The Gameological Society has posted a great new interview with Chris Jones and Aaron Conners. It covers Tex's history and the development of Tesla Effect. It's an interesting read with some nice new tidbits of info. Other than the trailer embeds, this one is spoiler-free for Tesla Effect. Check it out here!
1 Comment
Just a heads up for anyone in the Salt Lake City area, or who can be the first week of September, there will be a panel for Tesla Effect on Friday, September 6th. For more details on the Comic Con click here, and for a list of panels click here.
While I can't share the backers-only video, I think it's safe to say in the interest of promoting the panel, Chris Jones, Aaron Conners, Adrian Carr, Larry Thomas (Lt. Danwicz, The Soup Nazi) and Kevin Murphy ("Voice" in Tesla Effect) will all be in attendance. I can't attend, so I hope there's a recording afterwards, but it should be good! July 31st marked the last day to contribute to Project Fedora via PayPal, and Big Finish has now released the final total: A whopping $657,196 with PayPal bringing in an additional 10% over the money brought in on Kickstarter. It's an impressive feat for Tex to not only bring in the original asking figure of $450,000, but to surpass it by over $200,000. A congratulations to Big Finish for managing to brining in so much, and certainly a thanks to everyone who backed this project is called for, so: Thanks! No specific reason has been given for closing off contributions, but with a publisher becoming involved, it's probable that at some point they would rather sell pre-order copies at more than $15 a piece. I'm sure once all the distribution issues are settled, pre-order will become available. Based on what has been flying around the forums and from Chris Jones's interview on Wednesday, Steam seems to be the main target for distribution, which is great. Steam has a huge user base to expose Tex to. As I write this, there are currently 4.8 million people logged on to Steam. I wouldn't be surprised if we see Tesla Effect show up on GOG as well. Here's hoping Tesla Effect is a huge success! For those who missed yesterday's interview of Chris Jones on RetroNick Radio, it is now available for download here.
There were quite a few interesting tidbits regarding Tesla Effect. The things I found the most interesting are:
When Microsoft bought Access Software in April 1999, things changed dramatically for Tex. adventure games were falling out of favour and Microsoft's interest was in the Links golf series and its underlying technology. The future did not look good for Tex.
Hope remained, however, but it wasn't long before it looked like Tex would never return in the format we know and love. It was the announcement that in place of a full-fledged game, the new Tex would be released in a series of online Flash games or "webisodes", when almost all hoped drained away. You can see my original reaction and follow up here and here. Once I was reassured that the webisodes weren't Access giving up, I felt better, but the future for Tex still seemed bleak. The webisodes idea was soon replaced with a series of radio theatre episodes. While enjoyable, they were not quite the same. They did inspire several in the Tex community, including myself, to help keep Tex alive through the fan-produced Lombard St radio theatre (I recorded several episodes as the narrator. You can find a link to them in Downloads). In the desire to keep Tex alive I wrote and was involved in several fan fictions, several of which I never completed, including one that told the story of World War III and how it tied in with the events of The Pandora Directive. I, along with a fellow community member, attempted to make our own Tex game entitled The Nano War... I honestly don't remember how far we got, suffice it to say, we never finished it. I also created Who Wants to be a Tex Expert, available in the Downloads section on this site, or included free with your purchase of any Tex game on GOG. It was around 2002-2003 when I completed high school and went off to university that I had mostly given up hope. I drifted away from the community and towards the Star Trek community. I continued to be a lurker and hoped that maybe I was wrong, but the more time that passed the more I was convinced Tex was done. In 2008 my hope returned with the launch of Big Finish Games and the tease of Project Fedora. But despite everything, there never seemed to be any developments and by 2010 I was again convinced it was all over. BFG was a valiant effort, but didn't seem to be enough. When Tim Schaffer found amazing success on Kickstarter, I knew that many in the Tex community would insist the idea was the way to bring back Tex. I wasn't convinced. I knew that the community itself would be enthusiastic, I just didn't think it would be possible to get the money needed to produce a game at the level of Tex Murphy. When the Kickstarter was announced, I was 100% on board even if I wasn't sure it would work. It wasn't until the Kickstarter launched that I thought this might actually be just what the entire community had been looking for for 14 years. The sum asked for was modest and the day one haul was huge. I was finally excited at the prospect that Tex could actually be returning. For a short time in the middle of the campaign, it was a bit slow and I started to worry, but all that ended quickly. And I think we know how things have gone since then. So, were you always convinced Tex would return one day, or do you have a similar story to my own? Please discuss in the comments! Welcome back (and a welcome to any newcomers as well) to Alcatraz: A Tex Murphy Site! Alcatraz has been down for nearly four years, since my original host, Geocities, closed up shop. And while I was always fond of my site, without much promise of a new Tex Murphy game, I just didn't have the will to bring it back.
