The Tex Murphy Pre-Kickstarter Campaign

I am very happy about the news! It looks like there will definitely be a new Tex game after all, and any money raised on Kickstarter would be used to make the game better and better. I’ve been lurking on these boards for over 10 years. I think now is a good time to start posting!

There is 8 weeks until May 15, and we have a lot of work to do in that time-frame. Before May 15, we should focus on (A) spreading the word about the fund all over the Internet and (B) getting those who have not played a Tex game to buy and play Under a Killing Moon on GOG. After May 15, the goal will of course be to get people to donate. It’s good that we have 8 weeks for the pre-campaign, because that will give us time to spread the word, and two months is about the time that it would take a new player to comfortably complete the last three games, and some would have time for the first two as well.

I think we can all agree that the best game to introduce Tex Murphy to someone is Under a Killing Moon. While we all pretty much agree that The Pandora Directive was a little better, UAKM is better for newcomers because of the (a) large amount of humor and silliness and (b) no prior knowledge from other Tex games is necessary and (c) because UAKM is the only Tex game that has two cases. The robbery at Rook’s Pawn Shop is encompassed completely by Day One: Cuffing Up Flemm, and has nothing to do with the rest of the game. This is good because it’s a full case, a quite interesting one, has many funny moments, and serves as a great introduction to Tex Murphy and Chandler Avenue. And since it’s about 3 or 4 hours of gameplay, it definitely isn’t too hard, too easy, or too long for a newcomer to play, and they can use to judge if they’re going to like the rest of the Tex Murphy saga. And if Tex fan potentials aren’t ready to spend $10 on UAKM, they can always watch the let’s plays on YouTube. There are actually SIX let’s plays (by different uploaders) of UAKM on YT. I will review all of them to determine the best one to market Tex with, but for now here are the links to all 6:
ClassicLetsPlay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OjaCCgsJQ0
Suraht: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZGIhKJ6ie4
Elanare: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75pZ3rzS ... B8791F54B1
The1Nostalgic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV-HjV257XU
longplayuploader: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbpQxxtH0Bc
Disthron: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81pbluCggDA

Spreading the Word:
Luckily, if you Google Tex Murphy, you’ll get a lot of news stories about the Kickstarter Campaign news and game in development. Most of these articles and comment postings have been quite positive. However, most of the biggest gaming news sites do not mention it yet. Here is a list of the top 15 video game websites: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/video-game-websites
What we need to do is start posting threads on the forums of these websites, informing everyone of the Tex fund, and express exaggerated excitement, such as “I will donate my life savings!”. We should also encourage the watching of the let’s play videos of Day One of UAKM at the very least, the purchase of UAKM on GOG preferably, and the purchase of UAKM, TPD, and TM: O on GOG ideally. We could also explain that not donating to the fund could result in the new game being closer in production values and scope to Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum, but if the funding is successful, it could potentially be as epic as The Pandora Directive in terms of scope, size, and gameplay, and as epic as a AAA 3D game in terms of production qualities (Portal 2, LA Noire, Crysis, etc.).
We should also e-mail the journalists of these sites to inform them of the fund and accompanying YT video, so they hopefully make a news posting about this if they haven’t already. Aside from the previous link to the top 15 video game sites, we should hit all of the relevant sites. Most of the adventure game related sites already know about this, but it doesn’t hurt to keep talking to those forum posters about Tex Murphy and how great the games are. Adventure Gamers and Just Adventure have not posted news stories about this yet. We should definitly hit all of the adventure game sites, as well as the PC game sites. As for languages, we should hit all of the EFIGS sites.
The key will be to not look like spammers or trolls. However, since we have about 54 days for the pre-campaign (the time period before the Kickstarter fund starts), we can spread out the frequency of these posts. Also, if a lot of use help in this “spread the word” campaign, we’ll have multiple people posting, which will include multiple user names, writing styles, and testimonials. The only thing we have to keep in mind is…

Knowing Our Target Audiences:
The forum postings should be unique to the target audience of the website they are posted on. On Adventure Gamers, and other adventure game sites, this should be really easy, since these people know what adventure games are. We can talk to them using the same language we would use here. For puzzle game sites, or independent game sites, this should still on the easy side, but our posts should focus on the puzzle aspects of the games. We could even post on independent film sites and call the games interactive movies. For general gaming sites, especially ones for console and AAA games, this will be a lot harder. We just need to make sure we….

