Speaker A
Okay, I've been told it's time to get started. Wow, there is a huge echo up here. That's going to be fun for the next hour. All right, so you folks all do realize you're here to hear about a 17-year-old game, right?
GDC Festival talk on Deus Ex by its creator, exploring design, history, and impact of the genre-busting 1999 classic.
Key Takeaways
- Deus Ex is a genre-busting game that blends multiple gameplay styles to create an immersive and collaborative storytelling experience.
- Player choice and unique narrative outcomes were central design goals, reflecting the developer’s passion for shared authorship.
- The game’s roots lie in the developer’s early Dungeons & Dragons experience and prior immersive simulation projects.
- Deus Ex challenged conventional game design norms of its era and influenced future game development practices.
- The development journey included overcoming publisher skepticism and refining ideas over several years.
Summary
- The speaker discusses the design philosophies behind Deus Ex, emphasizing its genre mashup nature combining immersive simulation, RPG, FPS, and adventure elements.
- Deus Ex is set in a near-future dystopic cyberpunk world where conspiracy theories are true, inspired by works like Neuromancer and The X-Files.
- The talk highlights the importance of player collaboration in storytelling, aiming for a unique experience shaped by player choices.
- The origins of the game trace back to the speaker's formative experience with Dungeons & Dragons in 1978, which inspired a lifelong mission to recreate shared storytelling in games.
- Previous work on immersive sims like Underworld, System Shock, and Thief laid the groundwork for Deus Ex’s design.
- The speaker expresses frustration with traditional fantasy and sci-fi game tropes, motivating a shift toward a 'real world role-playing game' with meaningful player choice.
- Early concepts like the game Troubleshooter at Origin evolved into Deus Ex after initial publisher disinterest.
- The talk includes reflections on what the team did right and wrong during development and the game's reception.
- Deus Ex was innovative for its time, introducing design practices that are now common but were novel in the late 1990s.
- The speaker emphasizes the goal of giving players authorial control to create a personal narrative experience.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
I'll take that as a yes. So for starters, people often ask me which of my games I like the best or which I think is the best. And don't ever ask a game developer that question. The closest I ever get to answering is
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saying that the game I'm most proud of is Deus Ex for a variety of reasons. And I'm here today to talk about how that game came to be.
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So let me start by telling you specifically what I want to talk about. First, I want to talk about the design philosophies behind the creation of Deus Ex, why I wanted to make it. Then I want to talk about the history behind the
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making of the game. Third, we'll go into what we did right and what I did right and wrong. And then finally, we'll end with the response to the game, how the world responded. A lot of what you're going to hear and see today
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is common practice now. Rest assured that a lot of it was not common practice in the late 1990s when we were working on this game. So don't make too much fun of me for telling you things you already know. Make
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as much fun of me as you want, I don't care. Okay, so let's start by talking about what Deus Ex actually is. Fictionally, it's a game set in a near future dystopic cyberpunk version of our real world. It's a world where
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conspiracy theories are true, and it's kind of James Bond meets the X-Files by way of Neuromancer. I assume from the applause earlier you guys all know that.
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Conceptually, I thought of Deus Ex as a genre-busting game, which let me say really enamored us to the marketing folks. They love that. If you ever want to make a marketing person unhappy, mash up genres together. They'll be your friend for life.
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But it was a genre mashup. It was part immersive simulation, it was part role-playing game, it was part first-person shooter, and it was part adventure game. So it was a bunch of stuff all mashed together. It's an immersive simulation because you
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feel like you're actually in the game world, or at least that's what we were trying to do. There's as little as possible getting in the way of you feeling like you're there. And that kind of defines what an immersive simulation is for me.
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It's an RPG in that you play a role. You play JC Denton, which translates to me to an R-O-L-E role, not an R-O-L-L role.
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And you make choices that ensure you end up with a unique avatar, and your character determines your experience. So it's a role-playing game. It's an FPS because you see the world through your character's eyes and your skill with virtual weapons is clearly an
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important factor. And it's an adventure game in that it's story driven. Its narrative structure is completely linear. I hope you all realize that. And it involves character interaction and accumulation of objects to advance the plot. So it has a little bit
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of all of those things. And that's the most important thing. It's the combination of those genres that was designed to ensure that players would end up as collaborators with us in the telling of that story. I wanted the story to be as much
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yours as it was mine and my team's. So let me tell you where it began. This is gonna get a little embarrassing.
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It all began with Dungeons and Dragons. Is there anybody here who hasn't played D&D?
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Raise your hand if you haven't played D&D and then leave. Okay? All right. Like I said, it's been 17 years since the game came out, but it really started long before that. I am going to date myself horribly here, but it began
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in 1978. And it began with a game of D&D. The day I discovered that game was literally life changing for me. I would not be here, you would not be here if not for a game of Dungeons and Dragons.
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My dungeon master was cyberpunk guru Bruce Sterling. I don't know how many of you are familiar with him, but he and William Gibson kind of started the whole cyberpunk thing. He was a great storyteller. But what made the experience special
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wasn't the story that Bruce was telling. What made the experience special was that my friends and I were telling the story with him. We had to use our wits and some more or less vague rules to get around and over and through the
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obstacles that Bruce threw at us. The shape of the story belonged to Bruce. I mean, anybody who's played D&D knows this. But every detail belongs to us, okay? So we all became storytellers that night.
