Let's have a look at Deus Ex (2000), but to
make things real spicy-like I'm going to have a look at the PlayStation 2
port, which was released in 2002 as
Deus Ex: The Conspiracy.
Deus Ex is fascinating. On the surface it's a well-made
action-adventure with intricate level design and thoughtful writing, plus a
tonne of goofy voice acting. Stylistically it reeks of the 1990s,
specifically The Matrix and Blade - the main character wears sunglasses and a black trenchcoat throughout - but its
themes are timeless. Partially because some issues will always be with us and
partially because the game had such an impact that a lot of modern-day "tech
bros" were influenced by it. They played it when they were kids, or at least
they knew about it. Elon Musk has directly referenced it in some of his
tweets. It casts a shadow.
Deus Ex floats the notion that anti-terrorist legislation passed
in good faith can be used by bad actors to subvert democracy, an idea that was
not new in June 2000 but gained a horrifying relevancy a year later, and over
the years that followed. Deus Ex also extensively features
ECHELON, a US government surveillance programme that was still shrouded in
secrecy at the turn of the millennium. The game's version of ECHELON uses AI to monitor the entire internet
in real-time, which was fanciful in 2000 and is probably not easy in 2023 - if
only because there's so much more traffic - but what else do the world's
governments do with all those TOP500 supercomputers?
Fans of electronic money believe that control of the economy
should be removed from human beings and given over to algorithms, because
the human animal is fundamentally incapable of governing anything without
being influenced by lust, or being led astray by false gods, angry gods, evil gods. That is essentially the key theme of
Deus Ex, and in Deus Ex, as in real life, there is no right or wrong, there is only power.
The spectre of a machine god looms over the world of Deus Ex. One of the game's endings involves the player activating a supercomputer that will rule the world in a just and fair manner, albeit that no-one will be allowed to disagree; another ending involves blowing everything
up and removing control entirely, in the hope that a sufficiently
well-educated population can look after themselves. Neither ending is
presented in a particularly hopeful way. The developers had read
A Canticle For Leibowitz and they knew people.
Deus Ex also posits the idea that the human animal secretly craves
surveillance, because it means that someone cares about us. The game suggests
that we believe in God because we want to believe that someone is looking out
for us, that someone knows we exist, that someone might remember us after we are gone. Today, literally today, hundreds of
millions of people will post intimidate details of their daily lives to a
social media audience of bots, just for the thrill of upticks from strangers
who aren't real.
Something something COVID. And so forth. Deus Ex is also a
mess, with a scattershot approach to sci-fi futurism that misses more often
than it hits, but it's an ambitious mess.
What is the PS2 Classic range? Early versions of the PlayStation 3 could run PlayStation 2 games straight from the disc, because they had the CPU and GPU of a PlayStation 2 buried inside them. It was an extravagant
use of silicon, but Sony was convinced the PS3 would be a massive smash hit, so they spared no expense when they built the console.
Unfortunately for Sony sales were sluggish, not helped by the PS3's steep price, or by competition from the XBox 360 and Nintendo Wii, or by the economic crash of 2008, or by a dearth of decent games. To make things worse the PS3 was sold at a loss - Sony hoped to make a profit from sales of games, films, high-def televisions, multiplayer subscriptions and so forth - and in the final years of the decade Sony lost huge amounts of money.
And so throughout the rest of the PS3's life Sony cost-engineed the console in the hope that it could be sold at a profit. The PS2 components were among the first casualties; the second revision of the PS3 had limited backwards compatibility with the PS2 and later revisions stripped it out entirely.
My PS3 is one of the later, "super-slim" models. The early models had a
dampened, motorised disc insertion mechanism and a touch-sensitive on-off
switch. The super-slim model isn't like that. The on-off switch is a piece of
bendy plastic. The disc eject button is a piece of bendy plastic as well.
The eject button releases a plastic catch
that makes the disc cover spring open, literally with a spring. There's no
dampening, it's just plastic sliding over plastic.
It looks and feels cheap. Because it is cheap. It was built down to a price by a company that had once aimed for the moon. Those bits of plastic are
symptomatic of an age, of the passing of an age.
The upshot of Sony's cost-engineering is that for a few years it was
impossible to play PS2 games on a PS3, but in 2011 Sony launched the
PS2 Classics range, which consisted of a
bunch of PS2 games that ran with specially-tailored software emulation,
available via digital download at budget price. Of roughly four thousand PS2
games only a few hundred were re-released as PS2 Classics, but at
least Sony tried.
A few PS2 games are also available for the PS4 and PS5, but only a few.
Fifty or so, not including The Conspiracy. The big
Final Fantasy and Resident Evil titles have been remastered
and reissued separately, but despite the fact that the PS4 and PS5 are
powerful enough to emulate the PS2 I imagine rights issues and a lack of
consumer demand prevent the more widespread re-release of PS2 titles.
The Conspiracy
Why was Deus Ex ported for the PS2 in the first place? It seems to
have been a trial run for the sequel, Invisible War, which was in
development at the time.
This contemporary interview, in which lead developer Warren Spector was pleased that his team managed
to squeeze Deus Ex into the PS2's 32mb of memory, also implies
that the PS2 market was too big to ignore. The PS2 Classics port
itself was released in 2012, which makes me wonder if Sony hoped it would
ride on the unexpected success of the long-awaited third game in the series,
Human Revolution, released a year earlier.
The original Deus Ex attracted good-to-great reviews in the PC gaming
press and a big clutch of awards. It's still fun today, with
sporadically excellent writing and solid exploration gameplay. Nonetheless I
have the impression that outside the PC world the original Deus Ex doesn't have much of a footprint. It was never a pop cultural thing
on the same level as Tomb Raider or Zelda etc.
The PS2 version also attracted positive reviews, mainly of the "I'm surprised it
works at all" variety, but I can find no evidence it sold in great numbers.
