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!
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I thought I'd take a moment to share with you how I found Tex, what led me to starting this site and my feelings on Tex's future post-Microsoft takeover.
My discovery of Tex happened quite randomly. My dad went to Las Vegas for a convention (not sure what, but maybe it was the Consumer Electronics Show if its been around long enough). Intel was at the show, and as part of the tie-in with their new powerful Pentium chips, they were giving away free copies of Under a Killing Moon. My dad was lucky enough to get one. At the time, my family didn't have a computer quite powerful enough to run it, but a few months later my dad got a Pentium 100MHz. Once it was setup, one of the first things my dad did was install the game as a test. I remember waking up that morning, walking into the computer room/office and found my dad playing it. He let me play a bit and that was that. I was hooked. That was sometime in 1995, when I was only 11. Tex has been part of my life for nearly as long as I can remember. In August of 1996 I was browsing through a gaming magazine at the store and discovered Tex was coming back in a new adventure - what I thought at the time was The Pandors Directive. I went to the store shortly thereafter asking about it, and found a copy at the second one I visited. Though I started Pandora in August, I didn't finish it until February - I was so scared of the part where you need to defeat the Black Arrow Killer that I just could get past it. I'm glad I eventually got over that! Overseer I discovered online. I don't recall the site, but I do remember it had an all blue background and a large font with no images - it was 1997. It told me that not only was Overseer coming out, it was going to be released on something called "DCD". I had no idea what that was, it was only later I found out it was supposed to be DVD and that it was the future of storage media. Overseer was a day one purchase... Actually it was a day -1 purchase. I had read on the Unofficial Tex Murphy message board from a fellow Canadian that a store here - Compucentre - had released the game early. I got my parents to take me to the mall and I got my copy, complete with blinking red light. That light still works with the original batteries. I completed Overseer in about two weeks. It was around this point that I had started playing with Microsoft Front Page, and I started building my Tex Murphy site. On April 15, 1998 I opened my GeoCities account and launched the site. Everything went well for the first year in the world of Tex Murphy. There were delays expected due to Links Extreme and Access's new project, Black Pearl, but it seemed things would eventually happen with Tex's next adventure. But in April of 1999 Microsoft purchased Access Software and things changed. Next time I'll discuss my various feelings, ups and downs during the time between 1999 and 2012. In the meantime, how did you discover Tex? Discuss. 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! I swear there's a swarm of crickets that have descended on the Tex Murphy community. It's been quite inactive over the past month or so, and I don't really have any good news on that front either (nor do I have any bad news, thank goodness!). Just a few small updates to let you know that I'm still alive:
- After a LONG hiatus, Adventure Gamers is back (formally Adventure Gamer). Check out their new and improved site by clicking here. - I've updated the technical guide to getting UAKM to run in WinME. If you're still having some difficulties you may want to check it out. Click here to go to the page. I have added a link to the UAKM WinME help page in the UAKM section. Previously it was only accessible through the Electronics Shop, but this should help those looking for information on getting it running on WinME.
NEW inventory object found in Overseer. A long metal pole has been found in Alcatraz Cell Block C! It has been added to the inventory list. Thanks to Ian R. for discovering it. If you're having trouble finding it, click here to see a picture.
Have Windows ME? Can't get UAKM to run? Follow these instructions to get it to run! New quote of the week. New cool thing to try added to UAKM Cool Things to Try. Fixed method 3 for getting infinite points in UAKM.
New! Adrian Carr interview by Adele, with information on Tex and his film career. Click here to go to it.
Also, you may have noticed some small changes to the Pandora and UAKM sections. I've changed the titles on the sections (not the names, but how they're set up) and I've also put those two sections into subdirectories. Look for some more changes coming soon. Well, it has now been two years since James LeMosy made his famous April Fools Day joke, only at the time we didn't know how right he was. If you weren't here (meaning on the internet, or in the internet's Tex community) or you just want to read it again, click here.
I added a new section to the UAKM section of this website called Story Connections. This section will tell you about little known bits about the storyline of UAKM. Coming soon, a Pandora Directive Story Connections section. New quote of the week. Old quote archived. |
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