Somehow Define The Tex Murphy Games To Each Audience:
I think a lot of people, especially adventure gamers, will love the Tex Murphy games once they actually play them. For many adventure gamers, the games are on their list of games to play, but they just haven’t bought them on GOG or played them yet. Hopefully many of them will do that in the next two months.
As for people who never play adventure games, many of them don’t even know what traditional adventure games even are. Many of them think the Legend of Zelda is an adventure game, when I’m sure most of us would not call it a traditional adventure game, and instead an action game or an action-RPG. Many of the non-adventure game players think of either Myst type games or Monkey Island type games when they think of adventure games. If they think adventure games are like Myst, then this is really bad because they then may think that all adventure games are boring, have virtually no characters, minimal story, cheap production values, and very hard puzzles that make no sense. If they think all adventure games are like Monkey Island, then that’s more in our favor, but Tex Murphy is definitely not a Monkey Island clone. For those people we should let them know that while Tex is first person instead of third person, it’s fully 3D, with the same immersion as an FPS (or an adventure game like Amnesia: The Dark Decent or Dear Esther), and that the games are just about as funny as a Monkey Island game, yet have a serious underlying story which ties together all of the sillyness, just like Money Island. That’s why we should have them play UAKM first. Pandora has about as many funny parts as Moon, but since it’s a longer, bigger game, proportionally, Pandora is much more serious than UAKM.

As for the other genres, I’m going to brainstorm how we can tell those people how Tex is similar to the games they like… this article may help us: http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,149

Adventure Games: There really is no substitute for Tex that I would say is similar to him in the adventure genre. However, if someone likes Black Dahlia, Gabriel Knight 2, Phantasmagoria, Casebook, or Conspiracies, I would say that would definitely like Tex a million times more!
Puzzle Games: World of Goo, Braid, The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom, Portal 2, etc: We should tell them that Tex is most like Portal 2 in that it takes place in a fully 3D world, uses cinematics and the environment to tell a story, has deep character development, and uses puzzles as it’s primary form of gameplay. Adventure Gamers even cover the Portal games because the “focus {is} on puzzle solving within a narrative framework, generally with few or no action elements.” That is definitely true of both Portal and Tex. Yes, there are huge differences, but the main thing is that Tex solves his problems by using wits, ingenuity, inventory, and object manipulation as opposed to using physics defying wormholes to manipulate a test chamber environment. Tex can also talk, making him a much more interesting character than Chell. Over the course of the Tex games, we also get to know the secondary characters (like Chelsee) as much as we get to know GlaDOS over the course of Portal, but in Tex’s word, the conversations are actually interactive.
RPGs: On these sites, we could just call the Tex games RPGs, and that wouldn’t be a lie. You DO play the role of Tex, so that’s role playing right? Hopefully these gamers won’t realize were actually talking about an adventure game before they become interested in Tex and his world. For those that know better, there is no combat in any of the Tex games (MS aside), but Tex does sometimes fight in the FMV sequences. Tex may not pick up potions, but he does pick up inventory, which is a lot more interesting. How about a real live gieger (sp?), which can violently tear of someone’s throat? Or a bartender who threatens to do the same? That’s it, the conversations! Those are interactive, just like in an RPG. We should focus on the interactivity of the conversations for these gamers. As for what mainstream RPG game Tex most represents… maybe Deus Ex, because they both take place in a dark, gritty, future? Or maybe Quest for Glory? I haven’t played many RPGs myself, so I’m not really sure. Another aspect of RPGs that compare to (some) adventure games are their non-linear stories, and how player choice can impact what happens in the story. This is definably true in Pandora, the Elder Scrolls games, and the Mass Effect games. In ME 2 and 3, you can actually import a previous saved game from a previous ME game so that the story will play out based on your previous actions. The same would be true of Pandora if it was an episodic game with 9 chapters (the 9 playable Days in the game). For example, if you let your client die in Day 3, it can and will impact Day 4 as well as the final outcome in Day 10. RPGs also have a ton of gameplay hours, and the Tex Murphy games do to, especially the harder modes in Pandora and Overseer.
Strategy Games: These games are about strategy, and puzzles are about strategy. I guess the tower defense games like Plants vs. Zombies involve puzzles which needed to be solved with inventory (the plants). However, I think a better comparison would be The Sims. In those games, the player is either playing for the gameplay, for having new experiences with the new expansion content, or for creating their own stories and machinima. In the Tex Murphy games, you don’t entirely create your own story, but (in Pandora especially), you do have a huge impact on how that story plays out, based on your actions. This happens in RPGs too. We could sell Tex to players of The Sims games because Tex is about story, just like the Sims games. Also, the Tex games were created by someone who is currently creating The Sims games!
Action Games: This is a hard one, but there are similarities. If you take an FPS like Duke Nukem 3D or Duke Nukem Forever, it’s part adventure game in the sense that you can interact with the environment just for fun. Playing pool in a Duke game is not a whole lot different from playing the piano as Tex in UAKM, or the Mean Streets arcade game in Gideon’s study in Overseer. Both scenarios involve a quick and fun diversion from the regular gameplay. If you look at Half-Life or Call of Duty, story is important in these games, at least according to the journalists and the players – in actuality, these stories kind of suck when compared to an adventure game, especially a Tex game. I also think that a new Tex game might include some kind of simple arcade type action sequences, such as those found in Telltale’s Sam & Max, Strong Bad, or the type of driving, fighting, and shooting found in LA Noire, so we could mention that in our posts.
So to mainstream websites we could play Tex off as a series that has the them and gameplay style of LA Noire, the puzzles of Portal 2, the player choice of Mass Effect, the story depth of Bioshock, etc. Of those games, I think that only Portal 2 compares to the quality of a Tex game, but Tex is still way cooler.