Is it playable on the PS2-but-running-on-a-PS3? Yes, although it gets
juddery at times. The game might be smoother on an actual PS2. On the whole
it's surprisingly faithful to the PC original. It uses the same voice
acting, and as far as I can tell all of the quests and side-quests are
present and correct. The maps have had a tonne of furniture taken out to fit
into the PS2's limited memory - at times it looks almost as crude as
Fallout: New Vegas - and the textures are noticeably
blurrier, but the level geometry, patrol patterns, character AI and so forth
are more or less identical. It's recognisably Deus Ex. It feels as if
the game was converted from the original PC assets rather than rebuilt from
scratch.
The frame rate chugs with more elaborate environments. The main technical
limitation seems to be complexity rather than view distance, so the
game has a lot of large-but-empty maps. Surprisingly most of the iconic
vistas of the PC original - the 747 hangar, the cargo ship, the towering
elevator shafts of Area51 - are kept intact, whereas the more
character-heavy maps are split into sections. The game deviates most from
the PC original in the early levels, which are story-heavy. The last few
maps are very similar.
Gameplay-wise the PS2 version has a few tweaks. In the PC original Agent Denton could
sustain damage to his limbs. If his legs were shot away he was forced to
crawl around. The PS2 version ditches the idea in favour of a single pool of
hit points. I can't say it makes the game any worse. The PC had a grid-based
inventory; the PS2 version is slot-based. Denton can carry X amount of melee
weapons in a single slot, plus four or five ranged weapons and their
ammunition in separate slots, plus medikits and ballistic armour in other
slots etc. The console interface involves a lot of messing around with shoulder buttons, but after a bit of blundering I got the hang of it.
The loading screens use images from the PC version of the game, which stands
out most in a short level near the end set in a petrol station, which has
windows in the PC version but is a solid blockhouse on the PS2. In the two
examples below the computer lab is more or less spot-on, but the huge shaft
has some fog that isn't present on the PS2:
There's something nostalgic about photographic screenshots. That's how video
games magazines did things in the 1980s. They photographed the screen with a
camera. The scuzzy, blurry, jagged look reminds me of those days.
The Conspiracy lets Denton point his guns around in a freehand
manner, which is easier to explain in a couple of images than with words:
But there's no reason to bother, because the game has generous autoaim. Combat was not one of the original game's
strengths. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a massive
improvement in that respect. For the most part combat in the original game
involves mashing the fire button while sidestepping a lot. Or just shooting
people from far away.
Or - if you're feeling merciful - running up to the
baddies and prodding their coccyx with a knock-out prod, because the
locational damage system gives human enemies a weak spot on their lower back, for some reason.
The FMV Denton looks older and thinner than
the in-game model. Was Josh Brolin a thing in 2000? The artist seems to
have used a pre-release version of Denton's costume that appears on the
box art but not in the actual game.
The PS2 version has a newly-rendered FMV introduction and a set of FMV
endings. The cutscenes use the original scripts and voice acting, with some
edits here and there. The
rendered cutscenes are in general an improvement on the in-engine originals. The original opining scene was a visually dull conversation between a pair of talking heads that ruined some of the game's surprises; the remake keeps the participants in shadow.
The in-game character models have more polygons, but as a consequence they look like plastic dummies rather than polygonal approximations of people. I'm not sure it's an improvement.
Anything else? The Conspiracy supports the PS2 keyboard and mouse,
but only on an original PS2. The PS2 Classics version for the PS3 is
controller-only. My hunch is that the code is still present, but it isn't
connected to anything. Perhaps keyboard and mouse support could be enabled
if with the original ROM running on a PS2 emulator. Some of
the music has been given fuller orchestration, but apart from the title
theme it's not really noticeable.
Is there any reason to play The Conspiracy instead of the PC
original? No. The maps are split up, but not in an interesting way. The
first level has a new area with some turnstiles, and a later level set in
the streets of New York adds a linking corridor, but in general the edits feel perfunctory. The rest of the game is more or less the same as the original but
with simpler lighting, less clutter, and cruder textures. At the very least
the fact that it's still recognisable as Deus Ex is a testament to
the quality of the port, given that the PS2 was much less powerful
than a contemporary gaming PC.
Old men are the future.
Facing Worlds
The Deus Ex franchise is a good illustration of the tension between
the PC and console markets. Especially during the early 2000s. By gosh
things were tense back then.
In the 1980s and 1990s PC owners didn't think about games consoles at all. The two markets were completely different. The stereotype was that console games were just a lot of cheap thrills, whereas PC games were big and complex, befitting the expensive hardware.
But the technology gradually began to converge, and in the early 2000s PC owners suddenly became scared that console owners
would pull them into heavy space and squeeze their juice until they had no
more special sauce. Their fingers did so much dancing but it was no use. They were scared, lonely bubbles.
Deus Ex was developed solely for the PC, at a time when the PC and
console markets had very little cross-pollination. Complex, technically demanding, A-list titles such as Mechwarrior 2, Half-Life, Quake, the Wing Commander games etc were developed specifically for the PC, with no expectation that they would be ported to a games console. If there was a console conversion it was invariably inferior. This was great if you were a PC owner, because you were top dog. In the early 2000s if you wanted to play the best first-person shooters, the best role-playing games, the best adventures, or any online games at all, you needed a PC.
And yet publishers were enticed by the console market, because it was ten times larger, and piracy was much less common.
The Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 closed the technical gap, but they still
weren't up the task of running a PC game without major compromises. This raised the question of whether developers should build a game for the PC, and then cut it down for games consoles; or alternatively whether they should build a game for consoles, and then spend money expanding it for the PC.
Or, and this was what PC owners feared, why not develop a game for consoles, and then just port it straight to the PC, button prompts and all?
The PC original, vs the PS2 version. The
maps seem to have been ported-and-modified rather than rebuilt from
scratch.