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And I was completely hooked. I played on that D&D campaign for 10 years. And the ending of that campaign was so dramatic that if I told you about it, you would absolutely make fun of me because I would start crying. It was so
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powerful. No, it was amazing. I mean, maybe after, if anybody wants to know, I'll tell you. And then you would abuse me for crying over a D&D campaign. So we're not gonna go there, but 10 years playing in that campaign was
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pretty amazing. So what does that have to do with Deus Ex? Just everything. My entire career, this is the pathetic part of the talk, my entire career, 34 years of making games, has been about trying to recreate that feeling I had in
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1978 when I played D&D for the first time. That's been my life mission, to recreate that feeling. So to start to bring this around to Deus Ex, I've been playing around with the notion of shared authorship, of that collaboration between developer and
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player, and immersive simulation, that idea that we can make you really feel like you're in another world. Some friends and I had been talking about that for a very long time and working in that field in games like Underworld and System Shock, and
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Thief and a variety of others. Every game I've worked on, every single one has been about trying to engage all of you, engage players in the telling of the story. My only hope is just to do it a little better every time, giving
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up a little bit more authorial control with every game. But then there came a point where what we were doing in Underworld and System Shock wasn't quite enough, and I decided it was time to kind of swing for the
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fences. It was a period of time when I was sick to death of making games about guys in plate armor swinging big swords. I was just tired of that.
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I'd done enough of it. If I even thought about making another game about you being the last space marine between the earth and alien invasion, I was going to stop making games. Simple as that. And I wish every developer would adopt
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that attitude. I wanted to make a game that I called the real world role-playing game. I wanted to make a game where you could solve problems the way you wanted. And I wanted your choices during play to make a
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difference in how the story played out. And here's kind of one of the keys.
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I wanted your choices to say more about you, the player, the human, with your hands on a keyboard and a mouse or a controller. I wanted the choices to say more about you than they did about your in-game avatar. I don't care about
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your puppet. I care about you. I wanted every player to get to the end of the game having had a unique experience. In other words, I wanted to tell a story with players just the way Bruce had told a story with me and
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with my friends. That was 1994. I was working at Origin, the place where they made the Ultima games. I have no idea if anybody remembers Origin. Okay, people remember Origin, good.
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I should give a whole talk about how special Origin was. Anyway, I came up with an idea that would let me do all the stuff I just talked about.
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And that was a game called Troubleshooter. It was set in the world of 1995. You played a character called Jake Shooter, ex-CIA, now a hard-boiled private eye. It was all very film noir.
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And Origin and EA weren't interested at all in a game like Troubleshooter, became Deus Ex at some point, I'll tell you all about that. I couldn't tell you why they weren't interested, but it's probably a good thing because trying to recreate the real
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wor...
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ideas because they're so amazing and valuable is kind of nutso, right? Ideas are easy.
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I had plenty of other games I wanted to make. A few years passed and I left Origin and worked for Looking Glass for a while where one of the critical projects going on was a game called Thief. And something really critical happened during
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the Thief development. I played a build. I came to a place that was just too hard for me to sneak. I was failing every time. And I asked the team, Just make me tough enough that I can fight my way past these
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guards because I'm getting killed every time. And they said no. Because if we made the player character strong enough to fight, no one would ever sneak. And the idea of the game was to sneak. And they were probably right. For Thief, that was
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probably the right decision to make. But I made a vow right then that I was going to make a game that lets you fight or sneak as you chose.
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So not long after that, Looking Glass ran out of money. I mean, let's be frank. And so I was out on the street, you know, like panhandling and stuff, and figured I should do a startup. I blew the dust off that old troubleshooter
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proposal, and amazingly enough, convinced a company I won't name to let me make a role-playing game set in the universe of one of the most successful RTS lines around, and I won't tell you what that was either. And I was about
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to sign the contract when John Romero called me up and said, don't sign that contract, join me at Ion Storm and make the game of your dreams. No creative interference, biggest budget you've ever had, biggest marketing budget you've ever had. And I mean,
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who says no to that, right? So I put that contract aside and Ion Storm Austin was born, okay? And this is when Deus Ex really got started. But hold on. Okay, I had this idea for a game, the game of my dreams. But before I start on any project, I've done
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this for every single project I've ever worked on, and I encourage all of you to do something like this before you start on your own projects. I ask myself a series of questions that I call the six plus two plus one. Now, why
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I don't call it the nine, I don't know. But it's the six plus two plus one. And if the answers to these questions are no or I don't know, I don't make the game. I have to have yes answers. So here are those
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questions. And this is not genius stuff, it's just something I do. And I didn't even use to tell my teams about it, which was really dumb. But anyway, I'm gonna tell you about it. What's the core idea? Can you describe the game in
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one, two, or three sentences? It's kind of like the elevator pitch, right? For Deus Ex, the real world role playing game where players tell their own stories. That was the one sentence pitch. So why do this game? Like I said, ideas are easy.
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I had a million of them. I've got 300 game ideas on this hard drive right here on this laptop. You need to choose the one that you, the right idea, okay, from all the ideas you have. Could it be a breakout commercial hit?
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Could it make everybody a fortune? Could it start a series? Is it something you burn to make? With Deus Ex, I had no choice, okay?
