Untitled

DevelopmentEdit

Main article: Development of Deus Ex

Deus Ex director Warren Spector and designer Harvey Smith

After Looking Glass Technologies and Origin Systems released Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds in January 1993, producerWarren Spector began to plan Troubleshooter, the game that would become Deus Ex.[31]Spector found himself burnt out on fantasy and science fiction settings, and hoped to make a game set in the real world.[32] In his 1994 proposal, he described the concept as “Underworld-style first-person action” in a real world setting with “big-budget, nonstop action”.[32] Spector later commented that Origin did not have the interest, nor Looking Glass the funding, to produce the game.[33]He eventually left Origin for Looking Glass and continued to develop the game’s concept,[31] but his project Junction Point, which was inspired by ideas fromTroubleshooter, was cancelled.[citation needed]After Spector and his team were laid off from Looking Glass, John Romero of Ion Stormoffered him the chance to make his “dream game” without any restrictions. Spector quickly joined the company.[34]

Preproduction for Deus Ex began around August 1997[35] and lasted roughly six months. The six-person team[31] came from Looking Glass’s Austin studio.[36] Spector, the team’s director and producer, saw their work as improving upon the game design ideas of Origin, Looking Glass, and Valve Corporationby doing what those companies did not.[35]The game’s “ironic”[32][37] working title wasShooter: Majestic Revelations, and it was scheduled for release on Christmas 1998.[38]The team developed the setting before thegame mechanics.[31] Noticing his wife’s fascination with The X-Files, Spector connected the “real world, millennial weirdness, [and] conspiracy” topics on his mind and decided to make a game about them that would appeal to a wide audience.[33] Shooter‘s fiction was based in part on conspiracy theories related to Area 51, CIA drug trafficking, the John F. Kennedy assassination, the Majestic 12, and aMasonic bunker beneath Denver International Airport. The team designed over 200 characters without associated in-game roles,[clarification needed] which was both helpful when designing missions and unhelpful as they attempted to reduce their scope.[31] Later in 1997, Spector wrote a “manifesto” on his ideal game and the structure of role-playing video games.[31] His principles included “problems, not puzzles”, “no forced failure”, “players do; NPCs watch”, and “areas with multiple entrance and exit points”.[32] In retrospect, Spector believed that Deus Exaccomplished the intent of his manifesto.[31]

The Shooter design document cast the player as an augmented agent working against an elite cabal in the “dangerous and chaotic” 2050s.[32] It cited Half-Life, Fallout, Thief: The Dark Project, and GoldenEye 007 as game design influences, and used the stories and settings of Colossus: The Forbin Project, The Manchurian Candidate, Robocop, The X-Filesand Men in Black as reference points. According to the document, the game would engage with “the millennial madness that’s gripping the world … and a general fascination with conspiracy theories and the desire to play with high-tech espionage toys”.[32] The team designed a skill systemthat featured “special powers” derived from nanotechnological augmentation, and avoided the inclusion of die rolling and skills that required micromanagement.[39]Augmentations were unique to the player character. By March 1998, preproduction had generated 300 pages of documentation. The document grew to 500 pages, with “radically different” content, by the game’s April 1999 Alpha 1 deadline.[40] Of Spector’s original design document, the marketing section was the only part left unedited.[38]

In early 1998, the Deus Ex team grew to 20 people and the game entered a 28-month production phase.[35] Spector hired new staff for his Austin studio, and was assigned an art team from Ion Storm’s Dallas branch.[40] The development team consisted of three programmers, six designers, seven artists, a writer, an associate producer, a “tech”, and Warren Spector, the producer and director. Two writers and four testers were hired as contractors.[35] Chris Norden was the lead programmer and assistant director, Harvey Smith the lead designer, Jay Lee the lead artist, and Sheldon Pacotti the lead writer.[34]However, Spector’s initial management structure, which involved two competing design teams and the matrix management of the Dallas art team, was a failure.[36]According to Spector, the team was interested in multiple video game genres, and it contained both design maximalists who wanted to “do everything” and design minimalists who wanted to do a few things well.[40] Close friends of the team who understood the intentions behind the game were invited to playtest and give feedback. The wide range of input led to debates in the office and changes to the game.[40] Spector later concluded that the team was “blinded by promises of complete creative freedom”, and by their belief that the game would have no budget, marketing or time restraints.[41] By mid-1998, the game’s title had become Deus Ex, derived from the Latin literary device deus ex machina (“god from the machine”) in which a plot is resolved by an unpredictable intervention.[42] Spector acknowledged its grammatical faults as a title, but he liked it because of its relevance to the in-game struggle for power, to the medium’s storytelling difficulties, to the game being played on a computer, and to the “self-referential” acceptance of trying one’s best to resolve affairs.[42]