This is essentially what happened to the next game in the Deus Ex series, Invisible War (2003). It was developed for the original Xbox. In theory a PC port should have been easy, because the Xbox was the most PC-like of the sixth generation of consoles, but it had a tiny amount of memory - just 64mb, shared between
the CPU and the graphics chip, at a time when gaming PCs of the period had
1gb or more.
And so Invisible War had some of the same problems as
The Conspiracy. The large
environments and open-ended gameplay of the original game were abandoned in
favour of a series of small maps punctuated by intrusive loading pauses,
while the interface was simplified even further. The end result apparently sold over a million copies, but it alienated PC owners, and ultimately sales of a million were not much for a console title.
To make
things worse Ion Storm's new Thief game, Deadly Shadows,
had exactly the same problem. In both cases a PC original notable for its mixture of expansive environments and huge maps had been followed by a console-optimised sequel that seemed like a technical step backwards.
My recollection is that the one-two punch of Invisible War and
Deadly Shadows sent a chill wind throughout the wider PC gaming
world. Can a one-two punch generate a chill wind? I suppose it can. That
metaphor actually works, how about that. The two games were a sign that the
PC had become an afterthought, and that major games would never take
advantage of its strengths again. Of course PC classics such as World of Warcraft
and Minecraft and Half-Life 2 and Crysis were still to
come, but there was a real sense of alarm at the time.
The PC still had a huge technical edge over consoles, but for how much
longer? If PC games were just ports of console originals, why should ATI or
NVidia bother to invest money in super-advanced PC graphics cards? What was
the point of the PC's technical superiority, if developers were forbidden
from exploiting it? If games were developed for the same hardware
specification, wouldn't they just become homogenised? And so forth.
Invisible War met with a tepid reception, after which the Deus Ex series went into
hibernation. An attempt to make an action game set in the same universe was
caught up in the collapse of Ion Storm. The resulting project was eventually
released by Eidos as Project Snowblind, a simple first-person-shooter
which attracted good reviews but quickly fell into obscurity. I haven't
played it. The franchise seemed to die off at that point, but in the second half of the 2000s eventual rights-holders Eidos Montreal were put to work on an official sequel. Technically a prequel,
set before the events of Deus Ex.
Production of Deus Ex: Human Revolution stretched on for several
years, but Eidos had faith in the project. Shortly before release an early demo of
the game leaked to torrent sites, which could have been a disaster, but the
leaked build attracted positive press for the quality of its gameplay and
writing. HR was eventually released in 2011 to excellent reviews
and strong sales.
It even managed to pick up a brand new generation of fans; when the
Deus Ex games are mentioned on internet forums the ensuing
references tend to be split 50:50 between soundbites from the original game
and from HR. A 50:50 mix between "what a shame" and "I didn't ask for
this" and "a bomb" and "you can dance if you want to". HR didn't have the same impact or
influence as the original, because the competition was much stronger in 2011 and 2012, but I
like to think that most people remember it fondly.
As with Invisible War it was developed specifically for games consoles, specifically the PS3,
but by 2011 console development had been polished to a fine art. The PC version was a straight port of the
console original, with irritating loading pauses and a plethora of L-shaped
"streaming map data from disc" corridors, but the storyline, gameplay, and
striking visual style were good enough to camouflage the game's technical
limitations.
I've covered Human Revolution elsewhere. It doesn't have the
same operatic scope as the original, and the plot suffers from the absence of a second or even third act, but it's still an exciting action game with an underlying sense
of horror that comes through more vividly on account of its smaller scale.
The general PC/console schism eased off at around this time. It took essentially the whole of the Xbox 360 / PS3 generation for developers to
get the hang of making HD games. Costs ballooned. But on the positive side the idea of locking developers to a certain platform by making the hardware impenetrably weird died a death. The technical potential was
meaningless if no-one knew how to use it effectively and if developers were unwilling to spend money exploiting it. And because the PC
had been around forever, and so much media was developed with desktop
computers, it made sense to build the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One around the
PC's technical architecture. Thus both the PS4 and the Xbox One were essentially little PCs masquerading as games consoles. They even used essentially the same CPU, an eight-core x86-64 unit made by AMD, derived
from the company's laptop chips.
It wasn't necessarily a triumph from the point of view of PC owners. The
PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were still less powerful than a typical gaming
PC, despite using the same underlying hardware, and despite the shared
architecture they still had different firmware and were incompatible with
each other. Furthermore there were still lots of half-hearted PC versions
of console originals, generally featuring spartan options
menus, cut-down graphics settings, or unalterable control schemes. The PC version of
Batman: Arkham Knight (2015) was so poorly-optimised it had to be
withdrawn from sale. But on the positive side the underlying philosophical differences that might once have made PC
gaming a dead-end no longer applied. The hardware had converged, with the PC acting as essentially a preview of the next genereation of games consoles.
The fourth game in the Deus Ex series, Mankind Divided, was
released in 2016 for the PC, PlayStation 4, and XBox One. It had large-scale
environments and detailed graphics across all platforms. Sadly the sales
figures were not to Eidos' liking, and the series became dormant after that,
as did Eidos Montreal. Divided was apparently developed as the
first part of a trilogy, but the abrupt ending and unsubtle use of
microtransactions annoyed reviewers, and perhaps the
gaming market had tired of the downbeat bleakness of the latter-day
Deus Ex games.
As of 2023 the series is in hibernation. It requires a lot of investment to
keep going. The games are a mixture of stealthy action and
role-playing adventure in a finely-detailed future world, with lots of voice
acting, all of which has to be localised, which isn't cheap. At the same
time the basic concept is too cool to die, so I imagine
Deus Ex will return at some point.
The irritating thing about the franchise from a console point of view is
that each of the four main entries was released for a different generation
of hardware, so if you want to play them on the original machinery you need to
own a PlayStation 2 for The Conspiracy, an original Xbox for
Invisible War, a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 for
Human Revolution, and a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One for
Mankind Divided.
