“At the time creating a computer game that was heavily story-driven was done by using static images and a lot of text. Although flying around in a simulator can be fun, by giving players a reason to go from point A to B, they felt that this would elevate the end product into more than just an action game. As it had a great futuristic look, setting, and impressive 3D technology, they began looking at ways to incorporate a story into the game. The caption was tired, predictable, like a wanna-be comedian vomited on the page.In the late ‘80s after releasing a string of successful golf titles, Chris Jones and other employees at Access Software were working on a flight simulator as a follow up to their first aerial action game, Echelon. And this is where the character of Tex Murphy was born, a gumshoe moulded in the fashion of Humphrey Bogart, ripped from the pages of a Raymond Chandler novel or screenplay. This was a passion shared by a few employees at Access Software, who in a time long before YouTube or even computer editing, would create short films as a way to unwind. STORY FIRST… THEN LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTIONChris Jones, the creative force behind Tex Murphy, and in fact, the actor who would play the character, grew up as a lover of film, especially those coming from classic Hollywood. No, it was also born from combining a passion for homemade movies with a day job of making games. But the road to Under a Killing Moon, which goes so far as to label itself an Interactive Movie, through the heavy use of full-motion video (FMV), real actors, and digitised sets, was not simply born from new technology. They aren’t timeless, yet they are still presented using some of the most advanced gaming technologies of their day. This is an important part of all Tex Murphy games. But a few short years after Mean Streets was released, the name Sound Blaster made its low quality sound feel obsolete, or at the very least outdated. Although storage space limitations at the time meant that this was limited to a few lines of dialogue and one catchy, if overused, musical cue, it laid the groundwork for a series that was always ahead of its time whilst still strangely being a product purely of its time.ĩ Images That may sound confusing or purposely obtuse but the way that works is that in 1989 RealSound was ground-breaking and on the cutting edge. RealSound, the technology created by Access Software in the ‘80s was utilised heavily in the very first Tex Murphy game, 1989’s Mean Streets. WHAT’S UP, TEX?So what does all this sound-tech-jumbo have to do with Tex Murphy? I’m glad you asked, as the story behind each Tex Murphy game is intrinsically linked to era-specific technology. But what if there was a way to connect one of these PCs to a stereo? Again, limitation breeds ingenuity, so by stripping a standard RCA cable and putting two Alligator Clips on one side, one connected to the PC speaker terminal, the other to the PC case itself, the end result was digitised sound in the ‘80s, early ‘90s-style. RealSound baby! Kinda.The only catch was that most PC Speakers of the day were internal and tiny, and weren’t designed to carry more than a high-pitched tone from the PC to the user. Created by Access Software and called RealSound, it allowed 6-Bit audio to be played directly from a PC Speaker without using up too much processor speed. But limitation breeds ingenuity, and one developer came up with a way to get digitised sound out of a beep-happy PC Speaker without the need for separate hardware. And it wasn’t a case of gamers in the ‘80s marvelling at the different beeps and bloops that were coming out of their PC either even they knew it was bad. That’s because the PC Speaker (R.I.P.) was this thing whose official use was limited to beeping in varying tones to let users know that their machine was either turning on or that they’ve been holding down the Enter key for way too long. And by using the internal PC Speaker found inside all IBM compatible machines, the end results were primitive to say the least. But this didn’t stop developers from trying their best to get both sound and music into their games. All of which explains why it wasn’t until the early ‘90s that sound cards became a staple part of what made up a PC. Sounds expensive… not to mention a hassle. So that’s some kind of Inception-style computer within a computer scenario. If you wanted quality sound out of a computer at that time, well, you’d pretty much need the power of an additional computer, such were the limitations of processor technology. Play READ HISTORY BOOKIn the ‘80s, digitised sound bearing the crisp quality one would associate with their cassette-tape boom box was something that wasn’t possible in the home computer market.
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