Tex Murphy

Tex Murphy is a series of six adventure games from Access Software, designed by Chris Jones. The games feature the titular character, performed by Chris Jones himself. He is characterized as a down on his luck private investigator in a dystopian future San Francisco.

Games

 * Mean Streets (1989)
 * Martian Memorandum (1991)
 * Under a Killing Moon (1994)
 * The Pandora Directive (1996)
 * Tex Murphy: Overseer (1998)
 * Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure (2014)

Tex Murphy universe
The games in the Tex Murphy series take place in a post-apocalyptic 21st century. All of the games take place mostly in a post-WWIII San Francisco. The skies glow red with radiation, and people who don't live in a better-sheltered city or lack genetic immunity to the radiation are disfigured and usually repulsive. Several San Francisco landmarks are still present, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower and Alcatraz, but most of them are completely abandoned; most damaged beyond repair from bombs in WWIII. The futuristic aspect borrows heavily from sci-fi books and films, most notably Blade Runner for its flying cars and impossibly dense tenements.

The character
Tex Murphy is a hard-boiled PI. Tex is a member of the portion of the population born without any genetic defects making him a normal human (referred by in-game characters as a "Norm"). He is an avid fan of the classic film noir films of Humphrey Bogart. As such, he does his work in the style of archetypal film noir detectives such as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. He has remarkable skills of observation (always punctuated with humorous internal monologues); when examining objects or features, he hardly ever misses an important or unusual detail. However, he is also occasionally a bit clumsy and naive which gets him into trouble from time to time, as does his sarcastic wit.

He is honest and generally a good-natured fellow who suffers from a bad back, a little too much alcohol (Bourbon...neat, preferred) and a few too many blows to the head. He runs his Private Investigator's business out of his apartment at the Ritz Hotel on Chandler Avenue in Old San Francisco "among the mutants and the destitute" where several businesses and friends reside, including his love interest, the mysteriously mutated newspaper stand owner Chelsee Bando. Aside from wishing for a respectable, not to mention high-paying, client all he'd like to do is earn her love and respect if he can just refrain from placing his admittedly not too bad smelling foot in his mouth.

Radio theater
To meet the fans' demand for more Tex Murphy, Chris Jones and Aaron Conners released a 6 episode radio theater series in 2001. The radio theater stars several of the original characters and voices from the games, including Jones as Tex Murphy. As of 2006 there were no plans to release any new episodes due to the costs. The previous episodes are currently available through The Unofficial Tex Murphy website.

Plans
The last game to be released was in 1998 and the developer of the series is no longer in business (Access Software was acquired by Microsoft, who in turn sold the studio to Take-Two Interactive, who shut it down). For years, the rights to Tex were held by Microsoft and later Take-Two, and efforts to revive the franchise were squashed. As of 2009, series creators Aaron Conners and Chris Jones have re-acquired the rights to past and future Tex games. Conners recently stated "I no longer think Tex's return is an 'if,' but a 'when.'"

Chris, Aaron, and a number of other veterans of the series have formed the independent developer Big Finish Games, recently completing their first game, Three Cards to Midnight. The site's main page was updated in April of 2009 with an announcement of "Project Fedora" as a future release. This has led to much speculation amongst the Tex Murphy fanbase that a new project in the form of a game is in the works as the fedora is a signature component of Tex's outfit, especially in light of the fact that this announcement coincided with the news of the rights to the series being secured.

On June 16 2009, Good Old Games re-released the first three games in the series as downloadable titles and put the last two into the "coming soon" section. The fourth game followed on June 30, and the fifth on the 21st of July. Some of the releases use DOSbox to maintain compatibility with modern operating systems.