Blade Runner: A Beautiful Mess

Let's have a look at Blade Runner (1982), but to make things real spicy-like I saw it on the IMAX screen at London's Science Museum. I've always been disappointed with Blade Runner, but I decided that if I was going to eat the cheeseburger I might as well eat the hell out of it.

For the record the IMAX screening was a digital presentation of The Final Cut of 2007, which tightens up the editing and fixes some special effects gaffes that were still present in the Director's Cut of 1992. The screening I saw began with the Ladd Company logo. There was lots of film grain, which is not a bad thing at all - it reminded me of Chungking Express at times - and on a visual level I am pleased to say the film has held up.

Director Ridley Scott wanted the futuristic Los Angeles of 2019 to look as if the twentieth century had coalesced into a big pile of beautiful detritus, and Blade Runner's clutter is still beautiful.

It was accompanied by a talk from a roboticist from UCL and a short interview with associate producer Ivor Powell. I learned from the former that it is possible to remotely control a cockroach. Imagine if we could remotely control something useful, like an aeroplane or a car. Or a helicopter. Is Blade Runner any good? No.

Look, I get Blade Runner. I grew up in the 1980s. I am not a fuddy-duddy. Blade Runner is one of the most influential science fiction films of that decade, alongside Alien, The Terminator, Aliens, and RoboCop, and yes I know that Alien came out in 1979. You don't have to point that out.

You're also going to point out that Blade Runner is a lot more sophisticated than those films, but that's not true. Blade Runner has the surface appearance of sophistication. It has lovely cinematography and a measured pace, but there's an emptiness to it. Especially compared to RoboCop, which had a lot to say about greed, vanity, and delusion. In comparison Blade Runner feels like a summary of substance, an index of substantial topics with no text.

On the positive side the film still looks awesome. The careful use of colour and intelligent use of sound effects as a storytelling device are recognisably modern. Even in its original, pre-Director's Cut, pre-Final Cut form, Blade Runner recognisably belonged to the modern age. The fashions are timeless. The use of old-fashioned television displays and mechanical computer relays feel like a deliberate stylistic choice. Even Vangelis' electronic score - heavy with atmospheric washes and bassy sound effects - has aged gracefully. The surprising thing is that the synthesisers haven't dated; it's the saxophone and electric piano that sound of their time, not the Yamaha CS-80 and the Lexicon reverb.

But as a story it's a mess. You have to understand that I get Blade Runner. I get it. The film was released on the very same day as John Carpenter's The Thing, which had a similarly rough ride from contemporary film critics. They hated The Thing. Vincent Canby of the New York Times described it as "instant junk", comma, "a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other".

But he was dead wrong. The Thing is a masterpiece. It deftly mixes visceral shocks with a creeping, underlying sense of doom. The gore effects establish that the film is not messing around, but for the most part the film's impact comes from its restrained, ratcheted tension and sense of hopeless dread. The critics were wrong about The Thing because they didn't get it.

The critics weren't quite so dismissive of Blade Runner. They praised its looks but were unmoved by the rest of it. Janet Maslin, also of the Times, loved the visuals but described its story as a mess. And so did I, a few paragraphs ago, but that's because it's true. It's a mess. Janet Maslin wasn't an old fuddy-duddy who didn't understand Blade Runner's brilliance. She got the film. She got the film. She was right.

The standard narrative is that the film was killed at the box office by ET, but that's not true. The two films had completely difference audiences. Blade Runner failed to turn a profit because it was a poorly-reviewed, slow-paced detective story with bursts of nasty ultraviolence aimed at an adult audience that still pooh-poohed sci-fi.

It was released within a few weeks of Conan the Barbarian, Mad Max 2, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, and Firefox - May-June-July 1982 sounds fantastic - all of which at least made back their budgets, so I imagine the typical moviegoer of 1982 was perfectly capable of seeing more than one film at the cinema. Blade Runner didn't fail because the people of 1982 were sentimental morons, it failed because it was an expensive, slow-paced detective film aimed at an audience that didn't exist.

Over time Blade Runner found a new audience of starry-eyed kids such as myself who were mesmerised by its visuals, so it became something of a mainstream cult, an underdog. In the age of Akira and Syndicate it wasn't fashionable to say bad things about Blade Runner, because if you did, you were square. You didn't get it. You were an old fuddy-duddy like Vincent Canby. And so people my age learned to pretend to like Blade Runner even though we had doubts. We bought it when it came out on the latest high-def optical format but didn't watch it. We kept the Blu-Ray in the wrapper.

