Mine's from this game itself, when speaking with Morpheus:
"The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government. You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands."
Did you ask it for wisdom? I once asked it for 20 quotes that (RIP Terry Pratchett) sound very meaningfull without meaning very much. ChatGPT obliged with 20 pieces of deep-sounding total nonsense.
As a professional game developer who has worked on multiple games affected by this, it's definitely something which bothers me a lot.
I've seen a lot of discussions among fans about why one specific publicly visible person made this or that decision when he was never part of any discussion related to it.
I see it as a facet of a larger thing where humans are instinctively driven to create stories--even oversimplified ones--about the world to capture and explain it.
It also happens in stories about how X was invented/discovered in history (ignoring a thousand required incremental steps and simultaneous discoveries) or how we can't help but intuit patterns in data we abstractly know is random ("hot streaks", "the coin is overdue for landing the other way".)
The myth of the solo creator who heroically makes something amazing has a romantic appeal to a lot of people, especially those who dream of doing such a thing themselves someday. In truth, all great things in history have many collaborators and what we think of as the “creator” is often just a person who played the role of bringing together the collaborators, with perhaps a few other direct contributions.
But in the AI era, this solo-creator myth can now become reality, or if you are more cynical, just an even deeper delusion that exploits the non-consensual labor of millions for one’s personal benefit.
Like many games, I think people's ratings of importance and quality are highly colored by their own experiences. For example, Goldeneye is beloved, but I've always found it weird, and I think anyone who played multiplayer Quake, Descent, Doom, etc., before it came out will just never see it as the revelation that console gamers do. Similarly, if you played Marathon games, Halo never seems nearly as special as many gamers find it.
With Deus Ex, I think one factor that really boosts it is that very few games previous to it focused nearly as much on experiencing a story while giving a first person player agency of any degree, and this is probably doubly true for the kind of audience that would find a first person real-time experience appealing, or at least I imagine the audiences for Fallout and Planescape: Torment and such, while overlapping some, weren't really quite the same audience as for Deus Ex, and stuff like Lucas Film's Maniac Mansion style games (puzzle narrative games?) are even further removed. While other games that are obviously similar in some ways, like Half Life, are much much more on rails in terms of both player experience and narrative compared to Deus Ex.
I think it's a great game, just like the X-Files was a great show, but also just like X-Files was not a perfect show. (Though I'm not sure there's a strict analog to the degree of unnecessary continuation X-Files has had.) By the standard of its time, just being first person and having varied endings, varied routes, and a lot of narrative support are all big winners for its time.
There's a lot to cover with the game, so I'm not surprised he doesn't cover the music. But the soundtrack is great! I still listen to it regularly. I like the UNATCO music best. Each track has a regular theme, and switches to variations on the theme for combat and other situations. Pretty unusual in 2000 and even today.
Michiel von den Bos was involved in the production of the original music, I understand he published a modern remix [1] in 2020, I believe to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the game [2].
Unatco and HK, of course, but much later while giving each track another more complete hearing, I discovered one of the NYC streets tracks has a long time building up, like >1min, and then gets really great too.
And I love how in later Deus Ex parts random radios throughout the levels will start playing familiar tunes. Makes it all more epic and nostalgic.
Looks like I am not alone in this. A youtube playlist consisting of the entire soundtrack of the game used to be my go-to for programming/working/studying during undergrad.
100%. DX:HR soundtrack was very much fitting the game, and tracks built upon variations of the tracks from the original DX worked so well there (and so did the brand new original tracks, with Icarus[0] specifically coming to mind). The visual aesthetic was perfect as well.
Shame what happened to the series after DX:HR (with Mankind Divided feeling rather unfinished and ending on an abrupt cliffhanger with no follow-up on the horizon, despite the game itself being great otherwise). But at least we got some really good crumbs (HR and MD) out of it, and I am very much thankful for that.
I felt like MD was kinda the refined version of HR. Most things felt just a little bit improved, polished. Story was great, but I very much want to know what's next and I don't know, if we will ever get another great one in the series.
Goodness, the introduction to Hong Kong and the music cast a new vibe on the game at a perfectly timed moment, when you've just about had enough of NYC. And it was seeded with all these little scripted moments you could happen upon. Talks in tea shops, gang fights in tunnels, overhearing convos in bars, the little newspaper boy who relayed threats to a newsstand vendor and leads you to a gang HQ if you follow him (and he even turns around and tells you not to follow him. In a 90s game!).
And the discoverability of all kinds of stuff in the canals. The cityscape building hopping and secret back entrances to the duplicitous Maggie Chow's apartment. It just had everything. You truly felt like you were discovering every inch of it and like it wasn't just on rails or procedurally generated.
That’s what Unreal engine had built in from start, these transitions were amazing even in first OG Unreal (leaving the ship for the first time into the planets jungle and waterfalls, oooh!)
oh yes the soundtracks! I remember even my mom saying back then "I don't really like you playing all the time, but I have to agree, the music is really good".
Genuinely curious if this ever ships. It was meant to release in January this year, but the devs pulled the launch after it got a terrible reception from fans.