And a Nintendo Wii U for the subtly different Wii U version of
Human Revolution. In this respect PC owners have it easy, because
even the first game will run with modern versions of Windows, although a lot
of people choose to run the original with
this replacement launcher.
The Need to Be Observed
But what about Deus Ex? Does it hold up? Is it any good? Was it ever
any good? The answers are "with allowances for age, yes, and yes" in that
order. To an extent its thunder has been stolen by the likes of
Fallout and Mass Effect, which have similarly detailed
worlds packed with side-quests, but Deus Ex is still
impressively open-ended for such a fundamentally linear game. The maps are well-designed, the music is fun, the worldbuilding has aged in an
interesting way, and the writing is occasionally clever. The characters are
all stereotypes, but they're charismatic stereotypes. The scattershot
approach to sci-fi futurism has more misses than hits, but the hits are
sometimes uncanny.
What is Deus Ex? It's a first-person science fiction
action-adventure game with stealth infiltration and role-playing elements.
It was developed by Ion Storm, a short-lived company that was formed in the
late 1990s by Id Software's John Romero, with money raised from the
success of Doom. The company's first
release, Daikatana, was an infamous disaster, but Deus Ex sold well enough to keep the company afloat for a
few more years.
The lead developer was a chap called Warren Spector, who had worked on the
classic System Shock while employed at Looking Glass
Studios. When that company folded he led a bunch of developers over to Ion
Storm. Contemporary reviews of Deus Ex often mentioned
the System Shock connection, pointing out that the
freeform gameplay of Deus Ex felt like an evolution of
the more constrained System Shock. Some of the same people
later went on to make the Bioshock games.
The three
franchises - System Shock, Deus Ex,
and Bioshock - are highly regarded nowadays. Partially
because they were well-made and partially because they were unlike
anything else at the time. Bioshock in particular was released
at a low point in the history of story-based action games, a time when
military shooters tended to have a completely
linear single-player campaign with no diversions at all. It was released at a time when the market had become fixated
on playtime. Games were suddenly measures in terms of the hours needed to
finish them, as if they were animated Kindle books, not interactive adventures.
His vision is augmented
There are also mild role-playing elements. Throughout the game J C Denton
gains skill points, which can be used to enhance his powers. He can also
install augmentation canisters that give him a permanent super-ability,
not unlike the special traits in Fallout. As a result the game has a
certain amount of replay value, because the player can make Denton a
lethal weapon in one playthrough, or a super-jumping-swimming man who can
leap over fences and swim past the enemy in the next.
Some skills are more useful than others. Back in the day the swimming
skill was infamously pointless, because the game has very little water, but for my playthrough of The Conspiracy I decided to max
it out. Thus I managed to explore every nook and cranny of Area 51's water
cooling system. I can't say it made me happy, but at least I had that
option.
Part of Deus Ex's genius is that the level of player choice is
maintained almost all the way throughout the game. The developers went to
great lengths to accommodate the possibility that the player might do
something bizarre. At one point our hero can kill a major character in a
way that would be unlikely to ever arise during the course of organic
gameplay, but the other characters react to the new storyline branch as if
it was perfectly normal. At least one mission is designed in such a way
that the player can fail without realising it was possible to succeed, an
idea that was also used in Human Revolution.
Alas the depth falls off towards the end - the last levels devolve into
simple press-the-button mazes - but for the first eighty per cent or so of
its runtime Deus Ex feels like a living adventure. I'm
old enough to remember when 8-bit games such as The Hobbit and Valhalla were touted as interactive movies,
but Deus Ex was really the first game that cracked it.
Very few action-adventure games before Deus Ex combined a
complex, branching storyline with memorable characters and a deep,
well-written plot. Thief: The Dark Project (1998) came
close, but it had a smaller scope.
Incidentally Deus Ex takes place in an exaggerated version
of the real world. I mention this because the basic idea sounds a lot
like Metal Gear Solid, but the two franchises are very
different. Solid is an over-the-top fantasy set in a
hallucinatory alternative reality, whereas Deus Ex is much
more sensible. Tone-wise it's a little bit like one of those dark-and-edgy
1990s comics, like Button Man or Transmetropolitan. Not real
life, but an exaggerated shadow of real life.
Now, Deus Ex isn't magic. The player is powerless to alter
the general thrust of the plot. If the story was mapped out as a flowchart
the player's actions would only amount to brief deviations, but the game is
nonetheless a masterclass in mixing a strong central storyline with the
illusion of player freedom. At one point Denton has the option of leaving a
key character to die, or fighting to save that character's life; as with a
similar mission in Human Revolution the outcome doesn't
affect the plot at all, but the game goes out of its way to remind the
player of their choice later on. On replaying the game I was struck by the
amount of times the developers second-guessed me, giving me exploration
bonuses when I explored what appeared to be dead-ends. It really felt as if
the developers were ahead of me, beside me, a part of everything in my
world etc.
You Will Have Your God
What separates Deus Ex from other, similarly well-written games
is its themes. It has them! And some of them are interesting. Most games
don't even have themes. They have plot, events, but nothing underneath, no depth. For all their strengths, neither System Shock nor
Thief had much to say about the human condition. Those games had
a little bit of backstory, but no themes.
In contrast Deus Ex has themes, interesting themes that still
resonate. They aren't original, but at least the game has them. Did we
invent God because we're terrified that no-one is watching us? Are human
beings fundamentally ungovernable? Is the human animal a commodity? Do
people have souls? Is it our destiny to make ourselves obsolete? Do we want
to be sad, lonely bubbles, or happy campers? Is humanity the sum of its culture, or just a genetic
template, one of many?
Themes give a work of fiction meat. The X-Com games have a
simple storyline, but lying underneath the surface is the question of how we
might fight off an alien invasion without becoming indistinguishable from
the aliens themselves; the first game in the series explored this by
turning the player's soldiers into identical, faceless, armoured tanks, the
later games were more explicit. Without that
element X-Com would be just a set of mathematical equations
and cool designs.
