#Tex murphy under a killing moon cast full
#Tex murphy under a killing moon cast series

Be it the result of poor marketing or just that the moment had passed, Tex's star has long since faded and the adventure genre itself has gone the way of film noir a lovingly remembered relic, occasionally revisited by a handful of devotees.

#Tex murphy under a killing moon cast series

Later games in the series never managed to recapture Under a Killing Moon's commercial success. It's not a grand work of fiction, but it's layered enough to have inspired a solid novelization, and both the humor and narrative succeed more often than not. The story progresses episodically, with Tex solving smaller cases that lead him to uncover a massive global conspiracy.

Under a Killing Moon walks the line between comedy and drama, with goofy dialog and sarcastic voiceover contrasting a reasonably complex homage to classic film noir. Like Guybrush Threepwood, Roger Wilco, or Larry Laffer, Tex Murphy is a classic adventure hero a bumbling incompetent with more luck than wits. If you do get stuck, you can buy hints using in-game points, thanks to an ingenious hint system that remains the best the genre has seen to this day. While some small items like keys or cards require a thorough search of the premises, there are usually just enough clues to nudge you in the right direction. While there's a ton of voice and video to convey the story and dialog, you'll still spend most of your time sleuthing, combing the many 3D environments for clues, and solving the usual inventory and logic puzzles you'd expect from a '90s adventure game. But Access wisely never let their aspirations of interactive cinema overshadow the actual gameplay. Surprisingly, everyone seems to pull their weight, with the amateurs hamming it up in comedic roles, and the pros holding down the more dramatic moments.

The cast was an odd mix of Hollywood vets like James Earl Jones, Russell Means, and Margot Kidder, alongside moonlighting computer programmers, with the game's director doubling as its lead character.

While other developers like LucasArts and Sierra were simply using the CD-ROM media to add voiceover, Tex's new adventure spanned an unprecedented four CDs, packed with video to illustrate every conversation and major plot point along the way.

#Tex murphy under a killing moon cast full

It might seem funny now, but it seemed impossible that these detailed, high-resolution environments full of shadows and nuance could be rendered on the fly. But this reviewer will never forget that feeling of awe upon seeing those graphics move and discovering they were real-time 3D. During a time of pre-rendered slideshows like Myst, it was natural to glance at Under a Killing Moon, and assume it was the same. It might be tough for a new generation of gamers to appreciate how amazing this title looked in 1994. But unlike those games, this was a 3D, first-person adventure game with an unrivaled cinematic presentation. While his first game was an experimental mish-mash of genres, and his sophomore outing a standard point-and-click adventure, Under a Killing Moon was proudly billed as an 'interactive movie,' a label already facing some backlash as a tide of titles substituting video for gameplay flooded the shelves.

This was not the first game in the Tex Murphy series, but it was a new beginning. Years later, it remains a seminal classic but often goes overlooked for the very reasons that once made it seem so fresh. Caught somewhere between the tail end of the full-motion video craze and the dawn of the 3D revolution, it walked a delicate line between passé and cutting-edge, and for that brief moment in time, it was perfect. Like Tex Murphy, a hardboiled, fedora-wearing gumshoe in a post-nuclear future, Under a Killing Moon was a game out of time.