New Tex Murphy News!

Hello, I’m a long time Tex Murphy fan. I have been playing the Tex games for years, and they have inspired me to become a game developer some day. I recently heard some info that may be really good news for Tex fans!

Last week I attended the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. On Tuesday night, at the IGDA party in the Westin Hotel, I had an interesting conversation with Doug Tabacco from Telltale Games. For those of you that don’t know, Telltale Games is an adventure game development company that has produced episodic games such as Sam & Max, Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, and Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures. I began talking with Doug about how much I love all of the episodic adventures that Telltale makes. He then asked me what my favorite adventure game of all time was, and I said The Pandora Directive.

It was then that he started to tell me about the possible plans between Telltale Games and Big Finish Games involving Tex Murphy. Apparently, Telltale Games is currently negotiating a deal with Big Finish Games to produce episodic Tex Murphy games! According to Doug, after all of the Wallace & Gromit episodes have been released, (so after this July), Telltale will either start to produce a Garfield episodic series, a Tex Murphy series, or both! Doug said that he wasn’t able to go into a lot of detail, and that everything was still in the planning stages, and approval was still needed from Big Finish Games. However, he did say that if Telltale becomes able to make Tex episodes, then they would be based off of the Radio Theater episodes, so that there would be six of them for the first season, using the same titles as the Radio Theater episodes (The Naked and the Bed, The Month of the Living Dead, etc.). I also asked him what Chris Jones and Aaron Conners would have to say about this, and he said that they would probably deny Telltale’s possible involvement with Tex Murphy since they are waiting for Three Cards to Midnight to be released. If the game sells well, the new Tex game will probably end up being produced entirely by Big Finish Games, but if Three Cards to Midnight does not sell well, it will probably be produced by Telltale Games.

I realize this may be really good news, or not so good news. What does everyone think? In the recent interview on Adventure Gamers, Aaron Conners did hint that they are considering episodic adventures. “Recently, though, we’ve started thinking about a new approach – maybe starting a Tex Murphy “series” of episodes, similar to what Telltale is doing with Sam & Max.”

I hope that Three Cards to Midnight sells really well. Let’s all buy 10 copies of it! Ideally, I think the new Tex game should be produced by Big Finish Games, and Telltale should make the Garfield episodes. However, since money is tight, I would rather have Telltale produce the next Tex game instead of there being no new Tex game at all. While Telltale does produce really great, fun, and humorous adventure games, the gameplay style and humor of their previous games is very different from the Tex Murphy games. Will they be able to pull it off?