S4E12 – Pandora’s Big Box

They say, “Never meet your heroes.” Luckily, they are sometimes wrong. With apologies to my two lovely co-hosts, I’d like to start this blog post with a personal anecdote. Through the magic of simply switching on a microphone and yammering into the void, I have been fortunate enough to actually talk to people I used

Continue reading S4E12 – Pandora’s Big Box

They say, “Never meet your heroes.” Luckily, they are sometimes wrong.

With apologies to my two lovely co-hosts, I’d like to start this blog post with a personal anecdote.

Through the magic of simply switching on a microphone and yammering into the void, I have been fortunate enough to actually talk to people I used to just merely admire through their work. Two game series in particular helped shape me into the socially awkward, sarcastic bastard I am today — Sierra On-Line’s Space Quest and Access Software’s Tex Murphy.

When The Two Guys From Andromeda, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe, called me up back in February 2012 and asked me to be part of their Kickstarter campaign for SpaceVenture, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. This week, I had that same feeling again.

Because this week’s guests were none other than Aaron Conners, Mat Van Rhoon, and Chris Jones — better known as, respectively, the writer, the 3D artist, and the man himself of the Tex Murphy games.

“Look, prophecies aren’t in my job description. I’m just a humble P.I. trying to make fanboy podcasters’ lives worth living.”

If you for some reason didn’t know, the Tex Murphy games were the stand-out examples of the 90s on how to do adventure games with full motion video that didn’t suck. These are, incidentally, available from GOG, along with the latest instalment that was crowdfunded in 2014, Tesla Effect.

For an hour, the three gentlemen regaled us with the secret of why their FMV games of the 90s — Under A Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive, and Overseer — didn’t, as opposed to other FMV titles of the 90s, suck. (“The FMV scenes should be a reward, not a hindrance.”)

They also talk about the technological achievements of early Access Software — making 256 color games with digitized actors in 1989, when everyone else, including Sierra On-Line, were still making 16 color vector-based graphic games. And there’s even some juicy details about The Poisoned Pawn, a fan-made remake of Overseer that not only has the official stamp of approval from Chris and Aaron, but will also have a novel tie-in written by Aaron himself!

When we were done with the whole thing, Gareth pretty much summed it up in this voice message from our private Facebook chat.

Suffice it to say, at the risk of sounding like a trio of professional brownnosers, we’re quite happy to have had the opportunity to chat with these esteemed gentlemen. And we were doubly thrilled when, a few days later, we received a monologue we had written for the show’s introduction — in a sort of “wouldn’t it be cool if he–? Yeah, but he wouldn’t, would he? Holy shit, he did!” way — recorded by Chris “Tex Murphy” Jones himself.

Behold the whole shebang on the Tubey thing here:

Or, as always, at the bottom of this post, where you will conveniently find links to subscribe to the show as well.

Oh, and we’d be remiss not to mention how our Patreon backers get exclusive behind-the-scenes content — for instance, this week, they hear how we all managed to show up an hour early because Daylight Savings Time fucked with us.