Unfortunately Deus Ex is overstuffed. Human Revolution handled its themes more deftly,
and in greater detail, because it had a narrower focus. The two games are
also tonally very different, much like the split
between Half-Life and its more world-weary sequel.
Deus Ex was released eighteen months before 9/11. It posits a
world in which conspiracies are mysterious and dramatic, and societal
collapse is exciting, because for much of the game's target audience in the
1990s life was relatively sweet. Terrorism and warfare were abstract things
that happened to other people on the far side of the world.
There was poverty in the United States in the 1990s, but very few
nine-year-old New Yorkers had to
scavenge through huge tips of rubbish, day after day, looking for bits of plastic that could be sold to a
recycling business. When I was eleven years old I don't recall
being handed a rusty old AK-47
and told to kill a bunch of people in the next village along, unlike my
contemporaries in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Who are mostly dead now. Whatever problems I had
were minor in comparison to the real actual problems faced by my peers in
foreign lands.
By the time Human Revolution came out, ten years after 9/11, the
baroque conspiracies and abstract philosophical questions of the original
game seemed quaint, out of touch, the stuff of teenage dreams. My
recollection is that the postmodern ideas that seemed so exciting in the
days of Metal Gear Solid 2 just felt offensively shallow in the
light of an actual economic collapse and real misery. In the 2010s kids in
the west still didn't scavenge through tips of rubbish or serve as cannon
fodder, but a tiny tiny bit of the scary outside world had touched us, and
all of a sudden clever points about the fourth wall and metanarratives
didn't seem all that clever after all.
And on a prosaic level it's hard to think of Deus Ex without
thinking of a flood of internet jokes that appeared in the years that
followed, viz the infamous Malkavian Mod, which tweaks the dialogue
so that the game becomes a work of dream-like surrealism:
But the creators of Deus Ex had no idea that
real-world events would overcome the game so quickly, and it remains an
entertaining political thriller, although the writing is often exposition-heavy. I remember being impressed with the first
level until the very end, at which point a terrorist leader delivers a
multi-paragraph speech about taxation and the Trilateral Commission that feels
like excerpts from a Noam Chomsky essay. It's not that the character's points
are bad, it's that the dialogue doesn't feel like something a real human being
would say, especially not a man facing certain death. A similar thing happens
in a later dialogue with a supercomputer who suddenly starts using parentheses
mid-sentence. It might be excused as characterisation, but in my opinion it's just clunky writing.
And of course the voice acting is infamously iffy. Jay Franke is perfect as J
C Denton. He delivers everything in a flat monotone but manages to convey a
mixture of naive idealism, cynicism, and underlying decency. He also has a
good line of deadpan humour. He is not famous but will live forever because of
an afternoon he spent in 2000 reading out "my vision is augmented" and "a
bomb" and "sticks and stones" and "I have to drop something" and "I like to make a silent takedown" etc. The other actors aren't in
the same league, partially because some of them were the developers,
although former Id Software ideas man Tom Hall's turn as the menacing Walton
Simons isn't bad.
Cliff Stevens as chief baddy Bob Page delivers his lines with gusto, but feels
tonally out of place, although it's hard to dislike his performance. He gets
some of the best lines, including "jump! you can make it!", which is hilarious
in context. Uniquely of all the cast he was brought back for
Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, where his
toned-down performance was much more appropriate.
The developers went to the trouble of hiring Chinese-American people to voice
the incidental Chinese characters, but they seem to have hired
Chinese-American friends of the development team rather than professional
actors, with results that would have seemed iffy even in the 1970s. The French accents are ropey as well, but I'm not being paid by the
French government to boost France's image in the UK so I don't care.
One of the early levels involves a character called JoJo Fine, a pimp who is
written as a stereotypical 1970s blaxploitation character. And he's called
JoJo Fine. He's voiced by an African-American voice actor, but perhaps mindful
of racial sensitivities the character model is white, which feels worse,
because it implies that the developers knew the character was a stereotype but
didn't have the time or inclination to rewrite the dialogue.
The New York-set parts of the game remind me of those 1980s films set in
Detroit or Chicago where the street gangs had an implausibly diverse mixture
of anglo, latino, and African-American heavies, always led by the Anglo-Saxon
Michael Ironside or Henry Silva, because the producers didn't want to be
accused of bigotry, with the unintended consequence that the casting director
must have been told to avoid black actors in the name of anti-racism.
And as with Human Revolution the female characters are a mixture of prostitutes, hostages, receptionists, and sneaky traitors who lie a lot. The most powerful female ally dies before the game begins; her daughter delivers some exposition but doesn't do an awful lot to help Denton. The implication that full-body augmentation might completely eliminate physical gender is never explored. Even the disembodied computers are portrayed as male. Human Revolution featured a soldier who appeared to have voluntarily had his genitals removed in order to be more effective in battle - the game didn't dwell on it - but Deus Ex doesn't even raise the possibility.
Is a penis useful in combat? It's an effective weapon of terror. If there was a way to use it as a melee weapon - perhaps with a bayonet attachment - I imagine the IJA would have investigated the possibility. I'm digressing here.
The original game's engine supported reflections, whereas for [insert
technical reason here] Human Revolution - despite coming out a decade
later - did not.
But when the writing works, it works well. Pictured near the top of his post
is an optional encounter with an artificial intelligence called Morpheus, who
has the ability to stalk everybody's Facebook timeline at lightning speed.
Except that Facebook didn't exist in 2002. Microsoft Firefly? Usenet?
Morpheus delivers an info-dump on the desirability or otherwise of
surveillance, but it's a thoughtful, well-written infodump that has aged well.