What has been shown so far looks worse than many of the free modded versions out there, and with AI lowering the bar for modifying games every week… As an experiment I asked Claude to take the source code from the browser port of the game that appeared on GitHub recently, add coop multiplayer, 32:9 ultra wide support and as much of the graphical enhancements from the remaster video.
It took about 4 prompts, and I have builds playable on Linux, MacOS and Windows, with coop. Gets well over 300fps on my Mac Mini as uses metal on an a Mac.
It really makes you think how long the business models of companies like Nightdive Studios (specialists in remastering old games for modern systems) can last, when you can “remaster” entire games in very few prompts.
Nightdive already does it with AI upscaled textures. Stephen and Alix are a national treasure because no one else is taking the time to secure the rights and literally remake these old masterpieces in new engines with attention to faithfulness and cognizance of how people like to play modern titles.
I am SO hyped for the Thief remaster they're putting out next month, and I enjoyed chewing through the Shadow Man remaster this year, but I was disappointed by how some of the textures looked when upscaled. Lots of artifacts. Of course, everyone is doing this now. Look at the absolutely horrible textures in Square Enix's KH1 remaster. At least with Shadow Man, a majority of textures were recreated from source. And also, at any time you can switch to the original textures! Truly a passion project.
A lot of modern remakes become "demakes". Often a remake focuses on surface level improvements, like graphics, but damages the underlying game systems that made the original beloved in the first place. Another common problem is lazy graphics upscaling that improves the resolution but makes the result look cheap or incongruous with the game's original style (GTA3 remastered is a great example[1]). I think there are a handful of truly great remakes a bunch of mediocre ones and a surprising number of total disasters like Warcraft 3.
But probably the worst trend with modern remakes is taking the original games off of online stores or "upgrading" them to the remake thus making the original unavailable. Combined with the "demakes" trend above and it seems like we're actively destroying many historical games with these "remakes".
Nightdive studio will be fine with their Sony and Nintendo devkits and arrangements with them, store access, publishing deals etc. They'll just use the same AI tools to get things done faster, presumably.
If you love Deus Ex, I think the Dishonored games carried the flag for this kind of game too. Harvey Smith, lead designer on Deus Ex, was heavily involved in making them and while the setting is completely different (magic, steampunk-ish), the “feel” of the games owes a huge amount to Deus Ex.
Dishonored 2’s fictional city of “Karnaca” gave me similar joy to explore and unpack as when I first encountered Hong Kong in Deus Ex.
Agreed on the System Shock, and of course if we are talking about Looking Glass games you have to mention the Thief influence.
Bioshock has never been in the same category for me, because it is very focused on run and gun combat, for this reason I’ve never felt it worked as an “immersive sim”. The levels aren’t nearly as open plan either, and there isn’t anything like the focus on providing players with multiple pathways to solve the same objective. It’s still great in its own right of course.
Deus Ex is IMO arguably a love letter to 90’s Looking Glass Studios games. It really does play like a hybrid of Thief and System Shock to me. Probably not that surprising given Warren Spector worked at Looking Glass before starting work on Deus Ex.
I picked it up a few months ago for the first time but I've not found the enthusiasm to keep going. Think I was around half way maybe. Does it get better? It's the sort of game I really like on paper but it just feels a bit shallow tbh. Plus I don't find jump scares relaxing after a long day at work. Feels like I'm missing something
Honestly doesn't get a ton better, but your character gets stronger and more able to deal with the enemies so they become less of a concern and can explore with a bit more freedom
The Mooncrash DLC specifically is one of the best pieces of gaming available. It turns the base game mechanics into a Rogue-like where the world resets but some things in the world still stay persistent.
While I like that DLC, I think it loses what makes these games so great to play: the feeling of exploration and slowly uncovering a story. Moon crashes repetition and time limits don't quite do it for me (although I still really recommend it to anyone).
Absolutely agree. Prey is stunning puzzle sandbox and I love so much the atmosphere of the game, from both the artistic and environment design perspective, but also from the outstanding ambiance soundtrack by Mick Gordon.
Unfortunately I have the impression that the final part was rushed, as the story feels incomplete at best. I wish Arkane could dedicate 6 more months to this game.
Until you get a better response, here's my experience: my 7700 gets stable 60 fps in gta5 at 1080p on medium-low. Haven't tried anything more modern, I'm addicted to ancient stuff.
Prey is extremely good, but boy did I hate the ending. It's not just a disappointing ending, it's one that retroactively cheapens the rest of the game, IMO. Still a great game and worth playing, but that ending will always leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
I would suggest anyone playing it for the first time to give the original with only basic engine fixes (e.g. Deus EXE) a go before playing some random modders take on what the game should be like.
You played a worse version. Revision butchers a few levels, especially the NYC section - bigger in scale without a good reason for it, making it impossible to find key persons organically (with also the hints not working anymore).
Revision sucked as it had crappy textures on Hong Kong. GMDX it's far ahead, less tacky/broken and with hugely enhanced areas. As early as at Hell's Kitchen you are looking a much more realistic area (city planning, buildings, park benches/objects and whatnot) than before.
I have the logo tattooed on myself (along with Babylon 5). First played it around 16 pre-spoiler-filled internet and was blown away by my friend and I having completely different outcomes to pivotal moments of the game related to Paul Denton (no spoilers: if you know, you know).
