The Pandora Directive is often touted as Tex Murphy’s finest adventure by players and reviewers alike. About 12 months ago, Chris Jones, Aaron Conners, Doug Vandegrift and Mat Van Rhoon sat down and played through the game together over the course of a few days. As the end credits rolled, there was one lasting unanimous sentiment in the room: “Boy, wouldn’t it be great if we could release this game, updated with today’s technology?”
The chuckles subsided, eventually replaced with murmurs of genuine contemplation. Five years ago, this would not have been possible, but thanks to advancements in technology, we knew that once the idea was planted, the idea spread, causing the team to spring into action.
The team in-house at Big Finish has been working hard for the past eight months, painstakingly collecting, capturing, and digitizing all the source materials from the archives using some of the best equipment in the industry. We recently discovered a whole new box of tapes from the Pandora shoot which accounted for over 50% of the game’s primary video content, thus properly completing the collection. Exploring recent advancements in machine learning technology, we’ve been reprocessing the video in marvelous high definition! So far, the results have been extremely promising.
While the video restoration has been underway, Doug (alongside Mat) have been getting up to speed on the latest in game engine tech while also digging into the archives to resurrect the original level designs, with the ultimate goal of faithfully recreating the game environments with modern details.
Given how impactful the game was on even us when we re-played it recently, we have decided to ensure it remains as powerful with a
faithful remaster. Our goal will be to provide players with an experience that mirrors the original game but with a modern interface. We also plan to perform some fine-tuning to ensure we preserve and enhance things that worked well, and cut back/fix things that didn’t work so well (*cough* alien abductor *cough*). But these liberties will be taken sparingly. Our goal is to take what we believe is an already amazing game and scale it up to modern standards while preserving the soul of the original game.
The in-house team currently exploring this project and their associated responsibilities are Chris Jones (production, game design, overseer), Aaron Conners (story, game design) Mat Van Rhoon (remastering creative director, full motion video, CGI, level design, programming), Doug Vandegrift (level design, art), Brian Johnson (art). We also have a number of other Big Finish Games team members, some who had pivotal roles in the original game coming back on board, some who also contributed to Tesla Effect.
