Chris Jones tried to give the gumshoe he plays in his company's latest computer game the steely finesse of a Humphrey Bogart.
But he admits his bumbling creation, detective Tex Murphy, is all too much like himself.The private eye, a 1930s throwback living in the 21st century, wanders through the streets of a post-World War III San Francisco in the latest of a three-game computer series Jones conceived.
The result may best be described as an interactive home movie starring a stumblebum sleuth.
"Rather than creating this superhero guy, we decided we're going to create this vulnerable guy that somehow muddles through," said Jones, a vice president of Salt Lake-based Access Software Inc.
Jones plays the detective in a new $2 million interactive game, "Under a Killing Moon," which took nearly three years to make and is scheduled for release next month.
Contained on four compact disks, the adventure game with viewer options will be the largest computer game on the market.
It will debut at the annual COMDEX convention, which runs Nov. 14-18 in Las Vegas and is billed as the nation's largest. The convention's more than 2,000 exhibits will showcase the latest of North America's $6 billion computer software industry.
Featured in Access' game are movie stars Brian Keith ("Hard-castle & McCormick," "The Parent Trap"), Margot Kidder ("Superman") and Russell Means ("The Last of the Mohicans").
The game unfolds much like a television movie except that at various points the player can pick and choose from a list of character traits and reactions that ultimately determine the direction of the plot.
The scenes were filmed with live actors placed before a blue screen. Programmers later filled in the background with computer-generated imagery.
The game's script is four times longer than a regular movie and has 10 times the amount of dialogue. But the sheer volume of the work wasn't all that gave the principal stars pause before signing on. They had to be convinced that lending their talents to a computer game wasn't beneath them.
"Even showing (Margot Kidder) around, I don't think she was really quite sure of what we were doing," Jones said. "Her visual reference point was Nintendo and Sega" games that were cruder and cartoonish."
Then Kidder was shown the blue screen.
"We sat her basically in this room that has a big blue wall and there's a table in front of her that has this big blue sheet over it," Jones said. "Everything is blue. So she had some way of relating to it because of `Superman,' which did all their work on blue screen."
It also took some convincing to get James Earl Jones, who provided Darth Vadar's forbidding voice in the "Star Wars" movies, to perform the same service as "P.I. in the Sky" - Murphy's mentor and adviser.
"Fat chance," was Chris Jones' response when his Access colleagues begged him to get the actor to play the part.
"His agent said, `No way, no way will we do this, no way,' " Jones recalled. "But it turns out his son had heard of the project and talked his dad into taking the part and doing it.
"So we got James Earl Jones for a reasonable rate because his son wanted him to," he said.
It's circumstances like that which Jones feels make him most like the detective he plays. Serendipity is the key to Murphy's success - and Jones', for that matter.
"He's always stepping in the wrong thing or falling off his horse, basically," Jones said. "But you know in the end, somehow, things fall together and he's able to solve the case.
"Maybe he's a great detective, but everything else he does in the world he would be a disaster at, and it shows," he said.
Access was founded in 1982 by its president, Bruce Carver, who started designing games on a Commodore computer in his unfinished basement. His first game, "Sprite Master," pictured crude images that could be moved around on the screen.
After showing the game to a few people, he decided to invest about $10,000 in a company to develop and market more games. Access' breakthrough came with its Links golf games, designed from blueprints of actual golf courses across the country.
The Tex Murphy series, including "Mean Streets," "Martian Memorandum" and now "Under a Killing Moon," evolved when the staff grew tired of working on a flight simulator game called "Echelon."
"As a break, we said, `Well, let's go ahead and make a movie just as a diversion because we're sick of working on this Echelon product for the last year and a half," Connors said.
The game's sheer size is the reason it has taken so long to complete. In fact, Jones said, it would take nearly 1,800 31/2-inch computer disks to store the entire game.
"We were planning to be the only game on two CDs, and then the dialogue kind of grew and the characters kind of expanded and then we were on three, and then the dialogue continued to grow . . .," said Aaron Conners, an Access technical support employee who wrote the script for "Under a Killing Moon."
Conners eventually was forced to halve the script so it would fit on four CDs. But no problem. Some of the material may be included in the next game Conners and Jones are starting to draft.