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.