Hi Scott -- I know many of us here assumed that we'd have the pleasure of a new Agatha Christie adventure game every fall, hopefully for decades. At one point, one of the members happened across an ABC Murder box shot that made us very hopeful that the game was being made as an adventure for PC. The ABC Murders is one of my favorite Christie novels -- it's extremely sad that it came that close to fruition before it was shelved.

That's wonderful about the phone message! I've always been curious -- was David Suchet surprised at the amount of dialog that went into a computer game when he voiced Poirot in the Murder on the Orient Express game?

I wasn't actually at the recording, which took place in the UK. I just slipped the line into the dialogue and waited to see what came of it (I did the same thing when we worked on SpongeBob titles, but because of the oddball nature of SpongeBob, it was easier to work the lines in surreptitiously.) What happened was I got a call from the producer at TAC overseeing the recording calling me out, but he wasn't too upset. I think Mr. Suchet took it in good humor as well - when the VO came back there was not only the answering machine message but another message where Poirot gravely intoned to Hastings how saddened he was by my suspicious murder.

By all accounts, he was really amazing to work with. I think his experience recording so many of the Christie audiobooks stood him in good stead when it came to not being overwhelmed by lines. He received an early version of the script several months before the recording, so he definitely wasn't surprised on the day -- but he may have been when he got the initial script. We only had one shot with him, so we had to pack the script with as many possible cover lines as we could think of, a large percentage of which were never used.

I can say it was one of the most satisfying days of my game dev career when the audio came back - we plugged it all in immediately just so we could hear it in context, and it just made such a night and day difference.

I know Murder on the Orient Express is most people's least favorite of the three, but it was certainly my favorite for two principal reasons - the art direction and Suchet.

I love David Suchet as Poirot! He brings such life to the Poirot character, quirks and all!

Thanks Scott!

Well you know your killer will be caught.

Ah, what might have been

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y10/Butcher_ss/g37587i7n2p.jpg

and then there were none was a great game and evil under the sun was the only other adventure game like that, what a shame

I agree that The ABC Murders would have probably been a really good game ,
it is depressing to know that it was put on the shelf .