The game also features a hulking UNATCO agent called Gunther Hermann, pictured
above, who is in theory a dumb heavy, but the writing gives him pathos, and
ultimately he comes across as a tragic figure. Technically he does nothing
wrong during the game - he is UNATCO's equivalent of Animal Farm's
Boxer - and in the end his bosses throw him against Denton in what turns out
to be a hopeless fight, just to get rid of him. Denton's immediate boss, a
chap called Joseph Manderley, could also have been a simplistic villain, but again
the game portrays him as an unfortunate victim of the powers that be, a
potentially decent man put in an impossible position.
And some of the sci-fi ideas are still interesting. The Hong Kong map features
acoustic sensors that alert the police to gunfire, which sounds obvious now,
but was cutting-edge in the real world in the late 1990s. The game features a
technology that resembles the replicators of Star Trek, capable of
manipulating objects on an atomic scale and therefore constructing almost
anything, but the presentation is far more realistic; whereas the replicators
of Star Trek were just used to make food, the Universal
Constructors of Deus Ex are presented as the final machines of
singularity theory, capable of transforming human society and possibly human
beings themselves beyond recognition.
The Conspiracy
Deus Ex takes place during the middle of the twenty-first century.
The United States has been through rough times; an earthquake in the 2030s
devastated California, after which several states declared independence. A
civil war brought the States back together again, but the upshot was an
incredibly harsh national government that retained dictatorial wartime powers.
After the civil war the US was hit by a new threat, a lethal, incurable virus
called The Gray Death. The early symptoms resemble influenza - the
developers seem to have modelled it on memories of the Spanish Flu pandemic -
and the only treatment is a vaccine called Ambrosia, which temporarily
arrests the symptoms. Supplies of the vaccine are heavily rationed.
At the outset of the game a terrorist organisation, the
National Successionist Forces, have attacked shipments of the Ambrosia
vaccine in order to distribute them directly to the people, or at least that's
what they claim. Similar actions are apparently being conducted by terrorist
organisations all over the world. In response the government of the United
States has asked UNATCO, the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition,
to conduct operations on US soil. You are J C Denton, UNATCO's newest recruit. The game begins with your first day at work. You join your brother, Paul,
who is a star employee but has been criticised in some quarters for an overly cautious
approach.
This is one of the game's most spooky moments. The maps are dotted with
news terminals that mostly just deliver background fluff - but suddenly
one of the terminals addresses you directly. And then nothing happens.
Just ambient noises. It's disconcerting.
Technically J C Denton is your codename. At the beginning of the game you give
yourself a real name, which is used occasionally in emails, but most people
call you J C. The original plan was for J C to be playable as a man or a woman, but the developers
didn't have time to do all of the voice acting twice. You can choose Denton's
complexion, but he has a single standard voice.
I don't want to spoil all of Deus Ex, but it doesn't take long
before J C Denton smells a rat. His work colleagues at UNATCO are
bloodthirstly psychopaths who seem more intent on building up a bodycount
than actually doing good, and before long he discovers that that the NSF's
arguments have worrying grains of truth. Ambrosia really is being rationed,
and the powers that be actually are using it as a tool of political control.
Ironically the initial conspiracy in Deus Ex is actually less
outlandish than some of the claims floated by COVID conspiracy theorists
today. Deus Ex has a nanomachine virus, and computer-brain
interfaces, but it doesn't suggest that either of them could be used to
directly control people's minds. The game implies that its billionaires
simply don't care about the great mass of humanity and have no use for them
except as a means to an end.
About a third of the way through the storyline Denton finally decides that
UNATCO is rotten to the core. It's the biggest instance of railroading in
the game, although there was apparently a plan to have the player remain
with UNATCO throughout; in the end the developers realised that the amount
of work required to make it flow properly was prohibitive, so they dropped
the idea.
As a work of prophecy Deus Ex has the two-steps-forward, one-step
back approach that affects an awful lot of near-future sci-fi. In the world of
Deus Ex China is the last bastion of freedom, because Europe and
the United States have been infiltrated by ancient conspiracies, whereas
Chinese communism is incorruptible and happy with the idea of free
trade. This aspect has not aged well. Hong Kong is a lawless territory largely untouched by the mainland,
which again has not aged well.
Deus Ex is also one of those sci-fi visions where the creators overestimated the
pace of brain/machine interface and AI development while underestimating the
convergent multi-functionality of smartphones. J C Denton has a smartphone built into his brain, but the physical PDAs
of Deus Ex are less advanced than actual late-1990s PDAs, and the
security cameras are larger and clumsier than actual real-life security
cameras of the period.
The computer terminals seem to be inspired by a mixture of the 20th
Anniversary Macintosh and those ergonomic two-part keyboards that were briefly
fashionable in the late 1990s:
Deus Ex takes place in a future world where optical media has made a
comeback, backlit keyboards never took off, and inch-thick PDAs will only
ever have enough space to store a single text message.
On a political level some of Deus Ex' underlying themes, and the
details of its nested conspiracies, owe more to the 1930s than the 1990s, as
if Warren Spector had grown up with The Shape of Things to Come and
The Jungle rather than for example The Turner Diaries or
The Anarchist's Cookbook. The game's central conflict pits
authoritarian totalitarianism versus two competing visions of people's
government, as in the real-life conflict between the various political -isms
of the mid-century, against a background of a new Great Depression. None of
the endings are unambiguously upbeat but there is an underlying faith in H G
Wells-style one-world government.
At the same time one character unironically champions the right to bear arms
as a bulwark against oppressive government, and there's a faint 1990s
libertarian streak running through some of the politics. The game doesn't have
a problem at all with the NSF's use of weapons in pursuit of its political
goals, and another character expresses a negative opinion of the European
Union, which in a modern-day work of fiction would result in that character
being killed, but in Deus Ex nothing happens.
Despite its conspiracy-dense plot he game totally ignores the JFK
assassination and the moon landing hoax, two things that were very fashionable
in the 1990s. JFK is mentioned briefly in one of the later games, but not the
original, and the moon landing hoax doesn't figure at all. Presumably because the
game was originally going to end in an actual moonbase on the actual moon.
