The Last Express

The game operates primarily from a first-person perspective of the story's lead character when they explore the train, with cutscenes being conducted in the third-person. Gameplay takes place almost entirely within real-time, albeit accelerated by a factor of six; the only time when it is not conducted so is when the player's character sleeps at certain intervals and when the player is on the game's pause menu. Events within the game are scripted. Thus, they occur at specific times denoted by the in-game clock.

For example, a character leaving their compartment in order to go to the restaurant car in order to have lunch. , Paris). The player may also fast forward to a later time, up until the current point in the story that they have reached.

The game's story takes place in 1914, between 24 and 27 July, aboard the original Orient Express route between Paris and Constantinople (modern Istanbul), prior to the outbreak of World War I. Much of the game occurs within the train itself - consisting of the locomotive, two baggage cars, a restaurant car, two sleeping cars, and a private car. The plot written for the game, while a fictionalized idea regarding the last journey of the Orient Express in 1914, includes many traditional elements of a murder mystery, including secret plots and deals, lies and personal agendas, as well as featuring notable references to political climates in Europe.

Robert Cath, an American doctor on the run from the police in regards to a murder in Ireland, is invited by his friend Tyler Whitney to join him on the Orient Express. Boarding the train whilst it is moving through the outskirts of Paris, Cath finds Tyler dead in his sleeping compartment, apparently murdered. Dumping the body from the train during the course of the night's journey, Cath assumes his friend's identity and goes to greet the other passengers travelling on the Express. Amongst the passengers he meets several people of interest: August Schmidt, a German arms dealer; Anna Wolff, an Austrian violinist; Vassili Obolensky, a Russian count travelling with his granddaughter, Tatiana Obolenskaya; Alexei Dolnikov, a Russian anarchist and a childhood friend of Tatiana; Miloš Jovanović, a Serbian travelling with a group of associates; and Kronos, a mysterious art collector travelling in a private car with his African servant Kahina.

Mechner founded Smoking Car Productions to create The Last Express. The company was located in San Francisco from 1993 to 1997. At its peak, Smoking Car had sixty full-time employees.

Mechner derived inspiration for The Last Express from Myst and Infocom's Deadline. He saw The Last Express as an opportunity to create a game with a complexity of story and depth of characters comparable to that seen in a film, something he felt he could not accomplish with his games for the Apple II due to hardware limitations. He said of the game's approach to storytelling: There's a built-in tension between making a game that's interactive and has a story. ...

In 2008, producer Mark Netter declared that The Last Express was "a total commercial failure." Shortly before its launch, the sales and marketing department at publisher Broderbund left the company. As a result, the game received very little marketing to support its release. The game's global distribution was divided between Broderbund, GAMEBANK, and its parent company SoftBank Group. However, SoftBank soon exited the game industry and closed GAMEBANK, which resulted in the cancellation of a "nearly finished PlayStation port of Express", according to programmer Mark Moran.

The Last Express achieved sales of 100,000 units by 2000, and failed to break even. Netter noted that, given its $5-million-dollar budget, The Last Express "would have had to be one of the top-selling games of all time" to recoup its development costs. Moran said that it was ultimately one million sales short of breaking even.

In 2000, the Fallout video game series creator and game publisher Interplay bought the lapsed rights and began quietly selling the game as a budget title. A short time later, Interplay went bankrupt; once again, the game went out of print. In 2006, the American subscription-based game service GameTap began offering the game on its network.

On January 14, 2011, DotEmu released the Collector's Edition of the game, which includes the soundtrack, a making-of video and a walkthrough. On January 26, 2011, Phoenix Licensing (the current copyright holder of the game) re-released the game in GOG.com, with all the extras of the Collector's Edition –except the walkthrough– and only in English.