Never worked in games (bar a bit of voice acting in The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex) but I think were it not for that era of gaming I’d never have ended up working on Homebrew or at GitHub.
Sadly the graphics have not aged well but if you can handle them: the writing and non-linear/branching plot and dialogue is still probably second to none.
My favorite game too.
I'm fine with the old graphics. Anything new would probably butcher it. There is a remake that replaces the engine but keeps the models, it was posted here a while ago.
One thing that bugs me is the article explains the twin towers missing from the skyline as "rendering engine couldn’t handle any more polygons", but it turns out... it's way more complicated than that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpi5xUXPqok .
While most of the country was all Glass Em! post-9/11, a few of us were sort of amazed that it took so long.
It wasn't just misanthropy on our part.
Zooming out, macrohistorically[1], the amount of destruction that can be controlled by the individual soldier has increased, steadily at first, then exponentially in the modern era. Obviously the extreme example would be something like SADM[2], but this increase also includes the multiplying complex systems of the modern world - bulk ammunition, heavy vehicles, commercial aircraft. As the numbers needed for X level of destruction decreases, the span of viable ideologies increases; it's easier to convince 12 guys of nutty ideas than it is to convince 12,000. So, in the big view, the idea of big cultural icons getting flattened, this is something scifi has been kicking around for a while now. One could argue it's a significant pillar of "cyberpunk" worldbuilding: the persistent presence of the "crazies" wielding the modern tools of fuel, bullets, and nuclear bombs.
[1] Which is definitely the perspective of the Deus Ex creative team.
To save others a few minutes, the more complicated explanation is that (according to Warren Spector) the guy who made the skybox left them out by mistake. :)
If I am remembering correctly, I felt terrible after completing the first mission but that may have been the point - make you think about what you are doing. It was presented to the player as authentic threat, then when you get to end you are told it was a test but in my playthrough I killed all the “bad guys” on the way, and could have spared their virtual lives by sneaking around and knocking them out.
Postal 2 can be played through without ever hitting anyone, which I've done for fun. Although it's the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do there, which is the joke.
Haven't been able to repeat that in Deus Ex, you can't play through the campaign as a total pacifist, and Carter explains as much right at the beginning.
I vaguely remember doing a self-challenge pacifist run... I think I had to move all the unconscious bodies on the PCRS Wall Cloud up to the dock, because otherwise, I would be indirectly responsible if it sank while they were unable to evacuate.
Sure, I've done at least a dozen of less-violent runs (being addicted to this game and a couple of others), but you still can't get though it without ever killing anyone, at least not without hacks exploiting NPC pathfinding bugs, and the game still treats characters like Anna as dead even if you work around it.
I choose to believe that whomever Paul defends himself from is not-my-fault as I hide inside the Covert Closet. (Though speed-running out the front is fine too.)
There is not a big difference between unconscious bodies and dead bodies in the game, after all, they never wake up. The real challenge is playing without harming anybody, which is possible up to one or two specific situations.
Or were there unconscious bodies on the ship from before your arrival? I do not remember that anymore.
My memory is hazy--a decade or more will do that--but I have this picture in my head of using the Pepper Spray (which temporarily neutralizes enemies without knocking them out) on the Wall Cloud crew inside the helicopter room control deck, so that I could get past them to some necessary switch or terminal.
It might be the "carry everyone to shore" thing was on a different playthrough...
For those who have never played Deus Ex, I'm actually going to do the heretical thing and propose that you start with Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Director's Cut).
It's an amazing game in its own right and holds up really well today. The problem with hopping directly into Deus Ex is that it's really showing its age these days, even with mods.
DX:HR is a prequel, so from a timeline perspective it makes sense to play it first :)
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is one of my favorite games of all time (and the game that got me into games). I enjoyed mankind divided a lot as well, though it felt different. I've started the original Deus Ex a few times but never really got into it; maybe I need to give it another shot.
I remember playing it again and again as a teenager, each time finding something new, some shaft I hadn't explored or a character in some side street I hadn't talked to. I must have played through 15+ times.
I really really really really missed seeing blogs like this! These blogs always felt like home, like a traveler's notebook, like a cozy warm personal place. And all we are left with is these boring corporate flat garbage.
Finally sat down and played this a few years ago. I didn’t think I’d be able to get into such an old game but it was one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had.
I spent hundreds of hours in the game, if not thousands, over the decades. Your best pick would probably be gmdx as it fixes many bugs and annoyances of the original, improves graphics a lot, while staying very close to it.
Revision is popular and cute, but changes too much. Level design on some levels is so different that you can't recognize them, I still get lost despite playing though it at least ten times, as original levels are burned in my memory.
Although this can be changed in settings, I'd still avoid Revision unless you want to have another go at it after finishing the original.
loved this game so much back in the day despite its ckunkyness at times. 2 felt cool still and later the whole atmosphere for me was lost. Still recognise and recall fondly a lot of the game many years later. ion storm, the intro music, dialogues.
great example in my mind of that games dont need to be perfect to be released or very memorable.
good writing is essential in my mind, dialogues and music / atmosphere. maybe its personal taste.
thanks for the lovely blog and memories :) totally makes me wanna go and replay them!
