One of the things that always struck me as odd was that, unlike other genres that experienced a decline in popularity, Adventure gaming always seemed poised to fully exploit whatever new technology became available. When Under a Killing Moon was released it was absolutely on that bleeding age to take full advantage of the CD medium, hi-res video modes, and 3d environments. Later on Overseer became the first DVD-Rom game, and that made perfect sense. It seems like adventure gaming has plenty of room to advance, to exploit whatever is thrown at it, and yet this hasn't happened in many years. Do you think this will ever turn around?
AC: This issue is irrelevant and will continue to be so until Adventure games again become financially viable. Certainly, if a bunch of Adventure titles were being developed right now with 10+ million dollar budgets, they would be taking full advantage of all available technologies.
It's always been a bit of a curiosity to me that there continued to be these low-tech first person moody sorts of "Myst-inspired" adventures to this day, but adventure games with actual character-oriented stories, and particularly those with humorous themes and bumbling anti-heroes like the Tex series seemed to fade away. Why the double standard?
AC: Myst was an interactive screen saver. Gorgeous, moody, inspiring...but not (in my opinion) a story game. Creating a long, complex, involving story with lots of characters and dialogue is a lot riskier than creating a slideshow of beautiful scenes. You look at Myst and say: "Wow! Those graphics are amazing! I could never create anything like that!" And it's true. You look at Tex Murphy games (or the hundreds of other story games, many of which were truly inferior) and you might say: "I could've come up with a story better than that one! I could write funnier jokes than those! I could act better than that guy!" And it might be true. But, trust me, writing is a lot harder than it may seem. Try writing something sometime and put it out there for people to critique. You'll find out what I'm talking about.
And lastly (and I know you might well not be at liberty to answer this, but just to give it a shot), do you think we'll get the chance to see another Aaron Connors original adventure, and is there a future for Tex Murphy in the gaming world? How do you like working for Take-Two compared to Microsoft?
AC: First of all, Take Two is a game company; Microsoft is a business software company that has produced a console and then bought some companies to make games for it. There are many people at MS who I greatly enjoyed working with, but I doubt MS will still be making games in 10 years.
As for what the future holds for me – after languishing for several years in Microsoft's User Experience department, I've come to realize that I'm more passionate about game design and writing than anything else, including novels, screenplays, etc. I would rather design and write the story for a game about cartoon farm animals than work in any other capacity in or out of the gaming industry. The past year has been very positive as I've had a great chance to prove (to some people) that I can write/design more than just detective adventures for the PC. I don't know if fresh opportunities will present themselves through Take Two or not, but Chris Jones and I remain in close contact and have several ideas regarding future titles which we sincerely hope to realize in the near future. In the meantime, I'm really enjoying my time here at Indie Built and looking forward to whatever the next project is.
