Ion Storm Austin’s Deus Ex was a critical and commercial success when it was released in the summer of 2000, laying the groundwork for an enduring franchise.
More importantly, it inspired a generation of game designers to dig into the nooks, crannies, and conveniently-placed ducts of what we now shorthand as "immersive sims," those games that ask players to make interesting choices in how they want to confront or slip past obstacles in their path.
Shortly after the game shipped, game director Warren Spector wrote a broad postmortem of the project. Today at GDC, he revisited the subject after 17 years to offer some fresh insight into how the groundbreaking game came to be.
“People always ask me which of my games are my favorite; don’t ever ask a game designer that,” said Spector. “The closest I ever get to answering is saying that the game I’m most proud of is Deus Ex.”
Spector acknowledges that a lot of what he's talking about is standard practice in the game industry now, but he reminds fellow devs that it absolutely was not common practice 20 years ago when the game was first conceived.
“Conceptually, I thought of Deus Ex as a genre-busting game, which let me say, really enamored us to the marketing folks. They loved that,” said Sepctor. “If you ever want to make a marketing person unhappy, mash some genres together.”
The game was envisioned as a mix of first-person shooter, adventure game, and RPG. But Spector traces the history of its development back to playing tabletop games, long before he became a game designer.
"I would not be here, you would not be here, if not for that game of Dungeons and Dragons"
“Let me tell you where it began -- this is going to get a little embarrassing,” said Spector. “It all began with Dungeons and Dragons.”
In 1978, to be precise, when he started playing D&D with a new Dungeon Master.
“I would not be here, you would not be here, if not for that game of Dungeons and Dragons,” said Spector.
The Dungeon Master of that game was “cyberpunk guru” Bruce Sterling, and Spector says the experience was meaningful not because of the story being told, but because of how it was being told -- by Spector and his friends, under the guidance of Sterling.
“The story belonged to Bruce, but every detail belonged to us,” said Spector. “I was completely hooked; I played in that campaign for ten years.”
So how does that lead to Deus Ex? Spector says it inspired his entire career in game design, a long-running attempt on his part to try and recreate that experience he had playing D&D for the first time in ‘78.
“That’s been my life mission: to recreate that feeling,” he said. “Every game I’ve worked on, every single one, has been trying to engage players in the telling of the story. My only hope is to do it a little better every time.”
So Spector became a game designer, and joined Origin Systems in 1989 to work on games like Ultima Underworld. But at some point he got tired of making those games, and he decided to “try and swing for the fences.”
“I was sick to death of making games about guys in plate armor swinging swords,” said Spector. He says he wanted to make what he saw as a “real-world role-playing game” in which the player’s choices would say more about the player themselves than their in-game avatar
“I don’t care about your puppet; I care about you,” he said.
He also wanted every player to get to the end of the story; he wanted to tell a story with players the way Sterling told a story with him and his friends back in the ‘70s.
At Origin Systems he pitched a game concept that allowed him to do all this: something called (Trouble)shooter, which was a sort of hard-boiled noir game. Electronic Arts and Origin weren’t interested at all, and Spector shelved the idea. A few years past, he left Origin and joined Looking Glass, where a game called Thief was being developed.
Spector says he had a moment while playing Thief: he hit a part that was too tough to sneak through, and impossible to fight through. So he asked the team to make the player character tougher, so he could fight his way through; but the team balked, saying that wasn’t the point of Thief. The game was about sneaking, after all; it wouldn’t make sense to let players smash through a roadblock.
That, says Spector, was when he got the idea to go back to (Trouble)shooter. So he left Looking Glass shortly before Thief shipped, and wound up nearly signing a contract with Electronic Arts to make a totally different game.
“That’s when John Romero called me and said don’t sign the contract; join me at Ion Storm and make the game of your dreams,” said Spector. “Who can say no to that?”
And so Ion Storm Austin was born, with the game that would become Deus Ex as its debut project. But before work got underway, devs may appreciate Spector's recollection of asking himself a series of questions he calls the 6 + 2 + 1 -- a vetting process he says he applies to all games he works on.
“Why I don’t call them the nine questions, I don’t know,” said Spector. “But if I can’t answer any of these questions I don’t make the game.”
What’s the core idea? Can you describe the core of the game in 2-3 sentences?
Why do this game?
What are the development challenges?
How well-suited to games is the idea?
What’s the player fantasy? (If the fantasy and goals aren’t there, it’s probably a bad idea)
What does the player do? (What are the “verbs” of the game?)
Has anyone done this before?
What’s the one new thing? (“You can always find one thing that hasn’t been done before [in games], even if you’re making a My Little Pony game.”)
Do you have something to say? (“In Deus Ex I wanted to explore all sorts of big issues,” said Spector. “And I wanted players to explore those things in ways that only games could do.”)
All of these questions were answerable for Deus Ex, so in 1997 work on the project got underway at Ion Storm Austin.
“If we were gonna plug into the real cultural zeitgeist, we had to play close attention to things in the real world,” said Spector. Things like mechanically-augmented soldiers, or the rising tide of terrorism.
“You didn’t have to be a genius, even in 1997, to see that the news was increasingly filled with reports of terrorism,” he added.
”And really interesting to us was the rise of nanotechnology; the dangers of that seemed fun to explore. But most importantly, everywhere you looked in 1997, it seemed like there was a conspiracy theory,” said Spector. “The world of Deus Ex was being created all around us; we didn’t have to make anything up. It was great!”
In short, Spector says the game was designed to answer five big questions:
What would happen if you mashed up the adventure game, shooter, and RPG genres?
What would happen if you dropped a secret agent into a world wih no black and white -- just shades of grey?