> Still, I do understand why it was done this way, and don’t really blame anyone for it: because truly interactive storytelling, especially on a scale like this one, is hard, as decades of experience have taught us all too well.
The Stanley Parable is an exploration of the fact that this sort of "interactive storytelling" is largely impossible. It's not a coincidence that it was made as a mod for Half-Life 2 (and then as a Source game). The different paths represent different attempts by the game designer or the player to either fix or cope with the failure of the game as the Narrator originally envisioned it.
If I am not mistaken Deus Ex was one of the first game with non-linear gameplay having different story entries and exits. That feature itself was very interesting and unique. Apart from that cyberpunk rpg design was attractive. All in all it was an epic game and It is a game which is memorable for lifetime. Thanks to Ion Storm one more time.
I had a subscription to PC Gamer and saw it was named Game of the Year. I got it from Wal Mart, a beautiful shiny box, and inside was a fake newsletter about events in the game world, I think the paper that Joe Greene, an in-game character, wrote for.
I had no idea what I was in for, and as a 15 year old, I felt twists and surprises, and organic game reactions to things I did that blow my mind even today, and imo still haven't been matched. And leveling and skills truly mattered and were tied into the game. Inventory management and ammo was interesting, the interface was perfect. It also had a kind of intellectual curiosity (characters talking competently about surveillance state and capitalism!) in the dialog that I only ever felt in, say, Alpha Centauri and later, Disco Elysium. It's still the best PC game ever imo.
Edit: I think the most important thing about its legacy now, is that it engaged with conspiracies in a fundamentally different way, more like 90s X-Files style fascination and curiosity than anti-intellectualism of Alex Jones-style rabid misinformation. A critical nuance that gets lost when conspiracy cranks try to claim Deus Ex as theirs.
Edit 2: Respectfully, contra the article, if anything I think there's not enough hagiography surrounding Deus Ex. It's either beloved or not known, and the latter is the crime that needs rebalancing as it represents an example of what's possible in passion project game design that I think is just as important as it ever was. That matters infinitely more to me than sidecar questions of how more or less "living" it's game world was relative to its predecessor System Shock. I also think the analysis is a little bit off to criticize DX's three-choice ending as being too on-rails relative to System Shock, which is a one-stop boss battle that lasts like 15 seconds.
It probably kicked off a minor G.K. Chesterton revival as well. 90s Cyberpunk viewed through post-graduate Philosophy amidst the transition of cyberpunk to eCapitalism, all tied together with cinematic sensibilities and a phenomenally realised OST.
Now if only someone could make a game aping 'The Difference Engine' in the style of Dishonoured... the time is right for a steampunk equivalent!
I've got it for ~5 eur (~$5) back in the day with a gaming magazine in Spain in 2003/2004, I can't remember. Dirt cheap and amazing game running really well on my Athlon with a Geforce2 MX.
On my last replay the game's politics read to me as hyper libertarian. Very anti-UN, anti globalism. Right up Alex Jones' territory
When the game came out though the politics around conspiracy theories was very different. Deus Ex tried to cram in every conspiracy theory circulating at the time. MJ-12, the trilateral commission, Roswell...
The article, (not that anyone ever seems to read it before commenting) does dive into the game's politics and comes to the conclusion you mention, right down to the Alex Jones comparison. It also has this to say:
> Lurking in the accusations against “wealthy bankers” is the oldest, ugliest conspiratorial trope of all, the idea — stemming from the 1903 forgery “The Protocol of the Elders of Zion” — that a cabal of Jews secretly run the world. “Famous conspiracy theories always turn out to be just antisemitism,” this website’s regular commenter Ross theorized after reading a piece I wrote about the thoroughly unpleasant Pierre Plantard, the man behind some of the most outlandish tales surrounding the French village of Rennes-le-Château. The more conspiracy theories I examine in depth, the more true this proposition seems.
While true, in 2026 if you're still conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism, you're part of the problem. Something something Epstein.
I wouldn't say it was anti-UN per se. The UN just happened to be the vehicle that bad guys used. It was ramping up an extrajudicial military force, coordinating with rich elites in the shadows and spreading a plague for political leverage that was the bad stuff (Paul was clearly against, but other characters not so much).
The good guys were trying to coordinate and make sure vaccine was widely distributed, and IIRC the original friends of the main character continue to believe in the value of UNATCO (the agency you work for in the game) and treat it like a good cause that was poisoned rather than a philosophical error.
I can see the libertarian bent, but with the very heavy qualifier that it's like Noam Chomsky 90s anarcho libertarianism than the joke that is today's fascist-friendly memeified online libertarianism. I doubt Tracer Tong and Alex Jones would have much in common if they tried to have a conversation. And it does give you three choices at the end of the day, and seems to mean it, though if you squint I suspect it's most sympathetic to Tracer Tong's preferred outcome.
Nah, dragon sword is the best once you push manual combat to the maximum level. Takes out pretty much everyone in one hit. I played through the game dozens of times and it's my standard pick for 99% of playthrough. Just need a little extra for the bots.
Such a great game. Afterwards I needed more and ended up finding this other game called Neocron which kinda ran the same vein but was no where near as good.
