few aspects of the Tex Murphy series that have aged decidedly poorly. Ah, well… to her credit, actress Micaela Nelligan attacks the role with relish. “Incredible!” said Rick Barba, who wrote the strategy guide for the game. “I found myself attracted to this big woman!” (I’m sure you’re a downright Adonis yourself, right, Rick?)

Out and about in the world. The interface is notably less clunky than in the previous two games. Now you can access your inventory on the fly just by moving the cursor to the side of the screen, instead of having to freeze the view in place and enter a separate object-manipulation mode.

There are also occasional set-piece mini-games.

In marked contrast to his hard-boiled detective heroes, Tex never fails to look painfully awkward whenever the possibility of a seduction arises. Far from being a weakness, this is a big source of the series’s goofy Mormon lovability.



When the folks from Access delivered Tex Murphy: Overseer, a game of which they felt justifiably proud, they were brought up short by an ironic turn of events that would have amused Tex himself at his most cynical. To put it bluntly, Intel didn’t want the game anymore. While Access had been beavering away at it, Intel had belatedly begun to ask itself some hard questions about where — or rather whether — its vision for interactive DVD actually fit. In reality, standard DVD was already far more interactive than the linear medium of VHS. A new era of movie watching was dawning, in which viewers could jump to favorite scenes instantaneously, could listen to directors’ commentaries and alternative soundtracks while they watched, could enjoy additional interviews and “making of” featurettes included on the same disc as the movie, could switch up languages and subtitles on the fly. Some companies were even experimenting with making the direction of the movie itself interactive, the cinematic equivalent of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books. All of this was possible using the standard DVD specification running on any everyday DVD player. Did people want to pay for additional hardware in order to run a full-fledged video-based adventure game like Overseer? Intel had a dawning suspicion that they did not. Certainly there could be no denying now that CD-based games of this style were in marked commercial decline, having been trampled by the latest crazes for 3D action and real-time strategy, not to mention the Deer Hunters and Trophy Basses of the world.

And then, for the final irony, Intel’s custom DVD technology was fast becoming irrelevant even for the purpose of watching ordinary movies on your computer. It was a case of the corporation’s right hand not being fully aware of what its left was up to: Intel’s latest Pentium II CPUs had sufficient grunt to be able to handle MPEG decoding unaided, without requiring any other specialized circuitry in an add-on video card or a set-top multimedia box.

So, Intel decided to drop its most ambitious plans for DVD and focus on the chips that had gotten it this far. With the facility that is the luxury of a giant corporation, it wrote off its multi-million-dollar investment in Tex Murphy: Overseer as just another idea that had seemed good at the time but hadn’t panned out. Access, Intel said, could do whatever it liked with the game.

At first blush, this might have sounded like unbelievably good news to Chris Jones and Aaron Conners. Thanks to Intel, they had a new Tex Murphy game which had literally cost their own company nothing to make, which they could now go out and sell without sharing any of the revenue with anyone else. When you thought about it a little harder, though, the waters were quickly muddied. Access, a company more interested in golf simulations than adventure games for the very understandable reason that the former made it lots and lots of money while the latter did not, must now try to sell Overseer all by itself in a marketplace that was growing ever more prejudiced against this kind of game. There was ample cause to wonder whether the company’s marketers would really give it their all.

Alas, such concerns were amply justified when Access shipped Tex Murphy: Overseer in March of 1998, with both the DVD version and a version on five CDs filled with grainier video in the same box. Overseer was, as far as I’ve been able to determine, the first ever computer game to be made available from its day of release on DVD. (A number of older games of the multiple-CD stripe had been or soon would be repackaged for DVD, including Wing Commander IV, Riven, and Zork: Grand Inquisitor.) But that claim to fame wasn’t enough to overcome desultory promotion and, most of all, the overwhelming sense in gaming culture that games like this one had become painfully passé. Overseer sold considerably worse than The Pandora Directive. Although the money it did bring in was almost pure profit thanks to the largess of Intel, that happy accident did nothing to undermine the business case against making another game of this type, at least in the absence of another patsy to pay for it.