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I had to make that game or my entire life was going to be a failure. I didn't think about commercial or critical success. I was gonna find a way to make this game one way or another. So the
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third is what are the development challenges? Really hard stuff is fine. I encourage all of you to tackle really hard problems. But impossible stuff is not so good. In Deus Ex, almost everyone thought it was impossible. to combine stealth combat and role playing.
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I was convinced we could pull all those things off and I was just going to make a team do it. How well suited games is the idea. We don't do being very well, okay? At least at the time we didn't. Being in love,
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we don't do that very well. Being amused, we don't, unless you're Tim Schafer, we don't do that very well. Games are about doing and about the exploration of spaces and that's really kind of the heart of Deus Ex. So what's the player fantasy?
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If the fantasy and the goals aren't there, it's probably a bad idea. In Deus Exit was, you're a James Bond figure, at least this is where we started, who's equally good at fighting, sneaking, and charming people, which is a pretty solid fantasy. What
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does the player do? What are the verbs of the game? Games are about doing, like I said. At some level, if you boil it down, Deus Exit is about running, jumping, Sneaking talking fighting, you know, which are all good solid game verbs. There
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was nothing nothing innovative about about the verbs of the game They were just good solid game verbs and then we get to the two plus one Has anyone done this before okay if someone has done it before what can we learn from them?
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And if no one's done it before what does that tell us it could be a really bad idea and Okay. Or it could be so original that it's something that could change the world of gaming. You know, you just don't know, but you
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need to know if someone's done this before and think about it. And I knew there had never been a game like Deus Ex. At least I felt that way in my egotistical world of fantasy. And I was going to show everybody that they
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had missed the boat. And then what's the one thing? We are a very young medium, even today. I've been saying this for 30-something years, and it's still freaking true.
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Anybody who believes that we've had our Citizen Kane, you know, or whatever, however you want to think about it, is fooling themselves. We have not done everything games can and should do. And you can always find one thing that hasn't been done before.
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Even if you're making a My Little Pony game, you can find... Actually, okay, we have some bronies in the audience. Great. Um... But you can always find one new thing, okay? And in Deus Ex, I thought the combination of genres was gonna be
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unique, would result in something unique, and the idea that players could solve problems the way they wanted to instead of us forcing, as developers, forcing them to play the way we wanted them to. And the plus one, this is really important to me,
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it may or may not be important to you, but do you have something to say? There has to be something more, in my opinion, in a game than what's happening just on the surface level of action, okay? If you don't have something to
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say, a theme or an issue you want players to explore, you are kind of wasting players time, and you are wasting your time. I said it, okay? There you go. In Deus Ex, I wanted to explore all sorts of big issues, which I
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will get to shortly. And I wanted to explore those things in ways that only games could allow them to do. So luckily, where Deus Ex was concerned, the answers were yes. So we started in the concept phase.
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The first thing that happened was the real world went away because even in 1997, it was just not possible to recreate the real world. So we moved it out to 2052. That was one of the first decisions we made. And we had to
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know what the real world was gonna be like 50 years in the future. So that led us in a couple of directions. It led us to cyberpunk fiction, and it led us to movies like Blade Runner, but that can only take us so
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far. So if we were gonna plug into the real cultural zeitgeist, we had to pay close attention to things in the real world. So you didn't have to be a genius, even in 1997, to see that the news was increasingly
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filled with reports of terrorism. It wasn't a part of our daily lives at that point, but you could kind of see it coming. If you did a little digging, you started seeing military efforts to create mechanically augmented soldiers, and we even found real
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world cloaking devices. They're kind of faked and phony, but it was still cool. We could put it in the game because we found that. AI research had people talking about the singularity. They're still talking about that. I'm still thinking about that. I'm working
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on System Shock 3 now. You'll probably think about it again soon. But the point where computer AI overtook human intelligence was on people's minds back then. And really interesting to us was the rise of nanotechnology. So the dangers of that
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seemed like it'd be fun to explore. But most important, everywhere you looked in 1997, there was a conspiracy theory. It was crazy. Black helicopters, men in black, manufactured diseases, you know, sentient AIs, governments serving the needs of mysterious overlords. I mean, it
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was all there, right? The World Wide Web, I mean, who knew where that was going to lead? People believed in all that stuff, okay? And the world of Deus Ex was being created all around us. We didn't have to make anything up. It
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was great. So, Here are the things I wanted people thinking about. I created some pillar questions and every decision that we made on the game was filtered through this mesh. I already mentioned this. So what would happen if you mashed
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up these genres? What would happen if you dropped a James Bond guy who believes in right and wrong and black and white into a world that's all shades of gray? What would the world be like if every conspiracy theory people
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believed to be true were in fact true? And what did it mean to be human in a world of augmentation, mechanical and nano? And finally, how would the world be better off? This was really important. Would the world
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be better off as it really is ruled by a secret cabal, of course? Would it be better off if it was ruled by a sentient AI that connected all of us but cost us our free will? Would it be better off plunged into
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a new dark age where free will reigned? Okay, or would... Yeah, anyway, I'll stop there. I got too much to talk about. The game would have no bosses to kill. It was going to be about the fate of the
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world and what you believed it should be. Now in a novel or a movie, all you get to do is say, I agree or I disagree. You get to interpret. In a game, I thought, and only in a game, you could answer those
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questions for yourself through your play choices. That was the power of those questions. So I also created a set of commandments, and I encourage you to do this too in your games. Your teams will appreciate it, I promise you. These are just the
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Deus Ex rules of role playing, basically, right? Your rules may vary. Always show the goal. You should always see what you're trying to accomplish. It's not fun to try to figure out what you have to do. It's fun doing it. You should show
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the goal. Problems, not puzzles. It's an obstacle course, not a jigsaw puzzle, okay? You should never have to read a designer's mind. No forced failures.