Deus Ex was an amazing game. My only regret is that the more we see the real world impacts of late stage capitalism and technology enthusiasm, I've spent more time wondering if the Tracer Tong ending was the better choice for the world
I always wondered why the game was called "Deus Ex". "Deus ex machina" is the "God from the machine", in a play someone who is magically lowered down from the sky via a theater contraption to save the day. "Deus ex" alone just means "God from". What does that mean? I guess I have to play the game to find out...
I always interpreted it as "From god", as a jab at those who think they are godly, or perhaps can play god themselves, which is a common theme throughout the game.
True story: two college friends of mine having a conversation on Friday evening, Friend A (single) asked Friend B (in a relationship) what he was doing on Saturday. B's excited reply was "Deus Ex!"
Still my favorite game of all time. The difficulty scaling was absolutely ridiculous though. In the first level, you're supposed to be a cyber augmented super soldier, but in the first level, they give you like 2 magazines for your pistol, and if you don't max our your small weapon skill, you have worse aim than a toddler with a nerf gun.
The gameplay and graphics don't hold up but the story was absolutely prescient around AI, billionaire oligarchs, and mass surveillance.
I was also completely blown away by something I only discovered years after playing the game when the sequel landed.
There's a portion in the game when your brother Paul is sick and he tells you to leave him to fight off enemy goons alone. Apparently you can fight your way through the hotel and he survives all the way to the end of the game!
When the sequel came out, I was like "why the fuck is Paul still alive"
The game implements this in a funny, low-tech way: you enter through Paul's window, and if you exit back through his window, the game treats it as though you've chosen to abandon him, so he dies. In order for him to survive, all you have to do is exit through the front door of the hotel before he is killed by any enemies, which you can do by running as fast as you can past all the enemies.
In my replays I just line the front door with LAMs so as soon as the goons enter they blow up. Then it's a massive shooting gallery all the way down. You can also use your leg augmentations to jump down the elevator shaft, and sneak your way to the front door.
The issue with this is that the game doesn't really communicate this fact to you, and not killing the goons technically should mean that they're still going to go upstairs at some point and kill Paul.
The most hilarious part of this is that Paul himself says he's too weak to climb through the window, but as soon as those goons bust in through the front door, he whips out a 50 lb flame thrower and starts strafing around at 30 mph like he's in the motherfucking murder olympics.
Indeed he does. There are many of these hidden things.
You can kill Anna on the plane where you're supposed to kill Lebedev; the game accounts for this with voice dialogue and everything. Crazy. At that point in the game there is no reason for you to even try (and she's a tough match) unlike later on --- but you can!
Fallout: New Vegas wins the award for allowing you to kill seemingly plot-essential NPCs. As far as I know, there are only two characters in the entire base game you can interact with that can't be killed, both robots. One is a vendor, so you always have at least one shop, the other is the head of a faction that allows you to complete the game even after alienating (or killing) all the other factions.
Haha, nice. Which reminds me of my first playthrough as well, and I was very much on-rails brained (just do what the game tells you to do, because most games give you barely any agency). In the plane where Anna goes to kill Lebedev, for whatever reason I tried killing her, it took a few tries but I ended up LAM'ing her and I was confused that the game continued afterward.
Deus Ex and Alice were both games I wanted to play when I was in high school, but they didn't have Mac ports.
I tried playing Alice a couple times when I got Steam in 2023, and I couldn't get into it. Tried another game from that era: Made it about halfway through Half Life 1 on a long flight and couldn't get into it either, even after I'd played Alyx.
It's wild how games that were considered state-of-the-art when we were kids can feel unplayably unpolished today.
Remains one of my favorite games ever, even as current events make it difficult to return to at present (it used to be a yearly replay over my winter holidays).
One thing strikes me however, as perhaps revealing my own naïveté:
> Lurking in the accusations against “wealthy bankers” is the oldest, ugliest conspiratorial trope of all, the idea — stemming from the 1903 forgery “The Protocol of the Elders of Zion” — that a cabal of Jews secretly run the world.
I never made that connection until literally reading this piece. Bankers weren’t all Jews, and not all Jews were Bankers. I had heard the stereotype, sure, but I never read said stereotype into such conspiracies or narratives. It just made logical sense that a newly-emerged global society formed around currency and trade would be manipulated by those people who specialize in said sectors, i.e. bankers and financiers. The fact said individuals continue having outsized import on daily news and current events almost cements the plot point as real prophecy instead of antisemitic nonsense, but I can also see how bad actors would tie hate speech to current events to boost their own platforms.
Old boogeymen in bankers became faang owners in real life some 10-15 years ago and almost nobody complained. Now its ai companies owners.
Compared to those, all bankers of the world even combined are still a minor insignificant player. I wonder if we will ever see 'occupy sillicon valley' movement?
> One thing strikes me however, as perhaps revealing my own naïveté...
On the contrary: whenever I see someone accuse a work of antisemitism because it has greedy bankers, I think that says a lot more about the accuser than it does the work in question. It is not normal to look at a fictional banker sect and assume that they are meant to be Jews, or a reflection on Jews.
"There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.
"The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization. The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. God was a dream of good government. You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands."