Let's talk about the good stuff. On a visual level Blade Runner codified the look of the future throughout the rest of the 1980s. The light through blue smoke; the spotlights; the Japanese-language adverts. The cinematography makes extensive use of narrow depth of field and chiaroscuro, in contrast to the flat, television-style lighting of so many contemporary films. The editing is punchy. Even the use of bass drops on the soundtrack feels contemporary. It doesn't look like a science fiction film from 1982. It looks like a proper film, a real film, a grown-up film.

And Rutger Hauer gives a fantastic performance as a charismatic, violent man-child who burns with righteous indignation at his crummy lot in life. He only appears for a few minutes, and only has a few lines, but the film lights up when he is on the screen.

Ditto Brion James, who spent the rest of his career playing belligerent heavies on account of this film. And Daryl Hannah, who plays a variation of Hauer's role, as a child-like killer who wears an emotional mask she can remove at will, while simultaneously giving the impression that under it all she might have some genuine emotions. They are all tragic characters, driven to kill by impulses they cannot understand, created as disposable tools by a heartless world, but the film largely ignores them. They dominate my memories of the film, but they're barely in it.

At heart Blade Runner is a variation of The Deer Hunter or First Blood. It's a film in which soldiers return from the war to find themselves alienated from a world that doesn't want them. But instead of focusing on the former soldiers, Blade Runner follows a detective who hunts them, because the producers needed a big star name, and he couldn't be a villain, so they hired Harrison Ford, but gave him nothing to do. And because he needed a love interest they hired Sean Young, and gave her nothing to do either. Young makes the most of what she has but Ford was apparently not enthused with the material, and it shows.

Beyond that the film (a) is too prosaic to work as a detective mystery (b) is badly-paced, with a busy opening and a dull middle section (c) raises a number of interesting sci-fi ideas but then does nothing with them (d) is surprisingly simple and linear for its length (e) is just generally overstuffed. The sequel, Blade Runner 2049, had almost exactly the same problems, but was more engaging as a story because it had an underlying mystery. And at least it tried to explore its sci-fi ideas, although it was still muddled.

Reviewers in 1982 pointed out that our hero's detective work is perfunctory, as did Harrison Ford himself, and they were right. Ford's character does a little bit of detective work involving some photographs and a snake scale, but everything after that relies on coincidences of timing and geography. The baddies essentially run into him. You might argue that Blade Runner is about more important things than detective work, but why couldn't the writers at least make the detective aspect interesting? Or added at least one plot twist, or something unexpected? It wouldn't have done any harm.

I haven't explained the plot. Blade Runner is a detective film set in Los Angeles in the year 2019, which in 1982 was almost forty years in the future. The city is blanketed in pollution. Humanity has developed robot slaves to do all the heavy work, but they're only authorised for use in the off-world colonies. The robot slaves - replicants - are almost indistinguishable from human beings, but smarter, stronger, more durable. Our superiors in every way.

Three things distinguish them from us. They are brought into the world as adults, with implanted memories, so they lack the emotional development of human beings who have spent a lifetime learning to deal with disappointment and rejection and having to take the bus to a post office on the estate because the local Argos has closed and the nearest Click and Collect depot is miles away. Secondly they're a lot stronger, although the film implies that they aren't superhuman, just massively more efficient (otherwise presumably the authorities could detect them by sticking pins into their arms, or something).

And thirdly they have a lifespan of just four years. The film implies that the replicants are unaware of this, although the villains find out somehow. They flee to Earth in the hope that they might extend their lives, in the process leaving a trail of death behind them, because they have nothing to lose, no reason to hold back. Blade Runner is essentially two parallel detective stories, one in which the escaped replicants try to arrange a meeting with the boss of the company who made them, another in which a detective tracks them down. The replicants achieve their goal first, only to find out that they are doomed, and at that point the detective's story just peters out.

There's a second plot. Early in the film the boss of the company that makes the replicants introduces a new model to the detective. She is more human-like than the other replicants. The fact that this character is a replicant is played as a mystery, but only briefly. No sooner is the character introduced than we learn she is not real. She learns the truth shortly afterwards, in a scene that might have had more impact if we knew her, or if it had been a surprise. Sean Young is asked to express what must be intense emotions at the realisation her entire life is a lie, and although she does a good job the script doesn't help her at all.

