15 years of Deus Ex with Warren Spector

The innovation that Deus Ex brought with it 15 years ago permeates through the industry to this day, a fact that director/producer Warren Spector can hardly believe…

You had wanted to create something very different with Deus Ex, what drove this ambition?

The reason I wanted to make Troubleshooter and, later, Deus Ex, was because I was sick to death of space marines and knights in armour, super soldiers, orcs, elves. I just felt stifled by sci-fi and fantasy, which dominated roleplaying and first-person shooters at the time. I felt like I’d scream if I had to make another game like that. So I set out to make the “real-world roleplaying game”.

What were some of the core design decisions you decided on for Deus Ex?

There were three core fictional tenets that survived from day one. 1) What happens when you have a guy who believes in good and evil and throw him into a world that’s all shades of gray? 2) What would the world be like if every conspiracy people believe to be true is in fact true? 3) And what does it mean to be human (and what does that say about how the world should relate to machines)? I think all of those are pretty well expressed. In addition, there was one core gameplay tenet that never changed: what if players could solve problems however they wanted to and see the consequences? Could we share authorship with players in the telling a story where no two players have the same experience? I think we did a pretty good job of that, too.

The setting was one of the stand-out features; what was that design process like?

The initial impetus was mine (the world of conspiracies) but the world itself was a team effort. I remember having long discussions with designers like Steve Powers and Kraig Count early on. And later, guys like Harvey Smith and Bob White came along and contributed a bunch. And, of course, Sheldon Pacotti, our lead writer contributed a ton to the setting. Obviously, we were influenced by the movie Blade Runner. But we were also totally into the pre-millennial madness of conspiracy theories. You wouldn’t believe some of the things people believe! And, finally, there was a real commitment to making the game as realistic as possible. I got blueprints for the Statue of Liberty… took a bunch of reference photos of the catacombs in Paris. Everything was as realistic as possible. I even got maps of the layout of Area 51!

Were there many changes to the setting and tone throughout development?

Well, we were originally going to set a mission in the White House. And there were some missions set in the space between the Mexican border and Austin, TX. And we knew what was happening in China and Africa and even the asteroid belt. None of that made it into the game. The tone of the game was the work of everyone on the team kind of rallying behind the Blade Runner look and feel. Total cliché now but I like to think we were there before it became cliché! The team really committed to that and nailed it, I think.

You wanted to make a game that played differently to anything else; what was the process of designing something so purposefully innovative?

I mean, it’s not like we were the first RPG, or the first FPS, or the first stealth game. We just wanted to be the first game to combine all three genres into one package. And we were committed to the idea of choice and consequence, of letting players tell their own minute-to-minute story in the context of a narrative arc created by us, the developers. Very few developers were doing that back then. Put that together and you have something we all recognised would be new and fresh and, yes, innovative.

So how did the combination of RPG and FPS mechanics come about?

I think that combination was a direct result of working at Origin and Looking Glass. I mean, Underworld kind of did something similar. And System Shock. And Thief. We just took the RPG aspects further. At some level, you could say that’s all we did. Man, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so innovative, does it. I should shut up now!

With complete freedom of player control so novel at the time, what kind of new challenges did you encounter implementing the feature?

Freedom over how you tackle a situation was the core part of the game’s design. At some level, nothing else mattered, at least not to me. Deus Ex may be the clearest example, but every game I’ve worked on has been an attempt to empower players to direct their own experience. Did player choice impact the way environments and missions were designed? Oh, man, yes. I used to tell interviewees that what we did at Ion Storm was harder than anything they’d ever done before – it’s tough to put your creativity on the back burner so players can express their creativity. Most potential hires thought I was nuts. I got used to seeing that knowing, indulgent nod that said, “Sure, what you do is harder… whatever”. The ones who got hired often came back to me later and said “You were right!” To get some real insight into this, talk to some of the designers on the team and they’ll tell you just how hard it was!

Were these choices difficult to implement?