Perhaps we need a better prototype for a much larger system...
I've seen a lot of discussions among fans about why one specific publicly visible person made this or that decision when he was never part of any discussion related to it.
It also happens in stories about how X was invented/discovered in history (ignoring a thousand required incremental steps and simultaneous discoveries) or how we can't help but intuit patterns in data we abstractly know is random ("hot streaks", "the coin is overdue for landing the other way".)
The myth of the solo creator who heroically makes something amazing has a romantic appeal to a lot of people, especially those who dream of doing such a thing themselves someday. In truth, all great things in history have many collaborators and what we think of as the “creator” is often just a person who played the role of bringing together the collaborators, with perhaps a few other direct contributions.
But in the AI era, this solo-creator myth can now become reality, or if you are more cynical, just an even deeper delusion that exploits the non-consensual labor of millions for one’s personal benefit.
With Deus Ex, I think one factor that really boosts it is that very few games previous to it focused nearly as much on experiencing a story while giving a first person player agency of any degree, and this is probably doubly true for the kind of audience that would find a first person real-time experience appealing, or at least I imagine the audiences for Fallout and Planescape: Torment and such, while overlapping some, weren't really quite the same audience as for Deus Ex, and stuff like Lucas Film's Maniac Mansion style games (puzzle narrative games?) are even further removed. While other games that are obviously similar in some ways, like Half Life, are much much more on rails in terms of both player experience and narrative compared to Deus Ex.
I think it's a great game, just like the X-Files was a great show, but also just like X-Files was not a perfect show. (Though I'm not sure there's a strict analog to the degree of unnecessary continuation X-Files has had.) By the standard of its time, just being first person and having varied endings, varied routes, and a lot of narrative support are all big winners for its time.
[1] https://open.spotify.com/album/2gC3Ecmd6SuSSvdtpa30zP
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20221225103900/https://www.pcgam...
I actually got chills during the surprise post-credits scene in Deus Ex: Human Revolution when the og Deus Ex theme started playing.
Shame what happened to the series after DX:HR (with Mankind Divided feeling rather unfinished and ending on an abrupt cliffhanger with no follow-up on the horizon, despite the game itself being great otherwise). But at least we got some really good crumbs (HR and MD) out of it, and I am very much thankful for that.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=402asYLG_b0
I loved the theme changes on them -- I remember HK Streets had explore, combat and death scene; transitions felt seamless in the game.
And the discoverability of all kinds of stuff in the canals. The cityscape building hopping and secret back entrances to the duplicitous Maggie Chow's apartment. It just had everything. You truly felt like you were discovering every inch of it and like it wasn't just on rails or procedurally generated.
I can recommend the HD remix.
Remaster, I guess. Which also makes more sense ;)
New renderers, new engines, The Purist Mod, GMDX, The Nameless Mod...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3131640/Deus_Ex_Remastere...
What has been shown so far looks worse than many of the free modded versions out there, and with AI lowering the bar for modifying games every week… As an experiment I asked Claude to take the source code from the browser port of the game that appeared on GitHub recently, add coop multiplayer, 32:9 ultra wide support and as much of the graphical enhancements from the remaster video.
It took about 4 prompts, and I have builds playable on Linux, MacOS and Windows, with coop. Gets well over 300fps on my Mac Mini as uses metal on an a Mac.
It really makes you think how long the business models of companies like Nightdive Studios (specialists in remastering old games for modern systems) can last, when you can “remaster” entire games in very few prompts.
I am SO hyped for the Thief remaster they're putting out next month, and I enjoyed chewing through the Shadow Man remaster this year, but I was disappointed by how some of the textures looked when upscaled. Lots of artifacts. Of course, everyone is doing this now. Look at the absolutely horrible textures in Square Enix's KH1 remaster. At least with Shadow Man, a majority of textures were recreated from source. And also, at any time you can switch to the original textures! Truly a passion project.
But probably the worst trend with modern remakes is taking the original games off of online stores or "upgrading" them to the remake thus making the original unavailable. Combined with the "demakes" trend above and it seems like we're actively destroying many historical games with these "remakes".
[1] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-...
Dishonored 2’s fictional city of “Karnaca” gave me similar joy to explore and unpack as when I first encountered Hong Kong in Deus Ex.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Smith_(game_designer)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishonored_(series)
Bioshock has never been in the same category for me, because it is very focused on run and gun combat, for this reason I’ve never felt it worked as an “immersive sim”. The levels aren’t nearly as open plan either, and there isn’t anything like the focus on providing players with multiple pathways to solve the same objective. It’s still great in its own right of course.
Deus Ex is IMO arguably a love letter to 90’s Looking Glass Studios games. It really does play like a hybrid of Thief and System Shock to me. Probably not that surprising given Warren Spector worked at Looking Glass before starting work on Deus Ex.
One of the few modern games that actually got me tense and scared. It is a really good game.
Unfortunately I have the impression that the final part was rushed, as the story feels incomplete at best. I wish Arkane could dedicate 6 more months to this game.
I have the logo tattooed on myself (along with Babylon 5). First played it around 16 pre-spoiler-filled internet and was blown away by my friend and I having completely different outcomes to pivotal moments of the game related to Paul Denton (no spoilers: if you know, you know).
