My favourite ever games journalism quote:

"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 journalist understood the assignment!

This goes beyond just the press really.

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.

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.

Hong Kong Streets FTW! I remember having it on a playlist with my kids in the car.

I loved the theme changes on them -- I remember HK Streets had explore, combat and death scene; transitions felt seamless in the game.

UNATCO theme is absolutely legendary, and so are many other tracks in the original.

I actually got chills during the surprise post-credits scene in Deus Ex: Human Revolution when the og Deus Ex theme started playing.

I’m on a metal discord server where the soundtrack regularly shows up in people’s weekly/monthly charts. Amazing music.

I can recommend the HD remix.

If anyone wants to play it again, dont forget the amazing mods available: https://www.moddb.com/games/deus-ex/mods

New renderers, new engines, The Purist Mod, GMDX, The Nameless Mod...

A remaster is apparently in the works.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3131640/Deus_Ex_Remastere...

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.

The studio will be fine. They'll use AI but it won't be a buggy vibe coded mess; they'll actually test it and refine it. That's the hard part.

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".

[1] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-...

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.

Also, if you haven't, Prey (2017) is the final song of that genre and probably the best of them.

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.

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).

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 played it for the first time using Deus Ex: Revision. It's very good.

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.

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.

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.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Muni...

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.

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 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.

JC: Blackmail of the U.S. government could not possibly escape the notice of the United Nations

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

I'm working to make open-source the webgl port in a few days! I love this game.

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.

Changed my life. Still the best game. Lapautin machine, etched into my mind.

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.

Metal Gear Solid 2 should get a mention if we're talking about prophetic games

> The secret organization that J.C. Denton works for is the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

If only the anti-government people could be told how much federal agencies do for us covertly, they'd change their attitude.

Black helicopters. I always knew they exist!

As always, someone has built a browser playable version:

> https://jarmitage99.itch.io/opende

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.

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.

Now with GMDX it's a must play.

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...

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.

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.

The background behind the text makes it hard to read. Getting a bunch of horizontal lines that intersect whole lines of text

Do you have a single fact to back that up?

What a shame.

How bout some soy food?

Paul... I... I... I thought you were a GEP gun.

— Malkavian Mod

what a great game! *nostalgic tears dropped*

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"

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. Made it about halfway through Half Life on a long flight, and same.

It's wild how games that were considered state-of-the-art when we were kids can feel unplayably unpolished today.

It is funny to go back and play some classics like that.

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.

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

"See how easily our technologies turn on us? The more power you think you have, the more quickly it slips from your grasp." - Tracer Tong (Ion Storm, 2000)

Reference: Deus Ex [Windows video game]. (2000). Austin, Texas: Ion Storm.

---

"As long as technology has a global reach, someone will have the world in the palm of his hand. If not Bob Page, then Everett, Dowd..." - Tracer Tong (Ion Storm, 2000)

Reference: Deus Ex [Windows video game]. (2000). Austin, Texas: Ion Storm.

JC! The net's going black!

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.

Just an odd bit of reflecting, is all.