Old Man Murray (aka OMM) was a popular computer game news and review site, well-known for its highly irreverent commentary and administered by Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw. Old Man Murray was perhaps the most critical of game criticism sites, and was harsh on games that were overhyped or received strong reviews elsewhere, most notably Trespasser and the King's Quest series. Common targets of OMM news updates included John Romero and American McGee. A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ... Erik Wolpaw was one of the two writers behind the influential and now-defunct Old Man Murray video game commentary web site. ... Trespasser was a computer game loosely based on the Jurrasic Park universe and featured a female protagonist (voiced by Minnie Driver), a first-person viewable player body, and was especially notable for being one of the first games to implement real-time physical simulation of 3d objects in a FPS... Kings Quest IV screenshot Kings Quest is an adventure game series made by the American computer game company Sierra On-Line (currently known as Sierra Entertainment). ... Alfonso John Romero (born October 28, 1967) is a well-known game designer, programmer, and developer in the video game industry. ... American McGee: Selected on November 2002 by PC Gamer as one of the future Game Gods. ...

A major theme in Old Man Murray criticism was the accusation that many new games failed to add any original ideas to the medium. Gabe Newell cited the opinion of Old Man Murray as a factor when designing Half-Life. Old Man Murray often took aim at the conventions embedded within game genres, such as the "bizarre dream logic" required to solve puzzles in various adventure games (most notably Sierra Entertainment titles), or the ubiquity of crates and cowardly scientists as a design element in first-person shooter titles. For example, Old Man Murray's writers devised the tongue-in-cheek "Start-To-Crate Rating System", an "objective" way of determining the quality of a game by simply determining the time an average player must play until seeing a crate. In Half-Life 2: Raising The Bar, Gabe Newell mentions, when developing Half-Life 2, there was such a worry about the crate cliché that événtually thé Valvé Softwaré téam gave up and made a crate one of the first things the player sees and manipulates, figuring this "was the Old Man Murray equivalent of throwing yourself to the mercy of the court." Gabe Newell (born November 3, 1962) is the co-founder and managing director of the computer game development company, Valve Software. ... Half-Life For a quantity subject to exponential decay, the half-life is the time required for the quantity to fall to half of its initial value. ... The most recent logo (Sierra Entertainment) Sierra Entertainment is a computer game developer and publisher active from 1980 to the present. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Half-Life 2 is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game and the sequel to Half-Life, developed by Valve Corporation. ...

In February 1999, the site received a form letter from the United States Postal Service personally signed by US Postmaster General Marvin Runyon. This letter was interpreted as proof that Old Man Murray had been named the official gaming site of the United States Postal Service and, by extension, the United States Government. A previous USPS logo The United States Postal Service (USPS) is an independent establishment of the executive branch of the United States government (see ) responsible for providing postal service in the United States; it is generally referred to within the United States as the post office. ... The Postmaster General is the executive head of the United States Postal Service. ... Marvin T. Runyon (September 16, 1924–May 3, 2004) was an American manager at Nissan and Ford who served as chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority and as U.S. Postmaster General. ... The government of the United States, established by the United States Constitution, is a federal republic of 50 states, a few territories and some protectorates. ...

The Old Man Murray forums were a hotbed of game discussion, as well as other topics. When updates began to slow on the main website the forums remained active. When Faliszek removed the forums, many of the regular posters migrated to a new site called Caltrops.

Old Man Murray was still running as of 2006, but for archival purposes only; the site is no longer updated. The founders of Old Man Murray were continuing to run Portal of Evil and its affiliate website system. Faliszek and Wolpaw are currently employed with Valve Software. In March of 2006, Wolpaw won a Game Developers Choice Award for Best Writing for his contributions to the game Psychonauts. 2006 is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Portal of Evil (POE) is a humorous web directory co-founded by Chet Faliszek (of Old Man Murray) and K. Thor Jensen, and based in the Seattle area (formerly Cleveland, Ohio). ... Psychonauts is a platform game developed by Double Fine Productions, published by Majesco, and released on April 19, 2005, for the Microsoft Xbox, the Sony PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Windows. ...

Appearances in other media

• On the Quake 3: Arena map Q3DM19, the OMM logo is on the back of the antenna lift.
• The Old Man Murray website appears on all the monitors within the game Postal².
• Old Man Murray is thanked in the first level of Serious Sam.

This article or section should include material from Anarki For an overview of the Quake game franchise go to Quake series. ... Postal² is a 2003 computer game by Running With Scissors (RWS). ... Serious Sam is the title of a series of first-person shooters created by the Croatian company Croteam. ...

External links

• Old Man Murray
• Portal of Evil
• Caltrops