Never worked in games (bar a bit of voice acting in The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex) but I think were it not for that era of gaming I’d never have ended up working on Homebrew or at GitHub.
Sadly the graphics have not aged well but if you can handle them: the writing and non-linear/branching plot and dialogue is still probably second to none.
It wasn't just misanthropy on our part.
Zooming out, macrohistorically[1], the amount of destruction that can be controlled by the individual soldier has increased, steadily at first, then exponentially in the modern era. Obviously the extreme example would be something like SADM[2], but this increase also includes the multiplying complex systems of the modern world - bulk ammunition, heavy vehicles, commercial aircraft. As the numbers needed for X level of destruction decreases, the span of viable ideologies increases; it's easier to convince 12 guys of nutty ideas than it is to convince 12,000. So, in the big view, the idea of big cultural icons getting flattened, this is something scifi has been kicking around for a while now. One could argue it's a significant pillar of "cyberpunk" worldbuilding: the persistent presence of the "crazies" wielding the modern tools of fuel, bullets, and nuclear bombs.
[1] Which is definitely the perspective of the Deus Ex creative team.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Muni...
Haven't been able to repeat that in Deus Ex, you can't play through the campaign as a total pacifist, and Carter explains as much right at the beginning.
100% of regular NPCs can be spared IIRC.
Or were there unconscious bodies on the ship from before your arrival? I do not remember that anymore.
It might be the "carry everyone to shore" thing was on a different playthrough...
It's an amazing game in its own right and holds up really well today. The problem with hopping directly into Deus Ex is that it's really showing its age these days, even with mods.
DX:HR is a prequel, so from a timeline perspective it makes sense to play it first :)
My advice is to put a few more points in your primary combat skill, and don’t forget that you can level up during the game (like I did!)
I remember playing it again and again as a teenager, each time finding something new, some shaft I hadn't explored or a character in some side street I hadn't talked to. I must have played through 15+ times.
My favorite quote: "A bomb!" -Joch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxOKEsBx4NU
Wann to try it again since i played it back then to its release, and back then i liked it but was too young to really get what it wants from me.
Revision is popular and cute, but changes too much. Level design on some levels is so different that you can't recognize them, I still get lost despite playing though it at least ten times, as original levels are burned in my memory.
Although this can be changed in settings, I'd still avoid Revision unless you want to have another go at it after finishing the original.
Paul Denton: Don't be so quick to trust the UN.
JC: Are you kidding?
JC: The UN's about the only chance we've got these days. If the U.S. spirals into another Civil War...
Paul Denton: A pretext, nothing more.
Paul Denton: The whole project of world government going back to the League of Nations has been funded and manipulated mainly by wealthy bankers.
JC (Jesus Christ): Is that so?
Paul Denton: Remember that the UN itself was built on land donated by John D. Rockefeller
Paul Denton: The wealthy have always been the ones to profit from one-world government
Paul Denton: The United Nations' secret goal... well, this is David Rockefeller's description, from half a century ago:
Paul Denton: "the supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers."
Paul Denton: The UN was founded not to end war but to gradually dissolve national governments and replace them with a Globalist meritocracy.
Paul Denton: Average people never benefit from government and business on a scale they can't even understand
great example in my mind of that games dont need to be perfect to be released or very memorable.
good writing is essential in my mind, dialogues and music / atmosphere. maybe its personal taste.
thanks for the lovely blog and memories :) totally makes me wanna go and replay them!
[https://www.moddb.com/mods/terminus-machina/images/the-human...]
The Stanley Parable is an exploration of the fact that this sort of "interactive storytelling" is largely impossible. It's not a coincidence that it was made as a mod for Half-Life 2 (and then as a Source game). The different paths represent different attempts by the game designer or the player to either fix or cope with the failure of the game as the Narrator originally envisioned it.
Some years later I learned some english and found out the game is deep with layers, and the more I play the more I learn something new.
I had no idea what I was in for, and as a 15 year old, I felt twists and surprises, and organic game reactions to things I did that blow my mind even today, and imo still haven't been matched. And leveling and skills truly mattered and were tied into the game. Inventory management and ammo was interesting, the interface was perfect. It also had a kind of intellectual curiosity (characters talking competently about surveillance state and capitalism!) in the dialog that I only ever felt in, say, Alpha Centauri and later, Disco Elysium. It's still the best PC game ever imo.
Edit: I think the most important thing about its legacy now, is that it engaged with conspiracies in a fundamentally different way, more like 90s X-Files style fascination and curiosity than anti-intellectualism of Alex Jones-style rabid misinformation. A critical nuance that gets lost when conspiracy cranks try to claim Deus Ex as theirs.
Edit 2: Respectfully, contra the article, if anything I think there's not enough hagiography surrounding Deus Ex. It's either beloved or not known, and the latter is the crime that needs rebalancing as it represents an example of what's possible in passion project game design that I think is just as important as it ever was. That matters infinitely more to me than sidecar questions of how more or less "living" it's game world was relative to its predecessor System Shock. I also think the analysis is a little bit off to criticize DX's three-choice ending as being too on-rails relative to System Shock, which is a one-stop boss battle that lasts like 15 seconds.
