Might be the greatest game ever made. I was raving like a lunatic about it to a friend in public once and a guy next to us turned around and interrupted me to say it’s the only game he’s ever played because he felt no other games could top it.
I was 14 and impressionable, but when I played, the "twist" of the game coincided exactly with the moment I decided to switch to the "terrorists" and tried to kill Anna Navarre. Then the rest of the game went exactly as I hoped it would. It completely blew my mind.
I'm not ashamed to say that Deus Ex was extremely formative and the reason why now, almost in my 40s, I still read about political philosophy, anarchism, and cultivate a healthy distrust of the government and mass media. Which in turn also gave me a direct pipeline towards crypto-anarchism and Internet privacy rights.
When I first played this game, I couldn’t speak english and just thought it was cool.
I still remember the exact moment I learned the word “surrender” from the terrorist leader at the statue, because I’ve replayed the first level hundreds of times, since my pirated version of the game would crash around one of the first levels.
When I was a late teenager I learned english and my mind was blown that the game actually had deep meaning behind it.
It's the game that made me stop using cheats. I was young and discovered cheat codes and used them in every game that made them available.
I remember completing Deus Ex and finding it "just ok", but then I read how people talked about it, and realized that taking away the challenge from games was making them worse!
Never used one again, aside from when I discovered Cheat Engine, which was amazing for somebody who was starting to get interested in programming.
I opened the level file I was currently in and filled a room with every weapon upgrade and skill booster. Then put bosses outside the door, saved, loaded the game. If I could get in, I could have the stuff.
Kids these days don’t have access to edit their games like we did. It’s why crafting games are popular, the only “level editors” that remain once companies realized they could monetize extra content.
IMO - There's a few games that match it, but nothing "in the same category". Braid, Portal, Stanley Parable come to mind. (Also what I hear about Baldur's Gate 3, but I haven't played.)
But the depth of character, discussions on morality - I still reference the MJ12/Illuminati portrayal from Deus Ex as a discussion on leadership and morality - the depth of gameplay, the way it created a feel of a much bigger, open world.
>Also what I hear about Baldur's Gate 3, but I haven't played.
They're very different, so they're difficult to compare. BG3 is very much a tabletop RPG in electronic form, with a focus on tactics and positioning. I guess you could call it fantasy XCOM. In terms of player choices, BG3 is more open, though I'd say it's almost to its detriment, because it's jankier than DX. You'll probably get at least one bugged out quest during a playthrough. Nothing game-breaking, but still. It kind of kills the immersion.
Yeah. I was just a teenager when I first played, but the prison escape and the associated revelations were breathtaking to me and once of my first "holy shit" moments in playing a PC game. And not the only such moment just from that game! The Agent Navarre airplane scene was incredible. And I loved that you had conversations, like with the Australian expat at the Hong Kong bar or the AI, or the terrorist at the statue of Liberty, that were good conversations where the payoff was just intellectual curiosity and the content itself. Hong Kong was amazing to just explore too.
I still haven't played anything like it some 25 years later unless The Nameless Mod counts.
While still not treating its audience like idiots. A modern game with political undertones would be much more in your face in a us vs them kinda way and unable to deal with any sort of nuance, just like our political discourse.
Several years ago Elon Musk did an interview with Marques Lee Brown praising the original Deus Ex and stating his disappointment with the sequel.
In the intervening years he's invested tons of money into neuroaugmentation, capturing global telecommunications in a massive satellite array, buying out the US president, and poured money into a compute cluster for a superintelligent AI finetuned to be obedient to his will (although it deviates from time to time)
Basically Elon has turned into the supervillain Bob Page from Deus Ex sans the "globalist agenda" and with a dash of stormfront white nationalism to boot.
The original game takes place in 2052, and we are headed straight towards that dystopia.
One thing I found especially disgraceful was Elon pointing to the games narrative as a reason to be skeptical of measures to limit the spread of covid, noting that in the game the a plague intended for social control.
But... in the game the good guys were the ones trying to make sure everyone had the vaccine, which Elon conveniently omitted when tweeting about it. What makes his invokation of the game more hilarious is exactly what you noted: the parallels between Elon and Bob Page, a billionaire tech mogul and one of the main villains, are impossible to ignore.
Technically in the game both the disease and the control of the supply of vaccine are used for social control and political leverage. It was a plotline ripped directly from popular media at the time, mainly the X-files Movie which had a very similar if not identical plot of shadowy government conspirators named the "illuminati" spreading an virus but secretly manufacturing a vaccine for themselves, their families, and certain government officials.
The game, both in the 2000s when it came out, and today has bits of both left wing and right wing elements. The NSF faction read as libertarian right wing terrorists, and UNATCO is literally an arm of the "globalist" UN which would probably appeal to the right-wing qAnon types today. But the actual villain is basically a dude who is exactly like Elon.
>and the control of the supply of vaccine are used for social control and political leverage.