Reviews & Metacritic:
Reviews for the Tex games have been quite positive over the years. However, none of these reviews appear on Metacritic for any of the games. We should fix that somehow. The Adventure Gamers reviews of the games for example are very positive. The most common complaints for the Tex games in the reviews or in forum postings are related to the technology of the time, playing them on modern machines, and graphics, and that’s we should be sure to…

Dispute Any Irrelevant Negativities About the Previous Games:
Just about all of the complains in any of the Tex reviews were for things that are no longer relevant in the GOG releases, or will not be relevant in the release of Fedora, just because of how much computer game technology has advanced since 1998. For example, many people complain about disc swapping (eliminated in the GOG games) and having trouble running the games on Windows. GOG handles all of this nicely. As for the other complaints, they are for the “awkward interface” or “blocky pixilated graphics” which are two things that won’t be an issue in the to-be-released Fedora. Fedora will hopefully use an engine that has similar controls to a modern FPS, so those players will find it easy to interact with the world. And if not, I’m sure it will be a lot easier to use than the UAKM/Pandora or Overseer engines. I never had a problem with them at all myself, and loved them, but apparently many did not like the interfaces. So when we encourage people to play UAKM, they should actually watch the tutorial video in Pandora (it’s not included with UAKM), and they can do that on YT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u72bKOEqhAw
As for the pixilated graphics, they are actually really good for 1994-1998. Some people think they don’t hold as well up today. Very few 3D games from the 90s hold up well today graphically. Even with no Kickstarter budget, I’m sure Fedora will look nice by today’s standards.
And if people can’t get passed the graphics and interface, then can always watch the game being played on YT. That isn’t the ideal situation, but it’s easy to do, free, and still allows the player to experience the story.

Okay… well, this post turned out to be A LOT longer than I had intended. I also went off on tangents. I don’t have time to proof-read this, so hopefully it all makes sense (it’s very late here). I’m sorry if some parts seem crazy.

In summary, we need to do the following so that the Fedora Kickstarter fund launches successfully on May 15:
1. Spread the word about Tex (game news sites and forum postings)
2. Get people to buy the games on GOG. UAKM first, TPD if they like UAKM, and Overseer if they like TPD too.
3. An alternative to buying the games is watching let’s plays on YT. I’ll watch them to pick the best ones.
4. We need to assign people tasks to complete in this campaign (who wants to do what?)
5. Gather content from videos on YT, record our own from the games, and add in testimonials
6. Think of more ideas that I did not outline above, throw out my bad ideas, keep my good ones, modify ideas as we go along, and never give up!
7. Danger is like jell-o. There’s always room for a little more, and it takes a long time to set up.

Let me know if you would like to join the pre-Kickstarter campaign and help out. Together, we can have a successful campaign and raise over a million dollars! Beating the Odds: A Chameleon to One!