He is characterized as a down-on-his-luck private investigator in a post-nuclear future San Francisco, borrowing tropes from both the film noir and cyberpunk genres.
It was notable at the time as one of the first commercially available games to use 256-color VGA graphics, as well as for its "RealSound" technology that allowed recorded digital audio to be played back without the need for an external sound card.
Martian Memorandum continues the Tex Murphy storyline, but features more traditional point-and-click adventure gameplay, with inventory-based puzzles and branching dialog trees.
Aaron Conners was put in charge of writing duties for the first time, and he re-imagined the Tex character as a down-on-his-luck divorcee, struggling to find work as a private investigator.
It featured real-time 3D graphics that were exceptionally detailed at the time, and was one of the first games to take advantage of systems with 16 megabytes of RAM in order to display higher resolution textures.
Access hoped that Overseer would serve to set up a proper sequel to Pandora and ended the game on a cliffhanger that remained unresolved for over 15 years.
However, due to increased traction in the game's development, as well as significant technological advancements, the project evolved into an official canon continuation of the Tex Murphy series.
Aaron Conners (series writer) came on board, writing all-new content for the game, which would have continued the story after the events of Tesla Effect, and taking place in the year 2050.
While the foundation of the games' story was still centered around the Overseer plot, Tex (with the assistance of St. Germaine) would have revisited various parts of all of his prior cases in order to decipher his true past, and prepare him for an uncertain future.
Several San Francisco landmarks are still present, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower and Alcatraz, but most of them are completely abandoned; most damaged beyond repair from bombs in WWIII.
The futuristic aspect borrows heavily from sci-fi books and films, most notably Blade Runner for its flying cars and impossibly dense tenements.
Tex is a member of the portion of the population born without any genetic defects making him a normal human (referred by in-game characters as a "Norm").
He has remarkable skills of observation (always punctuated with humorous internal monologues); when examining objects or features, he hardly ever misses an important or unusual detail.
Tex is honest and generally a good-natured fellow who suffers from a bad back, a little too much alcohol (Bourbon...neat, preferred) and a few too many blows to the head.
Conners has announced one more novel following The Romanov Enigma, an entirely original story that will conclude the series, calling it "Tex's last ride into the sunset.
To accommodate the accelerated schedule needed for the project, Access shifted their plans to a re-telling of Mean Streets, done in the style of the later games in the series, and stripped away many gameplay elements.
[14] Big Finish updated the main page of their site in April 2009 with an announcement of "Tex Murphy - Project Fedora" as a future release.
[23] The Guinness World Records awarded Longest-running graphic adventure protagonist to Guybrush Threepwood (from the Monkey Island series), after his character was recognized for spanning the period between October 15, 1990 and December 8, 2009 (a total of 19 years and 54 days).
[24] However, in an apparent contradiction to this disqualification, Guinness World Records also awarded Longest wait for a sequel to a point n click adventure to Tales of Monkey Island.
[26] The video was originally a Kickstarter backer incentive for Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure, but was made available to the general public via YouTube.
It also features interviews with many of the series' original creators, including behind the scenes video content from when the Access Software company was formed, all the way through to the Tesla Effect Kickstarter campaign.