A lot of people think Deus Ex is a game about choices. It is, sort of, but the important bit isn’t the choices, it’s the consequences of those choices. The game had to notice what you were doing and respond appropriately. If you’re not showing the consequences, choices are irrelevant. If the choices don’t matter, you might as well not go to the trouble of offering them. That’s just a waste of time and money. There are dozens of challenges associated with choice and consequence gameplay, not least of which is containing what could very easily turn into a traditional branching narrative. We did not want to do that, so we structured the game in a way that constrained the problem. Basically, Deus Ex is a completely linear storyline but the story is told by traversing a series of self-contained sandboxes. Within a given story element, or sandbox, all we needed to know was where the player started and where the player ended – which we determined. How they got where we needed them to go was up to them.

The game’s story was heavily praised at the time. How was it guided during development?

Several of us worked on the original story. I sort of took over after a while and took all the elements we’d come up with and put them together into a completely unimplementable kitchen sink of ideas. Two things happened to fix that: first, Harvey Smith, the lead designer, and Steve Powers, one of my favourite designers on the planet, came to me and said, “Warren, we can’t tell this story.” They took me out to lunch and laid out a smaller, more constrained, more do-able version, which is pretty much what we built.

The second thing that happened was I found Sheldon Pacotti, who became our lead writer – and for much of the game’s development, our only writer. Much of the game’s thematic depth and what people think of as the story’s “intelligence” came right out of his imagination. We all contributed, but the game would have been radically different without Sheldon’s contributions. A real unsung hero. The weird thing was he had carpal tunnel syndrome so we got Dragon Naturally Speaking [voice recognition software] and he spoke all the dialogue and books and such in the game. It was entertaining walking by his office sometimes!

And how about the music? How did the team settle on what would fit the game’s style?

I don’t know what more I can say beyond the fact that Alexander Brandon did a great job on the music and sound. He created the distinctive Deus Ex ‘sound’. One of the things I think Deus Ex: Human Revolution did right was capturing that sound. I was pretty psyched about that. One other thing, audio-wise: not a lot of people remember that there were three or four tunes written by Reeves Gabrels – a guitar god who used to play with David Bowie. One of the big thrills for me on Deus Ex was getting to hang out with him at his New York studio. I even got a guitar from him – a bubblegum pink ‘57 Les Paul Junior! Of course, Alex had to take those tunes and get them working with the Deus Ex audio system, so his fingerprints are all over Reeves’ stuff, too.

What sorts of problems did you encounter during development that you didn’t anticipate?

It might be better to ask what problems we didn’t encounter during development! I made mistakes in team structure, for sure. There were running issues with the folks paying the bills about why we weren’t “just making a shooter”. There were game systems and story elements I came up with that the team and testers had to tell me were unimplementable or just plain bad. I wanted everything in the game and the team had to talk me down from some pretty crazy stuff a few times. And despite that, the game was so ambitious and we were doing so many things no one had ever done before, it was just plain nuts. How did we handle things? I changed the team structure; the team beat me into submission; we worked really hard… it was game development, you know?

Looking back, is there anything that you would have done differently?

You know, I don’t really think I’d change anything (as long as there are the same technical limitations in the equation!). The game was of its time, technically, and in terms of its UI and its graphics. And, though every detail changed – thanks to a team that was way smarter than I was – the game played pretty much exactly the way I imagined and hoped it would when I first started thinking about it in 1994, long before we shipped.

Did you get a sense that Deus Ex was destined to be the success it was, prior to its release?

Yes and no. I mean, the positive response we got – from testers, folks at trade shows, journalists – gave us some hope. But I remember sitting at my desk when we gold mastered, putting my head in my hands on my desk thinking to myself, “If people compare our combat to Half-Life, we’re dead; if people compare our stealth to Thief, we’re dead; if people compare our role-playing elements to what BioWare does, we’re dead. But if people get that they can do anything they want, we’re going to rule the world.” Things worked out okay.

You can find more Retro interview access like this in every issue of games™. This issue, we chat with Red Faction’s Mike Kulas