As you likely already know, things have changed quite a bit in the land of Tex Murphy over the last year. After the successful Kickstarter campaign last spring, Tex will soon be gracing our screens again in Tesla Effect, the long awaited sequel to Overseer. With that revival came a strong desire to bring back my site, not just in name, but with all (or most) of the content as it stood when it was last online in October of 2009. And so, here is Alcatraz, back and this time on Weebly. While I am still a slave to a host that could theoretical shut down the way Geocities did, I'm hoping that if this site proves popular enough, I may invest in setting it up free from such chains - but we shall see. In any case, the Alcatraz you are on now is almost identical in content to the original site, save for a few items I felt were no longer valuable in the modern age and in a few cases, some downloads linking to external sites were lost. But I always kept a copy of my site on my computer, so I was able to restore 90-95% of the original content. Even those I felt had no particular place anymore can be found under Miscellaneous Stuff. In there, you will find some goodies, like the original A Black Sun Ascending movie description, and some not-so-goodies like how to run UAKM on Windows ME. The Games, Novels and Downloads section are all mostly intact, with some redesigns, both out of necessity with the tools at my disposal and also because some of my original site's design elements sucked. That said, I am still toying with this site, so don't be surprised if you find visual changes. I would appreciate any feedback, so please shoot me an email at [email protected] with your comments or suggestions or leave a comment on this blog post. I'm also not much of a graphic artist, so if someone out there wants to create a better logo for the top of this site pro bono, please go ahead. I can't guarantee I'll use it, but I will be grateful regardless. Also, this blog contains every update to the original site made from June 1998 onwards (unfortunately I never saved the updates from April and May), so take a peak around the blog and you may find yourself taking a trip down memory lane. Everything is there, warts (and typos) and all! You will also notice that I am on Twitter. If you follow me, I will inform you of site updates as well as any other random things that I may want to say. I'm not much for using Twitter for every little thing I do, so don't worry, I won't bombard you with 50 tweets a day :) My hope is to keep this site going for as long as there is still a Tex Murphy community to support it (which I suspect will be a long, long time, even if Tesla Effect proves to be Tex's last hoorah). I'm open to the idea of guest bloggers so if you have some experience you'd like to share, let me know, and I may just post it! Be sure to stay tuned. While I am bound by confidentiality with regards to any Mutant League-only information, I will provide as many details as I can about the upcoming Tex adventure, and once Tesla Effect is released you can join me in my experience through the game and start browsing all of the Tesla-related content I have provided for all of the other Tex games. Thanks for visiting, and I hope you make Alcatraz a regular stop! Wow, it's hard to believe it has already been five years since I last updated this site. Judging from Geocities traffic information people have continued visiting over the years and I'm glad that even though I no longer update, people still come here as a source for all things Tex.
Over the last ten years us fans have been anxiously awaiting another installment in the Tex series, and I'm updating today, not to say that it's coming, but that the possibility is likely the strongest it has been since Microsoft's takeover of Access in 1999. Chris Jones and Aaron Conners have been working on a self-funded game titled Three Cards to Midnight. The game is well on its way to completion and is expected to be released in November. On their website for their new company, Big Finish Games you can read all about this new game and in the near future check out some screenshots and try out a demo. Chris and Aaron have suggested that if this game does well enough another Tex game to wrap up the series is a very strong possibility. Three Cards to Midnight seems very promising, and I'm sure that it's up the quality we've come to expect from Chris and Aaron. I urge anyone who is interested in seeing a conclusion to the Tex series strongly consider buying Three Cards to Midnight. At the very least you should check out the demo when it comes out this October. In closing, I'd like to thank everyone who has visited this site over the last decade. I can't say that this update means that I will resume updating the site regularily, but if there are any other major updates in the world of Tex Murphy, I'll be sure to post them. Keep checking out Big Finish Games website for updates on their future projects and to stay as up-to-date as possible on Tex check out the forums at The Unofficial Tex Murphy Site. In a recent post on the Unofficial Tex Murphy Message Board, Aaron Conners set a new earliest possible date for the release of the demo of the Tex online game: May 1st.
Last February, it came to the attention of the Tex community that a company known as Whiteshark Entertainment had posted a summary of A Black Sun Ascending (the film version of The Pandora Directive). The summary was removed shortly thereafter, but thanks to the Internet Archive, it's back. It is accessible from the Rank and File, or by clicking here. In a new post over at the Unofficial Tex Murphy Message Board, Aaron Conners has said that the first episode of the proposed online Tex game will indeed be free and may be available as early as March. He also mentions that there are hopes for placing the game on MSN Gaming Zone, which has "MILLIONS of subscribers - and ~200,000 people on the site at any given moment." If this works out, it could be just the boost Tex Murphy has been looking for, for almost 5 years.
Aaron Conners is taking any questions people may have regarding the online game, so if you have anything to ask him, click here (Registration required to post). Rampa has started a new Tex Murphy site for French-speaking fans. It's called Tex Murphy 4ever. Click the link to check it out! According to Jim, the Old Guy in a post at The Unofficial Tex Murphy Site's message board, Aaron Conners is currently working on the puzzles for Day 3 of Chance: I will say this and I quote from AC: "this afternoon/evening, I will be sitting in a noisy, smoky bar in downtown Salt Lake City, laying out the game design, story, puzzles |
Random Quote:
Categories
All
Archives
October 2013
|