And perhaps for reasons of taste religion is almost entirely absent. I have
the impression that for the typical middle-class North American progressive
person of the 1990s religion was not a factor, just as it was not a factor for
H G Wells. From their point of view The West had outgrown religion, and only foreign people still believed in God, and they
were far away and unimportant, although you weren't supposed to say that because it would be
offensive.
The existence or otherwise of the human soul is one of Deus Ex's themes, but even the later games avoid commenting on religion, perhaps for the best.
Human Revolution comes closest to openly stating that the human
animal is just meat, and that our brains are just meat, and there is nothing
more than meat.
On an economic level the 1990s was a particularly good decade for the United
States. Its geopolitical enemies had been vanquished or constrained, leaving
the US with the world's most powerful military, the world's biggest cars, the
best toys, the most spectacular films, the surliest teenagers, the best
television, the only internet, a Space Shuttle that mostly worked, Pamela Anderson, etc,
all of which the US graciously shared with the rest of the world. But the good times weren't apparent until a few years later. The 1990s
looks like a paradise now, but at the time things weren't so clear-cut.
There had been a global recession in the early 1990s. It didn't last, but what
if it happened again? The West continued to haemorrhage manufacturing jobs.
The dot.com boom was great for a small number of talented coders, but it was a disaster if you worked in a record shop. The rise of
globalisation produced pushback, and in the 1990s it
dawned on an awful of young people that their career would probably consist of
a series of temporary jobs that didn't pay well with a future living in bedsits
forevermore. The world of Reality Bites and American Beauty and
Fight Club - in which working a full-time job in an office is portrayed as the worst thing ever, and people can earn enough to live in a major city by DJing and selling paintings - that was romantic at the time but nowadays seems
alien. What's so bad about having a job?
And economic booms do not make for good drama, so the general tone of comics
books and films was dark and edgy back then. It's easy to forget, but the
simple jingoism of Independence Day was unusual in 1996. That's one of
the reasons it was so popular. Instead, action thrillers of the 1990s often
had a rogue element of the US government as the enemy (as in
Enemy of the State, or Mission Impossible, or some of the Jack
Ryan films), or the US armed forces were portrayed as hot-headed incompetents
(as in e.g. Godzilla or The Rock), or at the very least the
military was misguided (as in Crimson Tide) or up to no good (Courage Under Fire, Rules of Engagement). Underlying an awful lot of thrillers of the
period was the idea that the US government was fundamentally a good idea, but
that something had become perverted further down the chain of command.
Deus Ex leans in this direction. Whereas post-9/11 conspiracists tended
to portray the United States as a global bully, pre-9/11 conspiracists were
much more insular. In their mind the United States was conspiring against its
own citizens. Selling its own citizens out to the United Nations, or even to
aliens, as in They Live or The X-Files. There were no credible
external threats, so conspiracy theorists became convinced that the US
government itself was the enemy. The FBI's heavy-handed actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco did nothing to calm things down.
And so in 1995 ex-soldier Timothy McVeigh blew up a US government building in
Oklahoma, convinced that he was the good guy. The X-Files ran with much
the same idea for several years afterwards, but I like to imagine that
after 9/11 the idea that the US government was trying to turn its own citizens
in into food for aliens fell out of fashion. Whether because it was manifestly
untrue or simply because it felt old-fashioned, I know not.
After 9/11 the
conspiracy narrative was no less batty, but it became more concrete, more
plausible, less concerned with secret societies, more globalist. It grew up, in much the same
way that post-Saving Private Ryan action films of the 2000s were
more grounded in reality than action films of earlier decades. In the 2000s there was a
pan-cultural shift to verisimilitude, encompassing video games and pop
culture, that is outside the scope of this essay, but suffice it
to say that the original Deus Ex preceded it. There's no attempt whatsoever to explain how Denton can carry a rocket launcher, a machine gun, a shotgun, a stack of hand grenades, a sword, a stack of medical kits etc all at the same time. Or how he can survive rocket blasts to the face. It's just not a factor. The game predates the fashion for relatively realistic inventories.
The game's other political idea, that the Constitution of the United States is
sound but that the government has been perverted by a mixture of internal
corruption and sinister externalities, is of course as old as the hills.
During the lifespan of the United States the sinister externalities have
included the British, other Americans, the Chinese, Irish people, Catholics,
Germans, Japanese people, Jewish people, Communists, women, organised labour,
Nazis, bankers, intellectuals, Liberals, Dr Seuss, Al Gore, young people,
Pamela Anderson etc.
But didn't Pamela Anderson have a fling with the Wikileaks guy? Perhaps she is
the enemy after all.
The second thread running through conspiracy narratives in the 1990s was the implication that the conspirators were simultaneously super-competent and also really dumb, as in Capricorn One; that they were competent enough to make people vanish without trace but stupid enough to leave obvious clues lying around.
Deus Ex isn't quite
this nutty. The game implies that the overriding conspiracy isn't particularly
sophisticated, and that J C Denton arrives on the scene at a point when the
anti-conspiracy forces have already done a tonne of groundwork. And I suppose
technically he doesn't uncover the core conspiracy, or bring it to wider
attention; he just blows it up. The game never gives the player the option of
simply presenting Denton's findings to the US government and letting them sort
it out. The original plot apparently included this possibility, but later revisions cut out the role of the US President, with the result that in the final
game President Mead comes across as a distant figurehead who may or may not be
aware that his government has been subverted. He appears very briefly in the opening cutscene but never again.
Landline telephones will still exist in France in the middle of the
twenty-first century.