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Failure is not fun. Getting knocked unconscious and waking up with a smoking gun in your hand and dead bodies may make for a great story, but it has nothing to do, I'm not gonna curse, I was gonna curse. It has nothing to do
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with games, okay? Situations where the player has no chance to react in the Deus Ex world are bad. I already said this, it's about playing a role, not about rolling dice. We have better simulation tools and techniques than Gary Gygax
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and Dave Arneson had back in the 70s. Why do we still have character classes and skill levels and die rolls? So we were gonna try to do away with that stuff. If something is cool, don't even think about letting an NPC do
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it. Players do the cool stuff. NPCs watch the player do the cool stuff. You want constant rewards to drive players onward. You have to reward players regularly.
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This is genius right here. As the player gets better, make the game harder. Think 3D. I believe that 3D maps can't be laid out on graph paper. You're more than welcome to disagree with me. But if players aren't looking up and down
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constantly, you might as well make a 2D game. And be connected. Tunnels that go from A to B are not very interesting spaces. Highly interconnected spaces, horizontally and vertically, are what are interesting. Locations that have many entrance and
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exit points are interesting. Interconnected spaces are interesting. And every problem's gonna have multiple solutions. Okay, so I was laying down these filters and commandments and while that was going on we did even more conspiracy research research by the way Google Denver Airport conspiracy if you want
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to see one that was so wacky we couldn't even put it in the game We're in concept phase we honed in on what we wanted the game to look like inspired by game by movies like Blade Runner and We worked on our backstory.
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We figured out what was happening in all of these places, the asteroid belt in Africa and Mexico and all these places you never went in the game so we could make the places you did visit more believable. We worked out more than 25
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missions all around the world. The amount of story we planned was insane. We created over 200 characters before we had a story, also insane. But we figured we could build a story around the characters, which anyway, I don't know what we were
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thinking. We ended up with, are you sitting down, 500 pages of documentation. Yeah, no one read it. Okay, so concept phase, I'm really gonna have to rip through this, because I've got another 90 slides to get through.
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I'm not kidding. So concept phase wrapped up, and we headed into pre-production, and at the time when we figured out what game we were really going to make. We started prototyping, which I will come back to if I have time.
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We built a team, went from being just six people to being about 30. The team, the Deus Ex team was about 30 people. Totally dysfunctional team.
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We'll get into that a little bit more, too. So we had about six-ish months of pre-production, which probably wasn't enough, but it was It was good enough, it got us by. We cut a bunch of stuff and ended up with 270 pages of
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documentation which nobody read and we entered production. It was a grind just like every project. I mean, I could spend all day just talking about production. But every day we saw our goals being realized. There's a lot more to tell. I mean, you
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don't want to know how many times I was told just make a shooter and I said no. You don't want to you know you probably do want to hear but anyway an artist left out the World Trade Center from the New York City
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skyline Which was pretty eerie and and a totally innocent mistake And then there was the day we hit pre-alpha and realized the game was not fun. That was a good one By September 1999 we were done except we weren't the game was not good enough it wasn't ready to ship
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and September 1999 was really the first time we saw all of our game systems come together. And immersive sims come together very late. When all of your little game systems and rules are all working together magically to produce this amazing experience. But if
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we had shipped then, none of us would be in this room right now. Luckily, Eidos, our publishers, saw the potential of the game and gave us more time. So by June of 2000, Deus Ex was in fact ready to ship. It was the
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game of my dreams, it was done, it was created by an incredibly talented team.
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Another thing I always do, it's really crazy, but I close my eyes when I'm starting a game and I imagine what it's going to look like. I mean, I literally close my eyes and sit there and imagine. And three years later, there it
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was. Every single detail had changed, every single detail. But in spirit, it was exactly the game I hoped we would make, which was kind of amazing. The only time that's ever happened. But I was terrified. Right before we
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shipped, I put my head down on my desk and I just said, if people get that you can fight, sneak, or talk, we're gonna rule the world. If people compare our combat to Half-Life, we're dead. If people compare our sneaking to Thief,
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we're dead. And if people compare our role-playing elements to Baldur's Gate, we're dead. There was just no telling how it was gonna go. But there was also nothing anybody could do. We shipped the game and we'd soon know how people responded. try to
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get to that here today. So let me kind of rip through what we did right and wrong. It's ironic because we made a game where there was no right and wrong and yet plenty went right and wrong in the development, I'll tell you.
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So what went right? We had a clear high level vision. I've already talked a little bit about that. We knew what game we wanted to make or at least what kind of game we wanted to make. It was a natural outgrowth of games
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from companies like this. We built on a foundation that already existed. As you know, it was a game I'd been thinking about for many years, so it didn't come out of nowhere. We had a good idea of what game we
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wanted to make. So the lesson here is if there's a game that you have to make, never give up, because someone's gonna be stupid enough to give you the money someday, okay? We had very clear goals. Those commandments, they were a great start. But we had to move from abstract ideas to
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game design specifics. We had to start thinking about what players wanted to do and not what we wanted to do. So what were our goals? We wanted players thinking about who they were in the world. Character differentiation, totally important, okay? We
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wanted players to think how they wanted to behave in the world, okay? We had to wean players from traditional games, puzzle games, and fighting games to games where they actually had to, I don't know, what's the word, think. God, I have an attitude.
