Tex Murphy: Mean Streets (1989)
Tex Murphy: Mean Streets is a 1989 point-and-click video game made by Access Software and The Code Monkeys.
San Francisco, 2033. Tex Murphy takes a job from a woman convinced her father, a university professor, did not die by accident. What starts as a single suspicious death opens into a pattern: prominent scientists are dying, and someone is working hard to make each one look like something else. Tex navigates the city in a hovercar, calling informants, visiting locations, and piecing together a conspiracy that reaches into the highest corridors of power. The first entry in the series established the hardboiled-future template that would define every game that followed.
Quick answers
What is Tex Murphy: Mean Streets about?
San Francisco, 2033. Tex Murphy takes a job from a woman convinced her father, a university professor, did not die by accident. What starts as a single suspicious death opens into a pattern: prominent scientists are dying, and someone is working hard to make each one look like something else. Tex navigates the city in a hovercar, calling informants, visiting locations, and piecing together a conspiracy that reaches into the highest corridors of power. The first entry in the series established the hardboiled-future template that would define every game that followed.
When was Tex Murphy: Mean Streets released?
Tex Murphy: Mean Streets was released on 31 January 1989.
Who made Tex Murphy: Mean Streets?
Tex Murphy: Mean Streets was made by Access Software, The Code Monkeys and U.S. Gold.
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Explore Tex Murphy: Mean Streets guides
Tex Murphy: Mean Streets in our writing
- Companion guide: Access Software: Tex Murphy and the FMV Detective
A few thoughts on Tex Murphy: Mean Streets
For the shadowy-conspiracy-unraveling-one-clue-at-a-time feeling, The Blue Nowhere delivers a similar pleasure in novel form, a taut procedural about tracking a killer through digital infrastructure.
Detective games that make you piece together the case yourself
Mean Streets drops you into 2033 San Francisco with nothing but a hovercar, some contacts, and a case that keeps opening new doors, and it expects you to make the connections yourself. The Sinking City hands you the same kind of open investigation, Blacksad: Under the Skin wears its hardboiled trench coat just as openly, and Unforeseen Incidents and Rusty Lake Hotel both reward patient, clue-by-clue thinking over reflexes.
Hardboiled detective fiction with a wisecracking voice
Tex Murphy narrates his own case in wisecracking first person, the same voice that runs through the genre's best page-turners. The Complete Sherlock Holmes set the template for reasoning through a mystery in public, Mr. Mercedes turns that instinct against a killer taunting the investigator, The Blue Nowhere tracks a predator through code instead of alleyways, and The Godfather works the same corrupt city from the other side.
Procedural cop shows that solve a new case every episode
Mean Streets structures itself like a detective's case file: a client, a body, and a widening web of suspects Tex has to work through one lead at a time. Law & Order and its Special Victims Unit spinoff run the same lead-to-lead grind, NCIS and The Rookie chase down evidence with a rotating cast, and The Mentalist solves its case by reading the people, not just the clues.
Future-noir detectives working a case technology can't solve for them
Mean Streets imagines 2033 as a place where flying cars exist but murder still gets solved the old way, on foot, door to door. Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor both build future Tokyos where the detective work outpaces the gadgets, City Hunter runs its own hardboiled sweeper through the city's underworld, and Death Note turns the whole city into a battle of wits between investigator and killer.