The Return of Tex Murphy ?

I have mentioned before that the Tex Murphy games are my all time favourite computer games, and word is that Big Finish Games is to bring Tex Murphy back after a hiatus of fourteen years. It all depends on the success of a Kickstarter project to be launched on May 15th.

This is great news and I’ll willingly fork over some of my hard earned cash to support the project. After all I, and all the other Tex fans around the world, have been hanging out for a new game for fourteen years.

The game will be developed by the original creators of Tex Murphy, who have been around the video game scene for decades, first at Access, then at Microsoft who bought out Access in 1999. They now operate their own independent company, Big Finish Games.

So what makes these games so special?

Well, Under A Killing Moon, the first of the FMV (full motion video) Tex Murphy games, was ahead of its time, and the first truly interactive movie with a real 3D gaming environment. Not only that, it had a great story, witty dialog and was highly enjoyable to play. Set in a dystopian future San Francisco it had elements of film noir, hard boiled detective fiction and a Blade Runner futurist setting.

Under A Killing Moon was one of the first computer games I ever played, and I was hooked then and forever after. The second game The Pandora Directive only served to convince me more. It is a near perfect video game, considerably more sophisticated than Under A Killing Moon and generally acknowledged as the best of the three FMV Tex games. Tex Murphy Overseer came out in 1998 and was the first game to include a DVD version of the game as well as multiple CDs. Unfortunately, the DVD didn’t work on the computer systems of the day, or required lots of tweaking.  I never succeeded in getting it running smoothly; either the image was faulty or the sound was choppy or scenes froze and you had to reboot – very irritating to say the least.

Overseer ended on a cliff-hanger, where Tex, after accepting a lift with a stranger, is shot in the last frame with a “to be continued” postscript.

The new game, if the kickstarter is successful, will take up the story from there. The developers plan to create it in FMV as with the original games and also make use of new software developments to enhance the game play. Certainly something worth waiting for.

In the meantime, all the Tex Murphy games are available for download on GOG.com in a drm free format.  They work really well on Windows XP and probably later versions of Windows.

If you have ever played or enjoyed adventure games from the 1990s, you will want to support their return in 2010s. The 1990s was the golden age of adventure games, before they were generally cast aside by shooters and action adventure games.