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We wanted a game that tuned itself to each player's play style, okay, rather than forcing players to play the way we wanted them to play. We wanted them to feel like they were actually in the world, okay. They needed to be able to
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apply real-world logic to the problems in the game. And everything in the game had to be based on something real. I'm sure if there's anybody who worked on Deus Ex in this audience, I'm sure you hate me because I made everybody base stuff
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on real stuff. And could we put players in control of the experience? If not, Deus Ex was gonna be a failed experiment. The third thing that went right, we didn't skimp on pre-production. I said we had six months. You can always use more,
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okay? But we did okay. We started out with that team of six figuring out what game we wanted to make. We started working out our missions, way too many of them. I'll come back to this in a minute. We hammered on
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our game systems. But here's the thing, I have two number threes, look at that. I needed more pre-production on this deck. By March of 1998, we thought we knew everything we needed to know to make the game, but man, were we wrong. We were open to change, be open
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to change. Anybody who tells you that when you get to the end of pre-production, you've got a script and nothing changes has never made a game, right? And it's usually gonna be someone wearing a suit. Don't let them get away with it. So
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why did things change? Well, we had new people join the team. They had new ideas. As we brought on new people, we found ourselves with a team of hardcore shooter players, Ultima fans, RTS players, I mean it was crazy. And it
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was my job and my leads team's job to kind of manage that, the conflicts that raged over the kinds of games that all those new people wanted to make.
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By the way, if whoever made this diagram is in the audience, I'm sorry I stole it. Our game systems didn't work as well in reality as we thought they would on paper, or as I thought they would on
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paper. Another thing we did right was we always had a playable build. Again, this is like common practice now. We always knew where we were, even if that was painful. Proto missions critical to all of our scheduling and the quality of the
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final game. The first one we built was a White House mission, which we ended up having to cut, but that mission showed the potential of the game. We hacked in everything that we knew we wanted the player to do. It was totally hacked.
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And we saw a bunch of stuff that didn't work. That's the power of proto missions as we called them back then. Our performance was abysmal. We knew we'd have to cut our maps up into smaller chunks. The skill system that I came up
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with, this is when I got the first inkling that it wasn't actually going to be any fun. I was too stubborn to cut it at that point or change it, but we got a sense that AI was gonna be a big challenge for
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us. And then shortly after that, actually it was almost a year after that, we had some real missions built and we let real people play the game. You could do everything you were gonna do in the game and it
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really wasn't hacked. It was as documented but not hacked. And we let real people come in and play the game. Do not tell your publisher you're doing this. We needed the opinions of people who understood our kind of game and the development process
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better than we did. So we had real people come in and play the game and listen to their responses. I called that particular milestone the wow, these missions suck milestone. We had a lot of work to do. Okay. We had potential.
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Everybody saw that, but we had a lot of work to do. So we ended up cutting and cutting and cutting. We had too much game. Harvey Smith, the lead designer had been telling me stop being a kitchen sink designer and cut stuff.
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Uh, And I'll come back to that too. We licensed tech, that was something we did right. We used Unreal Tournament. And for the most part, it worked out really well. Adding what we needed was much easier than it could have been.
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Unreal Ed was really powerful, superior to anything else at the time. Unreal Script allowed programmers to do lots of interesting things easily and quickly. That's my entire programming team, plus one of the testers. Three programmers made Deus Ex. They
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were very overworked. But they were able to do it because we licensed stuff. So what went wrong? All sorts of stuff. Team structure did not work.
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I had two people qualified to be lead designers, so instead of picking one, I said, you're both lead designers. I'm going to give you both your own design team.
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Don't do that. I thought I could manage the tension between the immersive sim guys and the Ultima guys. And what ended up happening was that I had to call one of the design teams one and the other one A because neither would be
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B or two. Yeah, yeah. So eventually I had to just say one of you is the lead designer. A couple people left. It was very sad, but it was the right thing for the game. On the art side, we also had problems because the artists at first, for
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about the first year of the project, actually reported to a guy in Dallas, not to me. And I argued and screamed about matrix management not working, and ultimately I won, and the artists ended up reporting to me. And I can only imagine what
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the game might have looked like if the artists had reported to me from the start. That would have been interesting. One of the things I probably should have talked about that I did right was I had the right leads team. That's Chris Norton
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in the middle, Harvey Smith on the left, and Jay Lee on the right. Lead designer, lead programmer and assistant director, and art director. Those guys do not get enough credit for the creative aspects of the game, the fact that we shipped it all,
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and managing the team. So give those guys their due. Yeah, people think I make games they like pour out of my forehead, you know, like, I don't know, like I bang my head on a desk and blood pours
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out or something. So the lesson learned here, have a great leads group and don't underestimate the importance of team dynamics. Okay, another thing that went wrong was our goals were too big, we weren't realistic. I mean, if you're gonna advance the state of the art, and I hope you will all try
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to do that, you have to think big. but you really don't want to create missions, which I did, by the way, I have to take responsibility for. You're going to liberate 2,000 people from a concentration camp in the Midwest. Don't do that,
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okay? There's going to be a full-on war between the Russo-Mexican alliance and the United States government in Austin, Texas. Don't do that, okay?