The bad guys were trying to manipulate supply of it. The good guys were trying to make sure it was available to everyone. Interestingly, even the bad guys understood the necessity of vaccines, and their ability to leverage them for power hinged on a shared global understanding of their importance.
What it meant to be curious about conspiracy theories in the late '90s is fundamentally different than what it is in the present day, in a way that I think unfortunately distorts the experience of the game for people who don't know what it was like before. Hence Elon's bizarre attempt at retrofitting it to anti-covid narratives.
In 2 years it matches the date of the prequel Human Revolution. On the technology side there's still a lot that remains sci-fi, but the themes are at least on the horizon.
I recall watching a review in 2020/2021 where the reviewer stated how awkward he felt about the way it just took every conspiracy theory and just asked “what if it were true?”
Bear in mind that, at this time, people genuinely believed there was some nutjob conspiracies being revealed by QAnon. Ironically, half of them seemed to come directly from Deus Ex…
Deus Ex was drawing from a palpably '90s flavor of fascination with aliens, conspiracies, and alternative history. In the present day that same subject matter is unfortunately associated with things like vaccine denial and anti-democratic nationalistic movements. It's the difference between the X-Files and Alex Jones, essentially.
damn, for real? I still haven't played it -- I didn't have a Windows machine when it came out, and by the time I did have one, it slipped through the cracks.. it's really that good? That reminds me I do have one friend who says it's his top favorite game, actually, heh. It's especially strange I haven't played it since I generally love cyberpunk/dystopian stuff like that!
Agreed: didn't listen to the doubters, I think it's still the best PC game ever, even now. The level design still rocks, the dialog is great, the items, skills, inventory management, richness of environments, and breadth of locations, it set a standard I don't think has been eclipsed (for better or worse). I think Dishonored has a liiitle bit of the same vibe but not really, as it has no prescient future oriented politics. But yeah, ignore the haters, it's the best ever.
While I don’t agree with the best ever chorus, I’d say it holds up decently well with mods. The HD mod makes the graphics acceptable, and I replayed it in 2023 or something and it was still great.
A better rendering-engine is a no-brainer—the original shadows tend to become olive-banded messes—but my experience with texture-pack mods isn't as good.
IIRC they tended to make the overall experience worse, with jarring inconsistencies of high-poly/high-res objects versus unmodified portions of the environment.
Plus nowadays "low res" is sometimes it's own art-style. :p
I disagree. The political undertones in the setting of a global pandemic hit even harder today than when the game released in 2000.
I especially loved the "conspiracy" talk about corporations consolidating their powers thanks to government-sponsored wage slavery and higher taxes to the individual vs companies. It's something that's even more relevant today, especially in this space of entrepreneurship.
For sure! I just meant that when it came out it was revolutionary and cutting edge, if you play it for the first time now you have to get past the outdated graphics and clunky gameplay to really appreciate it.
I think things are a product of their time, and you had to be there for the vast majority of it. The Matrix was a revolution when it came out, but now it just kind of looks the same as everything else (even dated), but that's because everything else copied it.
I understand your point, but for some reason there's some corner of my brain that's interested in litigating this if you'll bear with me. I definitely think the color of nostalgia is a real thing, and for me that imprinting shows up the most in still having an inexplicable affinity for '90s nu metal that I can't really reconcile with any notion of sophisticated taste.
But I think sometimes you see the opposite thing too, where a rewatch or re-listen is very disappointing, and undermines your impression that something is great. So it's clear that at least some of the time the nostalgia effect falls away. And I like to think staying power after repeated watchings can testify to "classic" status. But I think the reason I'm interested in drawing distinctions here is because I don't like the idea that Deus Ex, the greatest game of all time imo, can be pointed to to vindicate modern day conspiracy theorists, like they are the same thing.
In fact, the next time Warren Spector is interviewed I hope someone asks how he feels about his game being invoked in that way.
I think I made the wrong point when I wrote about nostalgia. I don't mean so much "you're remembering the work as better than it was", but more "you remember the zeitgeist that made the work great".
I watched Macgyuver (my favourite childhood show) recently, and it was terrible, twenty minutes of filler for one cool engineering scene, way worse than I remembered it. However, it's not the show that's changed, it's that I forgot what the 90s were like and how cool Macgyuver was in that zeitgeist.
Similarly, it's not that the Matrix isn't great, it's that, if you watched it in its era, you may remember how unlike anything else it was. You can't know how groundbreaking it was unless you remember that era, otherwise it's just one movie of many.
I can't speak to your later points as I don't know what Deus Ex is about or how it's used to vindicate conspiracy theorists, unfortunately.
The dialogue options and scenario possibility outcomes were very impressive for its time. Still kinda is today. It's more in depth than you'd think. The levels are pretty sandboxy with how they allow you to approach missions and it still holds up today. Deus Ex came out in that period of time where stealth games were popular, so there's a lot of emphasis on subterfuge mechanics.
