Deus Ex

"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.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxOKEsBx4NU

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 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.

Edit 2: Respectfully, contra the article, if anything I think there's not enough hagiography surrounding Deus Ex. It's either beloved or not known, and the latter is the crime that needs rebalancing as it represents an example of what's possible in passion project game design that I think is just as important as it ever was. That matters infinitely more to me than sidecar questions of how more or less "living" it's game world was relative to its predecessor System Shock. I also think the analysis is a little bit off to criticize DX's three-choice ending as being too on-rails relative to System Shock, which is a one-stop boss battle that lasts like 15 seconds.

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

The gameplay and graphics don't hold up but the story was absolutely prescient around AI, billionaire oligarchs, and mass surveillance.

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.

Second, there's Open Deus EX (I think not GMDX compatible yet) and DX-Rust, which it is.

I still play to that game, and it's my favourite among Slashem and some few interactive fiction ones.

OpenDE: Fast, vanilla https://github.com/jarmitage99/OpenDE

DX-Rust: Slow, AI slop, but it can be improved. It supports GMDX https://github.com/Grissyelda/dx-rust

If you use Recomp Launcher you can install these with ease, even on Steam Decks.