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Harvey Smith and another designer, Steve Powers, came to me one day and said, you cannot make this game. We cannot tell this story and they browbeat me until I gave in and we cut a bunch and the game was better for it. So
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define your creative box, define it according to the limitations of your tech and also by the limitations of what's right for your game. The job of the creative director, the game director on the game is to define the creative limits and then make
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sure the entire team is within it. It is not to say make that pixel blue, not green. We didn't front load enough of our risks.
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We did a bunch of prototyping, but we ended up with systems that didn't work with AI that was created in a vacuum rather than designed to work with all of our game systems and our story. It was a big problem. We ended up
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with some pretty compelling AI, but it was inconsistent, let's just say, in delivering the promise of human behavior. Oh wait, I said this was something we did right. It was also something we did wrong. It took us time
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to become familiar with the engine and we never knew it as well as we would have if we'd built something ourselves. It took us months of playing with Unreal Tournament before we understood it well enough to work with it. The sim, I mean,
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Unreal Tournament was not designed to have a deep sim and allow fighting, sneaking and talking. We had to layer all that stuff in on top. It worked, but we ended up faking a lot of stuff, okay? Just to be frank. Deus Ex,
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there's a lot of smoke and mirrors going on that we didn't actually want. We wanted to be more real in our simulation-driven game. We wanted big outdoor areas. The tech was not up to it. We had to break things up
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into smaller areas, which actually did hurt the game some. And I don't remember what I was going to say here. Okay, I guess for the most part using licensed tech is a good thing because I've used licensed tech on every project I've done since. And it was a mixed blessing, that's I
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guess the bottom line. We also realized, I've already talked about this, so I'm gonna zip through this, but Deus Ex just became less realistic as time went on because it was a mistake to try to recreate the real world in 1997. Maybe today
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you could do it. But we had no way of living up to people's expectations.
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This is the interior of the Statue of Liberty. It looks nothing like the Statue of Liberty. That's not what the statue looks like. I've been there. Population density and object density, we could not come close to recreating the real world. We
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couldn't make people behave like people. We couldn't simulate a freaking telephone in ways that people would believe. So the game became less and less realistic as time went on. And then there was the stuff that was out of our control.
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Ironstorm was not a quiet company. I don't know how many of you remember this.
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At least the Dallas office screamed a lot. There were ads like this. That was the company motto. Our emails got leaked and printed in the newspaper, including my salary negotiations. That's a trip. Playboy shoots happened in the office. We had
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elaborate ship parties before games shipped. very, yeah, it was good. But let me be clear, let me be clear, two things. First of all, Ion Austin was an oasis of calm, and second, John Romero's one of the greatest people
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in the game business, okay? He lived up to every promise he made to me, and he loves games more than anybody in this room, so I don't want anybody thinking I'm dissing on John Romero, all right?
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But all that stuff had an effect on the Austin team. I mean, it's hard to be focused and productive when everybody is screaming negative things about your company. So finally, I'm a little over time. Oh well, too bad. I'm
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not good with schedules. So how did people respond? I said I was gonna get back to that. Did we get killed or did we rule the world? Okay. Well, we didn't die. So that tells you something. And we reviewed really well and won
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a bunch of awards and all that. But we were surprised by a lot of what players did. Even seasoned gamers were paralyzed by choice. It was strange. When they would get to a choice point early on in our testing, and
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I would see gamers push the keyboard away and go, wait, I have to make a real choice? Games had trained people not to think. It was unbelievable to me. And what I expected was that players were going to find a play style.
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They were going to say, I like fighting or I like sneaking, and they just play that way. But that's not what happened. What happened instead was players would get to a choice point, save the game, try something, go back to the save game,
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try something different, go back to the save game, try something different, and then pick the one they liked the best. It was very frustrating. But then, you know, once people buy your game, it's their game, so you can't be too upset about that.
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But we did discover that players could interact with our simulation as shallow as it was in a lot of ways and do things that we didn't expect. Everybody knows the lamb ladder story, right? I mean, people would take a light attack munition, put
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it on a wall, jump on it, put another one higher up, jump on it, put another one higher up, jump on it, and they could get out of the world. If you go do this in Deus Ex, on a lot of maps you'll
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find ladders and crates outside of the map so you can actually stack them up and get back in the game world. There was a time about a year after we shipped, I saw somebody in a place I had
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played myself a hundred times and watched people play a thousand times. There was a guard standing there in front of an open doorway with laser triggers that would set off an alarm and two guys on patrols on the other side
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of the door. It was three problems, okay? And I watched this one guy sneaking around, moving explosive barrels around. He took one shot with the pistol and solved all three problems at once. And I fell on the floor and I guarantee
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you no one else in the world had ever done that before, okay? That was cool. Okay, seeing people actually doing things that were not anticipated was cool and was one of our measures of success. By the way, know how you are going to
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define success in any game you make. If you can't define success, you are not ready to make that game. Okay, so conversation was my definition of success.