In a fit of optimism, when their heads were dancing with images of Tex Murphy reaching a whole new audience on Intel’s hardware and with Intel’s marketing machine behind him, Jones and Conners had decided to end Overseer on a cliffhanger. Having just finished telling the story of his first case to Chelsee, Tex flies away into the neon night in the back of an air taxi with her at his side — and then the driver turns and appears to shoot both of them at point-blank range. Needless to say, Jones and Conners would not have ended the game that way had they known that they weren’t going to be able to return to Tex Murphy for a long, long time — not until something called Kickstarter came along to offer an alternative way of funding games.

For the time being, the last nail seemed to have been hammered into Tex Murphy’s coffin in April of 1999, when Microsoft acquired Access in a deal whose details have remained secret. This latest mega-corp to come around flashing its money was, admits Aaron Conners, “oblivious to Tex Murphy. They bought us for Links.” Chris Jones was told by his new masters every time he broached the possibility of a revival that there was no place anymore for Tex: “It’s not really an Xbox product, and it’s way too big for casual gaming. Adventure games have died off. We don’t see where you fit.” And that was that.



But while Tex Murphy shambled off into an unwanted early retirement — or perhaps a worse fate, given the ending to Overseer —  the new technology to which he owed his final star turn was going from strength to strength. By the end of 1998, there were 1 million DVD players in American homes, and the format was beginning to make inroads in Europe as well. The American DVD market alone would be worth $4 billion in 2000, $8 billion in 2002, $12 billion in 2004, $16 billion in 2007. VHS would follow the opposite trajectory; the very last Hollywood film to be released on videotape was David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence in 2006.

Gaming platforms lagged behind, but not by that much. The latest generation of games, which tended to rely on 3D graphics that were rendered on the fly rather than lots of pre-rendered video, were ironically less demanding of storage space than those that had come before, making the need for an alternative to the CD seem somewhat less urgent for a while. Still, this “while” was fairly brief-lived; as 3D graphics grew in resolution and polygon count, and were supplemented by more and more ambitious soundscapes, the size of games in terms of raw data soon began to increase once again. In 2000, Sony’s decision to use a DVD instead of a CD drive in the PlayStation 2, the successor model to the most popular games console in the history of the world to that point, marked a watershed for games on DVD. Within a couple of years, the format ruled the games roost too.

The impact the shift from CD to DVD had on the nature of games was more subtle than that of the shift from floppy disk to CD; there was a difference of kind about going from 1.5 MB to 650 MB of storage space that was not present to the same degree when going from 650 MB to 8.5 GB. DVDs just helped games to become a little bit more: more aesthetically pleasing, more complex, more approachable. (No, these last two qualities are not in conflict with one another; in many cases, they go hand in hand.) It was, we might say as we strain nobly to bring this back around to Tex Murphy, the difference between Mean Streets and Under a Killing Moon versus the difference between The Pandora Directive and Tex Murphy: Overseer. The difference, that is to say, between a revolution and an evolution. Yet revolutions are often overrated, what with all the chaos and consternation they cause. Evolution can be just fine if it keeps us moving forward. And this the DVD most certainly did for gaming in general, if not for poor old Tex.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.


Sources: The books Tex Murphy: Overseer: The Official Strategy Guide by Rick Barba, DVD and the Study of Film: The Attainable Text by Mark Parker and Deborah Parker, and DVD Demystified (second edition) by Jim Taylor. Computer Gaming World of November 1995, August 1996, January 1997, February 1997, June 1997, October 1997, and January 1998; Retro Gamer 160.

Online sources include the archive of interviews at the old Unofficial Tex Murphy Web Site and a documentary film on the Tex Murphy series that was put together as part of the Kickstarter campaign for 2014’s Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure.

Tex Murphy: Overseer is available for digital purchase on GOG.com. Fortunately, this is the DVD version. Unfortunately, it’s temperamental on modern versions of Windows. PC Gaming Wiki offers some solutions and workarounds for common problems.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 Despite the many compromises inherent to the concept, video CDs did become quite popular in the still-developing regions of Asia and Africa, where they often took the form of bootleg discs sold at street markets and the like.
 
 

Tags: , ,