statuette. Everything seems great at first and the Countess is promising to pay Tex more money than he has seen in his life. However, everything quickly goes downhill when Tex finds out about a doomsday plot by a deadly cult calling themselves the Brotherhood of Purity. Development and release Under a Killing Moon was one of the largest video games of its era, with a budget of 2 million dollars and arriving on four CD-ROMs (although some material was duplicated among the four to reduce the amount of swapping). The game combined full motion video (FMV) cutscenes with an advanced 3D virtual world to explore. Though action games with 3D environments and a first-person perspective had been popularized by first-person shooters such as Doom, it was very unusual at the time to see these characteristics used in an adventure game. It is notable that the game's 3D graphics did not use ray casting techniques like Doom, but true texture-mapped polygons that allowed players to look in all directions as well as duck, and ran in then-high resolutions of up to 640x480. The designers Chris Jones and Aaron Conners recalled they went to their programmers and said that they wanted the 3D movement of Wolfenstein, but also wanted to look closer to the quality of pre-rendered graphics of The 7th Guest. The game was originally released on October 31, 1994. After its creators reacquired the rights to the series, it was re-released on Good Old Games in June 2009. Reception Sales Following Under a Killing Moons launch in late 1994, market research firm PC Data named it the United States' fifth-best-selling computer game of November. The game's overall sales had reached 400,000 copies before the release of Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive in 1996. At the time, Access reported that it had "broken all Access Software sales records". Critical reviews Under a Killing Moon received universally positive reviews. Contemporary reviews praised the game for its technology and cinematic presentation. In 2002, Adventure Gamers gave it a score of 4.5 out of 5, praising a mystery plot, characters and a classic Tex Murphy humor. According to IGN in 2006, the game has weathered the test of time and called it as one of the best detective games of all time. IGN also called it "a landmark for adventure games" and "a rebirth for the series", using new technology to create a game