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There was, okay, wasn't it cool I would hear someone say, when you rescued that prisoner from the cells under UNATCO headquarters, and someone else would say, what cells? That was a win. I used to say all the time, I love the pistol, and
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the team wanted to cut the pistol because it was the weakest weapon in the game. And it's like, no, don't cut the pistol. I love it. It makes me think. It's my favorite weapon. There was another time I was at
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an event like this, actually, and after the talk, I went out. I never do this. I went out for drinks with some people in the audience. Do not ask me. I won't do it. But... an inebriated fan sat down next to me and
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said, how can you make that right wing piece of trash? And before I could answer, I don't do a good drunk imitation. And then another drunk fan sat down on the other side and said, what do you mean right wing piece of trash?
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It was left wing propaganda from the start. And the cool thing was they were both right, okay, based on how they had played the game and the end games that they had selected and everything. And I just got up and left them to
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argue. It was awesome. So instead of talking about how they killed the final boss or saved the princess, they talked about the fate of the world. That was success. That was exactly what I wanted them doing. So that was
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what Deus Ex was all about. It wasn't about what the development team thought the world should be. It was about what you, not your avatar, not the character, what you thought the world should be. So, Like Bruce Sterling and every
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other D&D Dungeon Master, we provided the skeleton of the experience. And players put the meat on the bones. There was one guy, okay, I was at GDC, this was several years ago, and a guy came up to me dressed as JC Denton.
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And he was German, and I will not try and do a German accent, but he said, I've played through Deus Ex 63 times and had a different experience every time. And I pushed him on it and I said, it's not, and he said
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no, I played through it 63 times. And then he said words that were magic to my ears. I am going back to Germany after this show. And I was grateful because I really don't want to be on the same continent with that guy.
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So in the end, Deus Ex was, as all cyberpunk fiction is, about you and me and the future as it might be. No aliens, no teleporters, no demons, just people in politics and business and stuff that's usually beyond our control.
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But in the game world, you could actually make a difference and remake the world in your image. That was what Deus Ex was about. It was a powerful idea, at least to me, and I think it's at least in part responsible for the
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fact that all of you are here today. So that's the really quick version of a very long talk. But here's my final thought for all of you. I sincerely hope that every one of you gets an opportunity to work on the game of
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your dreams someday. It's amazing. And I also hope that every one of you gets to work on something that is still relevant 17 years after you make it and that has a life of its own beyond you. People ask me all the time how I feel about the new Deus Ex
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games and all I can tell them is it's amazing. It's amazing because it has a life beyond me, it has a life beyond my team. It's bigger than we were, okay? And I get to play Deus Ex games where I don't know all
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the secrets. So thanks for listening, that's what I got. And thanks to the GDC folks for letting me go eight minutes over. Fill out your questionnaires or whatever those things are online. And if you have questions or something, we ran out of time and then some. And I can stay out in
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the hallway or go somewhere if you want to ask some questions for a little while. What's that? I can't hear you, I'm sorry.
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What time is it? Dude, why did I rush through this? I totally rushed through the last half of this thing.
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Okay, any questions? No question, oh wait, we have a question. Say your name and who you are.
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My name is Mitchell Sabag and I recently presented a post-data narrative summit on Thief the Dark Project. So I found that talk of yours to be incredibly insightful and affection. Now with regards to how you were faced with limitations with regards to your design and how you had to essentially craft
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your game through subtraction, How did you approach designing these small maps around the various player personalities like explorers, adventurers, killers, etc.
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How did this come about given the limitations and coordination between the various teams? Realistically, like I said, there was a lot of smoke and mirrors going on in Deus Ex. Like I said, our simulation was just deep enough that players
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to this day actually still find solutions to problems that we didn't plan. But the team, the design team, I feel bad for those guys even now because every map had, or every problem and challenge had a sneaky path and a combat path and a sort of a
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character interaction path. So that was, we had to make sure that there was a way to play through it for every play style. And then we counted on players finding other solutions beyond that, okay? I'm not sure if that answered your question, but
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that was, we just pre-planned some paths through the game. No, I think that perfectly explains it. Thank you very much. You are very welcome.
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Hi. Oh, wait. Let me go over to the other side. Name and who you are. Hi. My name is Amir Rajan. I'm actually an indie game developer. I'm lucky enough to be able to do this full time. And you mentioned that your games
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need to have some sort of message or you want to say something through your games. Could you expand on that a little bit primarily from the perspective of maybe a large swath of genres of games? Some of them are super casual versus mid-core
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versus very hardcore games. What does it mean to say something when it's not full narrative. Yeah, okay. I think I perhaps overstated to make my point. I mean, I'm obsessing right now about a game called, you know, 100 with an exclamation point after it. It doesn't need a message, okay,
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but a game that has a narrative or even one that has, I'm trying not to name names, you know, I mean, it's so tempting. But any game that has any kind of narrative, however deep, can actually ask players to think about something. In Epic Mickey, for example,
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I doubt anybody even knows this, at least consciously, but for me the game was about how important are family and friends to you. Not family and friends are important.
