Tex Murphy: Overseer - Development

Development

The game continues the Tex Murphy tradition of using some well-known actors to portray major characters, such as Michael York, Henry Darrow, Richard Norton, Joe Estevez, and Clint Howard.

Overseer was the first game to ship a version developed specifically for DVD-ROM. The package contained two copies of the game, one on five CDs and one on a single DVD. The advantage to the DVD version was the absence of any disc swapping and the higher quality video files used. They were otherwise identical in content.

Initially, Access intended to develop a proper sequel to The Pandora Directive called Trance, but shifted their plan to Overseer in order to take a shorter term contract with Intel, who wanted a game to bundle with upcoming hardware. The choice to use an existing story arose out of the needs of an accelerated development cycle. Never intended as a full-on sequel, let alone the final Tex Murphy game, director Adrian Carr said it was "created solely as a demonstration for a new Intel computer chip." When Intel decided to drop the bundle, Access Software continued development and expanded the interactive areas, and published the finished game themselves.

The cliffhanger ending was intended as a lead-in to a true sequel. Trance, which was later expanded into a trilogy of games, tentatively titled Chance, Polarity, and Trance. However, Access was sold to Microsoft shortly after Overseer's release and the Tex sequels were put on permanent hold. This was due to the merge, the series' declining sales, and the decline of adventure games as a whole. In October 2004, Microsoft sold Overseer developer Access Software and rights to the game to Take-Two Interactive who then renamed the studio to Indie Built. However, in 2005 Indie Built shut its doors. After Indie closed, the rights to the series transferred to a group of former Access employees, among whom was Aaron Conners. Since Overseer, Conners and Jones have tried to give fans some hints as to where the story was headed: these hints included Flash animations and a series of "Old Time Radio" episodes. However, all further animations and radio episodes were cancelled in 2008.

After the closing of Indie Built, Chris Jones and Aaron Conners re-acquired the rights, and hoped to finance a new Tex game by developing casual hidden object games. During this time, they commenced some exploratory pre-development but were unable to generate enough capital to develop a sequel. Chris and Aaron launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the additional money needed to do a "full" Tex Murphy game. The campaign exceeded its initial goal of $450,000 on June 7th; production on Project Fedora began on June 18th.