Private detective Tex Murphy is hired to investigate the murder of a university professor. It turns out that he was one of eight scientists involved in Project Overlord, a mission to remotely control people. Tex soon learns of the deaths of other related figures. Suspects may include the British intelligence head, a surveillance company owner, and the professor's daughter.

Tex's first adventure takes the player through the seedy West Coast world of 2033, a setting that combines futuristic elements with film noir and "hardboiled" detective fiction styles. The game's main adventure portions are icon-driven, with object puzzles less significant than detective deduction and character interaction. Characters are represented by digitized photos.

Mean Streets features dozens of characters to interact with by asking questions or offering bribes. Fights often arise, but a diplomatic approach is more successful with characters whose guilt is unproven. Although it is largely an adventure game, travel between cities involves piloting Tex's Lotus Speeder in a flight simulation section. The game also contains side-scrolling action sequences where Tex has to eliminate a number of enemies before being able to proceed to the destination.

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Part of the Following Group

Tex Murphy series

Merchant	Title	Platform	Price
	Mean Streets	DOS	$44.98
	Mean Streets
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User Reviews

The early days of Tex Murphy, back when he had the slowest car in the galaxy...	Zovni (9429)
Interesting story with mostly tedious gameplay	Ingold (125)
So this is what the future is like	Katakis (37458)
An absolute classic.	Toka (16)

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The Press Says

Techtite	2000		100
Adventure Classic Gaming	Aug 06, 1999	4 out of 5	80
Just Games Retro	Jul 02, 2007	79 out of 100	79
GameZebo	Jun 22, 2009		70
Power Play	May, 1990	53 out of 100	53
Adventure Gamers	May 19, 2002		50

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Trivia

Cover art

The US box art bears a striking resemblance to Blade Runner's original theatrical poster.

Graphics

Mean Streets was the world's first popular PC game to fully support VGA graphics. Not content to stop there, it was also the world's first PC game to also support EGA, CGA, and Hercules graphics modes with real-time quantization and dithering. ("Real-time references the fact that they didn't include pre-converted graphics, which would have taken up twice the disk space, but rather they converted each graphic as it was loaded to fit the graphics mode being used.) Most games that supported VGA didn't support any lower standard at all because it was considered too difficult to convert graphics utilizing 256 colors down to 16 or even 4 for EGA or CGA.

Music

The Mean Streets intro music is also used in a TV commercial. Access plagarised music in the past; see the trivia for Crime Wave for another example.

Remake

In 1998, Access released Overseer which is a remake of Mean Streets.

References

There are many references to TV shows and movies in Mean Streets. For example, turn on the TV in Ron Morgon's Cabin and the sound resembles Star Trek. The robot in Cal Davis's Secret Lab is a reference to Lost In Space. The scene where you meet Larry Hammond is a spoof of a joke in The Bob Newhart Show. Also, the president is called Michael J. Fox, and a final joke refers to the first Back to the Future film he starred in.