If anything, The X-Files‘s influence on The Pandora Directive‘s plot is a little too on-the-nose. Their production is closer to what we do than to a cinematic feature - tighter budget, working faster. It’s been nice because we watch carefully to see what they do with music and lighting to portray a mood. I bring it in and we watch it during lunch. 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.Įveryone else in the development team is a family man, and X-Files is a little heavy for the kids. 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. 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. For the fact was that the free-roaming 3D adventuring engine used in Under a Killing Moon was still very nearly unique.Ĭonners 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. 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. 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 officially underway already by the beginning of 1995. 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. 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. 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. 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. Chris Jones in 1995, speaking about plans for The Pandora Directive If someone good actually likes Tex, well, he figures there must be something wrong with them.īut now, to take Tex down three different paths… this is very interesting. 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. We set it in the future because we wanted to give it the gadgets and get it out of today. He’s really from a different time period. He’s still a good guy, but he screws up a lot and says the wrong thing. Whether he’s fumbling around or whatever - okay, let’s give him a talent, but let’s put a few defects in his character. It’s not very interesting really, dealing strictly with such a one-dimensional character.įor us, the idea was to make this person seem more real. They aren’t real they don’t have texture they don’t have any kind of fabric to their personality. Too much of the videogame genre is just these invincible characters. But since then, we’ve changed our picture of Tex. You know, the Humphrey Bogart, Raymond Chandler classic character. When we started out with Mean Streets, we wanted a vintage, hard-boiled detective from the 1930s and 1940s.
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