A better film might have gone on to ask why human beings are real, and perfect duplicates of humans are not, but Blade Runner doesn't seem to care. Sean Young is fine in the role but ultimately the character is given little more screentime than the villains, and the romance between her and Harrison Ford's detective isn't engaging.

There's a persistent theory that the detective himself is an advanced replicant, in which case the romantic angle would actually make sense. The film would be about two emotionally-stunted robots learning to become human. Another film might have treated that as a hopeful outcome, because if robots can learn to love there is hope for the future, but again Blade Runner tentatively raises this theme but does nothing with it, as if the screenwriters had been told to make a tough action thriller and not trouble the audience with too many ideas.

It's so frumple. Blade Runner could have been great, but the story is just too prosaic to work by itself, and underneath it the film has a peculiar lack of curiosity. Does the average person in the street know that megacorporations are breeding slaves? Wouldn't that be a major political issue in the United States of 2019? Wouldn't the reveal that the villains are replicants have been more impactful if it had been kept hidden until later in the film?

As it stands, the nature of replicants is explained in a clumsy "as you know" dialogue scene right at the beginning, during which the stereotypical chief of police explains replicants to a man who has spent his career hunting them down.

The film's production design was strip-mined by oodles of films and video games. This kitchen immediately put me in mind of the latter-day Deus Ex games.

Wouldn't it have been interesting if the film had shown humanity on the verge of extinction, with the emotionally-stunted robot duplicates as our only chance of preserving something of humanity? The book explores that theme, and the film's portrait of a world where animal life has suffered mass extinctions alludes to it, but as with so much of the film this wisp of an idea is raised but never explored.

And that's Blade Runner in a nutshell. It's a frustrating missed opportunity. If the film had picked a single sci-fi idea, or built an interesting mystery, I would love it. It reminds me of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, in the sense that both works allude to a mass of interesting ideas but never commit to exploring any one of them in depth.

It could have been a film in which a set of tragic anti-heroes realise that they are doomed to be left behind by a future that doesn't need them, as in The Wild Bunch, or a mystery in which humanity attempts to cheat mass extinction by building a replacement that can survive in a harsh new world, as in The Talos Principle, or even just a solid action-adventure thriller along the lines of Manhunter, or a philosophical work that examines what it is to be real, as in Toy Story, but ultimately it's a mystery-less detective film, an unromantic romance, an unexciting action film, a philosophical meditation with the depth of an Ultravox video.

But it looks fantastic, I'll give it that.

EDIT: After writing this a couple of things struck me. This shot is puzzling:

Puzzling because it looks as if it was filmed by pointing a camera at a screen playing back the footage. As if it was mobile phone footage of a television screen. It stands out because it's wobbly and fuzzy and lasts for several seconds. I don't have a copy of the original version of the film to hand but I wonder if it was rehearsal footage spliced in for pacing issues.

A few months before Blade Runner was released Ridley Scott directed a commercial for Chanel. It was part of a series that began in 1979. One of the film's most iconic shots originally came from the Chanel commercial:

In the 1980s Ridley Scott was often dismissed as a lightweight visual stylist, a brash analogue of the nascent New Romantic movement. In my opinion he was just ahead of the curve.

Deus Ex: The Conspiracy

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.

In a world where economic progress has not been kind to the environment, is there a need for so many people? Couldn't we have fewer people instead, but better-quality people? Perhaps a small population of immortal billionaires looked after by machines, guarded by superpowered assassins, such as Agent J C Denton of the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition, hero of Deus Ex.

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.

I was curious about the PS2 port, but I don't have a PS2. I do however have a PlayStation 3, and luckily The Conspiracy was ported to the PS3 as a PS2 Classic. At some point Sony will turn off the PS3's access to the PlayStation Store, so I decided to try it out before it became lost forever. This explains why the screenshots are all photographs of the screen - the PS3 doesn't have a screenshot button. I had to photograph the screen.

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

The gameplay of Deus Ex typically consists of infiltrating a series of secure facilities in order to hack a computer or steal something or blow something up, but the player is allowed to choose their own approach. One map involves gaining entry to a naval shipyard. The player can sneak in via the sewers, or use stealth to run past the guards, or blow them all up, or even persuade a guard to let them through, depending on whether the player met the guard's friend in the previous level. In any other game the player would just blow open the door and kill everybody, but Deus Ex has options.

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.