Linked Achievements

David Edery (whom you may know as the Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live Arcade) has an interesting post up about CliffyB’s announcement on Gears of War 2’s achievements being linked to things you did the original. 

This got me thinking about a concept that has so far been poorly explored, likely because there hasn’t been a good platform to launch it on until relatively recently.

If you recall the first time you saw Memento, there’s an experience of having an incomplete series of events handed to you.  You’re thrust into the middle of a series of events, and the logic of how you got there, and what’s going on, don’t become entirely clear until the end.  If you’ve ever read the Vlad Taltos series of books in the order they were published, you’ll experience something similar (or for that matter, read any other series of books with a sophisticated plot, out of chronological order).

It would be interesting to reproduce this sensation in game format - by having a series of games with linked content, as David describes.  Instead, however, of treating this content - hidden until certain events in a sequel are unlocked - as an easter egg, use it as the core of the design process.  Imagine a game where the central concept is the corruption of a timeline.  You play through the first game, thrust into the middle of a series of events, not really understanding what’s going on.  By the end of the first game, you have a grip on the immediate scenario, but there are a lot of plot holes.  Playing the second, or third game gives you a similar experience.  However, in each of these games, there are events you can trigger which will have causal effects in one of the other games, altering a timeline either before, or after the position in which you triggered it.  This effect unlocks further content in the other games, forcing you to go back to them and play that content.  The entire experience is understood only through playing all three games, and retracing what you’ve done with significant alterations.  Another alternative would be to run parallel dimensions at concurent timelines, so that the game mechanic would be the same, but instead of altering time, you alter space.

Creating a series of titles like this would be extremely high risk - if one of the titles doesn’t get made, the entire experience is ruined.  This is a risk that nearly nobody in the gaming industry is has so far been willing to undertake - and yet in other formats, notably television, this type of risk scenario is now common-place.  The risk could be mitigated by making the titles digital distributed at a lower price point through something like Xbox Live Arcade, and by using a common infrastructure such that most of the risk is entertained in the first title, and it will cost significantly less to make titles 2 and 3 (assuming a trilogy).

Now if only there were a large games company with significant financial backing that was trying to do something progressive and could afford to entertain some risk…

What Ever Happened to Tex Murphy?

Chris Jones and Aaron Conners?

Backup.  Today’s Zero Punctuation regarding Zack and Wiki features references to several old adventure games (Yahtzee himself being a designer of some very emotive ones).  Among these are two piece of box art that are probably unfamiliar to most people:  Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive.

These two games are are the 3rd and 4th installments in what is generally referred to as the Tex Murphy adventure series.  You play a cynical middle-aged Private Investigator set in post WW3 San Francisco.  The first two games (Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum) are controlled in a reasonably standard side view that we have come to expect of adventure games, with the addition of a flight simulator-esque interface to travel from place to place.  Mean Streets in fact was originally designed as a flight simulator with some adventure elements added in, although the reverse ended up being the result.

The three latter games (Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive, and Overseer) all use live character actors, and most of the game takes place in a first person view of a mostly photo-realistic environment which is accomplished by projecting photographs onto 2D meshes.  These adventure games were hilariously funny, intuitive, and kept you playing until the very end.  The interface was extremely ambitious for the time (Moon came on 4 CDs in 1994, Pandora came on 6, and Overseer on 5 plus an alternate version on DVD, the first game I ever saw do this).  Nevertheless, the game suffered from a variety of mostly technical issues, and were being made during the twilight of adventure game popularity.  Sales were, one can assume, not exemplary.

A year after Overseer was released, the Utah based Studio - Access Software - was acquired by, wouldn’t you know it, my company, Microsoft!  Microsoft was, I assume, primarily interested in Access software’s more lucrative property in Links Golf, because the Tex Murphy series was never heard from again.  This is particularly unfortunate because Overseer ends in a cliff-hanger.  In 2004 Microsoft sold Access Software, now known as Indie Built, to Take Two Interactive, and it became part of the 2K Sports brand, again emphasizing the golf label over the now defunct Tex Murphy series.  Indie Built created a snowboarding game for the launch of the 360, and was then closed by Take Two in 2006, with no public reasons given for the closure.

Chris Jones and Aaron Conners were the designer and writer, respectively, for this phenomenal series, with Jones playing the titular Tex Murphy.  Aaron Conners also made novel versions of Under a Killing Moon and Pandora Directive, which are pretty good for pulp fiction.

Both Chris and Aaron moved with the acquisition to Microsoft to work on projects there, primarily on the Links series and the Amped snowboarding series.  Aaron seems to have moved to 2K Sports following the second sale, and worked under the 2K label until Indie Built was closed.  He has subsequently left the software industry entirely, and has started a contracting company called WordPlay LLC.

Chris on the other hand appears to have left around the same time Indie Built was sold to Take Two, becoming a partner in an new company called TRUGOLF that makes life-sized golf simulators for what I can only assume to be the “I have a vacation house in the Hampton’s” crowd (One can assume that Chris Jones really, really likes Golf).  Both he and Conners still live in Salt Lake City, Utah.
So what’s to become of Tex? Well, Tex has a sizable following over at James LeMosy’s Unofficial Tex Murphy Site.  Last month Aaron Conners left a note on the forums saying that he and Chris have a new game they’d like to make, and are actively searching for a publisher.  If that goes well, they’ll try to use it as a shoe-horn to make the final chapter of the Tex Murphy series, in some capacity.  The story is finished, apparently, and waiting to be told.  It’s been 10 years since we last heard from Tex Murphy, hopefully it won’t be another 10 before he finishes his tale.

If you’ve been negligent, you should try to get your hands on a copy of Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive.  If you copy the contents of the CDs into folders on your hard-drive, you can get DosBox to mount them as separate CD-ROMs, and you can avoid the interruptions you would have encountered at the time of having to switch CDs constantly because the games natively support putting each CD in it’s own CD drive (if you for some reason had 4 CD-ROMs in your PC in 1994).  There’s a lot to learn - both good and bad - in terms of game design from these games, and the writing is extremely rich in both.  I would highly recommend the investiture.