Now if only someone could make a game aping 'The Difference Engine' in the style of Dishonoured... the time is right for a steampunk equivalent!
Now with GMDX it's a must play.
When the game came out though the politics around conspiracy theories was very different. Deus Ex tried to cram in every conspiracy theory circulating at the time. MJ-12, the trilateral commission, Roswell...
> Lurking in the accusations against “wealthy bankers” is the oldest, ugliest conspiratorial trope of all, the idea — stemming from the 1903 forgery “The Protocol of the Elders of Zion” — that a cabal of Jews secretly run the world. “Famous conspiracy theories always turn out to be just antisemitism,” this website’s regular commenter Ross theorized after reading a piece I wrote about the thoroughly unpleasant Pierre Plantard, the man behind some of the most outlandish tales surrounding the French village of Rennes-le-Château. The more conspiracy theories I examine in depth, the more true this proposition seems.
While true, in 2026 if you're still conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism, you're part of the problem. Something something Epstein.
The good guys were trying to coordinate and make sure vaccine was widely distributed, and IIRC the original friends of the main character continue to believe in the value of UNATCO (the agency you work for in the game) and treat it like a good cause that was poisoned rather than a philosophical error.
I can see the libertarian bent, but with the very heavy qualifier that it's like Noam Chomsky 90s anarcho libertarianism than the joke that is today's fascist-friendly memeified online libertarianism. I doubt Tracer Tong and Alex Jones would have much in common if they tried to have a conversation. And it does give you three choices at the end of the day, and seems to mean it, though if you squint I suspect it's most sympathetic to Tracer Tong's preferred outcome.
I can’t recommend highly enough the remasters and remixes by Mothership Loudspeakerz.
> https://jarmitage99.itch.io/opende
— Malkavian Mod
https://www.it-he.org/deus.php
Something has gone very wrong if you're taking a silly story about the illuminati so seriously.
I found this author's take barely more coherent than the YouTube commentators he laments.
No, the author didn't say it was.
"Oh fuck off" said A.
The gameplay and graphics don't hold up but the story was absolutely prescient around AI, billionaire oligarchs, and mass surveillance.
There's a portion in the game when your brother Paul is sick and he tells you to leave him to fight off enemy goons alone. Apparently you can fight your way through the hotel and he survives all the way to the end of the game!
When the sequel came out, I was like "why the fuck is Paul still alive"
The issue with this is that the game doesn't really communicate this fact to you, and not killing the goons technically should mean that they're still going to go upstairs at some point and kill Paul.
The most hilarious part of this is that Paul himself says he's too weak to climb through the window, but as soon as those goons bust in through the front door, he whips out a 50 lb flame thrower and starts strafing around at 30 mph like he's in the motherfucking murder olympics.
You can kill Anna on the plane where you're supposed to kill Lebedev; the game accounts for this with voice dialogue and everything. Crazy. At that point in the game there is no reason for you to even try (and she's a tough match) unlike later on --- but you can!
I tried playing Alice a couple times when I got Steam in 2023, and I couldn't get into it. Tried another game from that era: Made it about halfway through Half Life 1 on a long flight and couldn't get into it either, even after I'd played Alyx.
It's wild how games that were considered state-of-the-art when we were kids can feel unplayably unpolished today.
IIRC Quake used “a” and “d” to… turn, instead of strafe, by default. Absolute madness. Can be played without a mouse I think(?).
On the other hand, it is still very cool that you can get the bad guys to fight each other sometimes. That should be a feature in every game really.
Second, there's Open Deus EX (I think not GMDX compatible yet) and DX-Rust, which it is.
I still play to that game, and it's my favourite among Slashem and some few interactive fiction ones.
OpenDE: Fast, vanilla https://github.com/jarmitage99/OpenDE
DX-Rust: Slow, AI slop, but it can be improved. It supports GMDX https://github.com/Grissyelda/dx-rust
If you use Recomp Launcher you can install these with ease, even on Steam Decks.
One thing strikes me however, as perhaps revealing my own naïveté:
> Lurking in the accusations against “wealthy bankers” is the oldest, ugliest conspiratorial trope of all, the idea — stemming from the 1903 forgery “The Protocol of the Elders of Zion” — that a cabal of Jews secretly run the world.
I never made that connection until literally reading this piece. Bankers weren’t all Jews, and not all Jews were Bankers. I had heard the stereotype, sure, but I never read said stereotype into such conspiracies or narratives. It just made logical sense that a newly-emerged global society formed around currency and trade would be manipulated by those people who specialize in said sectors, i.e. bankers and financiers. The fact said individuals continue having outsized import on daily news and current events almost cements the plot point as real prophecy instead of antisemitic nonsense, but I can also see how bad actors would tie hate speech to current events to boost their own platforms.
Just an odd bit of reflecting, is all.
Compared to those, all bankers of the world even combined are still a minor insignificant player. I wonder if we will ever see 'occupy sillicon valley' movement?
On the contrary: whenever I see someone accuse a work of antisemitism because it has greedy bankers, I think that says a lot more about the accuser than it does the work in question. It is not normal to look at a fictional banker sect and assume that they are meant to be Jews, or a reflection on Jews.