Very rarely do great games spark into life, perfectly realised at conception. Most struggle for existence, mutating ceaselessly as they gestate. But Deus Ex may well be one of videogaming’s most complicated pregnancies.
“I started thinking about a game like Deus Ex when I was with Origin in 1994,” begins Warren Spector. “I was tired of fantasy and science fiction and wanted to do something more down-to-earth, more grounded in reality. A few years later, John Romero offered me the opportunity to join Ion Storm and make 'the game of my dreams’. In addition to wanting to relieve a little personal boredom, I thought a more believable setting and freeform approach to gameplay would appeal to people who might never consider playing something designed by and for hardcore gamers.”
Romero’s was something of a brave proposition. By this time Spector was at Looking Glass Technologies – the innovative development studio behind Thief and System Shock, which was about to go belly-up, due partly to its perfectionist dogma. And here was another epic undertaking. But in September 1997, Spector and half a dozen ex-Looking Glass colleagues drafted the first Deus Ex design document and Eidos agreed to fund the project.
Although the commitment to an open gameplay experience – with multiple methods of completing each mission – was there at the beginning, the early story draft would be unrecognisable to Deus Ex veterans. “The original plot was this sprawling, crazy thing with 25 missions in all,” explains Spector. “There was a big mission series all about a plot to take over the government by driving it into a state of emergency. This would call into play a variety of executive orders, which would in turn create a shadow government in Mount Weather under the Greenbrier Estate.
“And that’s all real. One of the designers read about Mount Weather on a website somewhere and said it should be in the game. There really are these executive orders that have been passed since the Eisenhower administration that say, ‘Here’s what’s gonna happen in the state of national emergency.’ And I started reading the conspiracy theories surrounding them, and did a legal search. I had a lawyer go and get a copy of the original executive orders – she could probably get fired. And it’s all true. Recently when an announcement came that there was this shadow government in operation, congress was going, ‘This is an outrage. How could we not have known?’ And everyone in the studio was going, ‘We knew about that three years ago!’”
There were also plans to include the White House as an explorable location, and when it emerged that these had been cut, Internet speculation about government intervention was rife. “There were rumours going around that we deleted the White House because we were too close to reality. In fact, we did discover some really interesting things about the building. When putting together pieces of blueprint and public images and maps from various sources, we thought, ‘Hey wait, there’s a little hole here, and we don’t know what’s in there.’ None of the maps identify it, but there’s a space that has to be filled with something. I think we really did hit on some weird stuff, but we cut the mission because we realised that a few thousand little square rooms would be really boring – we didn’t pull it out because the government made us.”
But Spector admits there were interactions between Ion Storm and the authorities. “We did get some secret services guy contacting Ion at one point – I’m not sure what that was all about. And we were contacted by one government agency after we put up unatco.com [a teaser deliberately designed to look like an authentic government website, but now defunct]. We linked to some totally innocuous government agencies from the site and the day we went live one of them got so many hits we brought their server down. We got calls from their lawyers…”
Along with Washington, further locations were purged. A visit to Russia, an abandoned space station, a moon base – all, according to Spector, jettisoned as the design tightened. “We redid much of the plot mid-way through development, when the designers realised our original story, in its totality, was inexpressible given our technology.” Other late changes would follow. “After blindtesting by some other studios, we redesigned the skill and augmentation systems fairly dramatically. And I think we were early in beta when we realised that we hadn’t planned things so players encountered NPCs several times – players weren’t establishing relationships with the characters so the story lacked resonance. We made a major pass at the plot so folks from early missions showed up again and again. That was a critical moment in the game’s development and it came very late.”
Even the central concept of open simulation had to be gradually rethought. “At first, we wanted to get openness from a deep simulation of relatively small spaces. The idea was to give players lots of tools so the core ideas of choice, consequence and player freedom would naturally follow. We ended up with more expansive spaces than anticipated, a less robust simulation, more traditional game systems and more designer-crafted situations. It all worked, I think, but it wasn’t exactly what we intended.”