The game is famous for its dense worldbuilding. One early news story uses the
word "meme" at a time when very few people who were not fans of Richard
Dawkins were aware of it. One of Denton's augmentations is a miniature robot
drone, which seems unexceptional now but was heady stuff in 2000. One of the baddies uses a drone to surveil Denton as he infiltrates a cathedral. My
recollection is that drones seemed to suddenly become "a thing" in the
mid-2000s, and it's surprising how much sci-fi from only a few
years earlier doesn't mention drones at all. I learn from the internet that
the US Federal Aviation Authorities approved their use in 2006, at which point
the floodgates opened.
Ironically the main sci-fi idea - that of body modification - hasn't dated
nearly as well. Roadside bomb attacks during the War on Terror brought
artificial limbs back into the news in the 2000s, but as of 2023 the idea of replacing or
at least augmenting fully-functioning arms and legs with mechanical devices is
still pie in the sky. Cosmetic surgery is very popular, and perhaps if there
was a device that could give people toned muscles and a healthy six-pack it
would catch on, but I just can't see large numbers of people having
their arms and legs replaced with servomotors.
Denton himself has a more advanced form of augmentation. He's part of a new
breed of human beings who are augmented with nano-machines that can form and
reform inside his body. The game begins with Denton having an awkward meeting
with the agents he has been tasked to replace, who have visible mechanical
augmentations. They are understandably nervous that their time is up. Nonetheless the idea that agents need to be superhuman in order to fight terrorists
doesn't make a lot of sense - the initial wave of baddies are a poorly-armed militia - and outside UNATCO and Majestic 12 human augmentation seems to have no
traction, which admittedly is explained by Human Revolution.
As a consequence the real meat of the plot - global surveillance of the
internet, the subversion of governments, the possibility of perfect justice
from a machine - is skimmed over in favour of a debate about body modification
that doesn't go anywhere. The revelation that J C Denton is a completely
artificial man, a potentially immortal next stage in human evolution, is
dismissed with a couple of voice messages and an offhand shrug during a
memorable conversation with the aforementioned Morpheus:
Without wishing to spoil the rest of the plot Denton discovers that he is not
real. That he is an entirely artificial organism, akin to the Replicants from
Blade Runner. He is
intended to be the first of a new kind of human being, a higher-quality model
that will enforce order in a world where the existing population has been
reduced to manageable levels. It would have been an interesting twist if
Denton had decided to go along with this - there were plans to have the player
remain working for UNATCO throughout the game - but it turns out that the
chief conspirators are a bunch of petty old men with base motives, and
ultimately Denton turns on them.
Beyond the storyline, is Deus Ex fun to play? If the game was
just sneaking and opening vents and electrocuting people non-lethally we would probably remember
it in the same way we remember Perfect Dark, e.g. neat but old. What
sets it apart as a game is the scope. It leaps from New York to Hong Kong, then off to
Paris, then back to the United States. It moves from city streets to skyscrapers to an underwater base and a labyrinth.
By modern standards, post-Assassin's Creed, post-Skyrim, the depiction of Hong Kong is ludicrously small, just a
couple of level loads and a couple of tower blocks, but at the time it felt like a living,
breathing world. As mentioned earlier the levels are packed with side-quests,
often unmarked, and the first time I played Deus Ex I remember almost being overwhelmed with the Hong Kong level. There was so much to do!
The PS2 version is often very, very bare.
Hong Kong even has a fairly large area that you don't need
to visit. The PS2 version slims things down, although in its favour it makes
the collapsed tunnel underneath Hong Kong easier to reach (in the original you
had to sneak through a frozen larder, which didn't make a lot of sense).
The PC version, again.
In comparison Paris is a let-down - just a lot of square buildings and a sewer
- in fact I sometimes forget that the Paris section exists. The meat of the
Paris interlude involves infiltrating a cathedral, which feels like a generic
fantasy castle, and then exploring a deserted mansion that has no baddies,
which at the very least is a relaxing change of pace. From that point onwards
the adventure elements are largely eliminated in favour of straightforward
action-adventure. There's an underwater complex, and an airbase, but even though I have only just played the game I can't remember which comes first, or how they
connect together.
I'll look it up. Denton visits the airbase, then the underwater base, then
another airbase - technically a missile base - then Area51. I often forget
that the missile base is a separate location. He kills a chap called Howard
Strong who is a named character with a unique voice but doesn't do anything.
And then he visits a petrol station in order to rescue a key character's daughter. In theory the petrol station sequence is just padding, but it has atmosphere and it stands out.
The game ends up in a fantasy version of Area51, in which Denton has to pick one of
three endings. Human Revolution reduced this to a button press,
but Deus Ex at least has some action. The endings are all
bitter-sweet, and only the Illuminatus-in-charge ending has any kind of
closure. Invisible War continued the story - it is technically the
final chapter in the series, with Human Revolution and
Mankind Divided taking place before Deus Ex - but I
have to admit I haven't played Invisible War so I don't know what
happens next. Probably something involving grey goo, I don't know.
Envoi
In summary Deus Ex is a solid action-adventure that plays well,
although it looks very bare. It looked bare in 2000 and the passage of time
has not been kind. The PS2 port contains the entire original PC
game split into chunks, but despite a few tweaks there's no reason to play it over the PC
original. The game is still widely available as a budget title for the PC via digital
distribution. It takes a little bit of work to get it running with modern versions of Windows, but it's not especially hard.
The game's influence over subsequent games was surprisingly limited, if only because
the key to its appeal was the sheer hard work put into its level design and worldbuilding. It's hard to imitate hard work. BioShock and the modern Deus Ex games are often cited as
worthy heirs, as are (at least in terms of level design, if not writing) the
modern Fallout games. The game's ruminations on body modification
haven't aged well except perhaps on a metaphorical level, and I don't think that modern conspiracy theorists care about
Majestic 12 and the Illuminati any more, but the writing is often startlingly
prescient. The passage of time has turned the slightly-dated MOD
music of the original into a retro-vapourwave homage.
Recent advances in AI have made Deus Ex relevant again. It keeps coming back. Imagine if we lived in a nightmarish world of poverty, surveillance, and mass death. Imagine that.