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In a movie or a book, the theme, which you don't want players thinking, or readers thinking about your theme, you want them kind of ingesting it subconsciously. And in a game it's kind of the same thing. You want them ingesting it subconsciously. But
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games ask questions. Movies and books and opera, they make statements. Family and friends are important is very different than how important are family and friends to you. And is it better to be more powerful and alone or less powerful with friends who will help you? Okay, what does it mean to
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be forgotten and rejected? How does that feel? So even a Mickey Mouse game can ask questions like that. And if you think about it in terms of questions, and then create game systems and gameplay that allow players to explore those questions in subtle
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subconscious ways, I think games can actually be an even more remarkable medium than we are. Thank you. Hi, my name's Pete.
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My voice is a little broken because GDC. So I have a two part question.
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The first part is something that's bothered me for 17 years. What does JC stand for? It stands for Jesus Christ. It does stand for Jesus Christ, okay. But there's more to the story than that. Hold on. Okay. One of my
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best friends is a wonderful writer named Bradley Denton, who you should all go read.
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He wrote a book called Blackburn, which you should all read. And if you want to know about me and my friends, he wrote a book called Lunatics, which you should all read, and then you can try and guess who I am. Anyway, he
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is one of the nicest humans on the planet, and I call him helpful guy, because if you ever need any help with anything, he is there for you. And he's so helpful it gets annoying sometimes. So back then I
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would often find myself saying, Jesus Christ, Denton. Jesus Christ, Denton, don't be so helpful. And so when it came time to name the character, it was JC Denton.
Speaker A
That's interesting. So I had a two-part question, if you don't mind. OK, well, make it quick. Obviously, the internet went crazy over this sort of conspiracy theory that it was Jesus Christ because of what he represented. And obviously, no one knew that story, I guess. I'm
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not sure I've ever told that story. Did you find that a lot of people came out of the woodwork? Because it's a conspiracy theory-centric game, what was the craziest conspiracy theory around the game development that you've ever heard? Wow. I'm not
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actually sure. I don't have an answer for that. No worries. It was a complicated question. Thank you. G'day, my name's Marvin. I'm a design developer.
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Huge fan of Deus Ex or Deus Ex, as I called it in high school, probably. Actually, I thought that was funny. I called it Deus Ex because it's God from the machine, right? I thought Sension AI, that would be fun and say something
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about the game. My mom almost didn't buy it for me because of the name.
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A lot of people didn't buy it because of the name. I thought it'd be funny if people mispronounced it and said Deus Ex. I got sex in the name.
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Just wondering, are there any games, like modern or classic, that you really feel capture the vibe, I guess, of Deus Ex? Oh, yeah. One of the things that's been most gratifying is, I'm not going to name names here either, but part... Okay,
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everybody in this room is going to hate me when I say this. Part of my secret goal with Deus Ex was to shame other developers so they could never make the kinds of games they made again. And it didn't work.
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But I was really gratified. Lots of developers and lots of people from other studios talked to me at conferences like this one and said that they changed the way they thought about the games they were making as a result of having played Deus
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Ex. And a couple of them completely redesigned their games after they played it, which was probably foolish. But having having influences is great and now I see more and more games that that were influenced by games like Underworld and System Shock and Thief and Deus Ex and that
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whole lineage. Right now it's clearly the Dishonored games are the ones that capture capture that spirit the best. It's like half the guys who worked on Dishonored were on my old team. I can't wait for Prey because those are all
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my old guys who I'd want to hire back to work on System Shock 3, but I can't. Well, they're all happy. I mean, I hate it.
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Yeah. Cool, thank you. Hi Mr. Spector, thanks for coming out. It's Warren, I don't answer to Mr. Spector. Warren, my name is Keith, thanks for the presentation. Thank you, thank John Romero and thank your team for making Deus Ex, it's a huge inspiration
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on me. I have a bit of a loaded question for you, apologies for putting you on the spot. Since its initial release in 2000, I've always wanted to play this game in VR. And if If the source code of this game ever comes
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out, I'm dropping everything I'm doing and making a VR version of this. Is there anything you can do to help me with that first part? I recommend therapy.
Speaker A
No, you know, I have no idea what, actually I do have an idea where the source code is. I can't believe I just said that and I'm being recorded.
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but it's not gonna get released. I mean, someday you might be able to go to the Center for American History's video game archive and find it there and do something amazing with it, but I'm not gonna be releasing it
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anytime soon. And frankly, I don't know that long form VR real time movement through a 3D world is the best answer for VR anyway. Thank you. Although System Shock actually just supported VR in 1994, the last time VR was gonna save us.
Speaker A
Ooh, he said it. Yeah. Hi, Warren, my name is Hugh. I run a small indie studio. So for you as a creator, where do you draw the line between obviousness and subtlety, especially from a narrative standpoint? Because what I've found is that Like we made a game where you're employed
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by a company whose logo is a black skull on a red banner and people didn't get that they were the bad guys. So like, I mean like where do you, I mean System Shock is a, not System Shock, excuse me. Dave's actually a
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game that is mired in a lot of these subtleties and narrative elements but I think also it seems like a lot of people still managed to get a lot of what was going on with that game. And like as a designer, there
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are things that you might think are obvious that end up being very subtle to the consumer. Well, there, wow, that's about 16 questions in one. First of all, have a great writing team. I had four writers. All of them, with one
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exception, were programmers who could write, not writers who could, we tried to make interactive writers. I think that helped. They were, I mean like one of the writers had a dual degree in creative writing and computer science from MIT and Harvard simultaneously. It's kind of easy to
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make an intelligent game when you've got people like that on board. But honestly, I don't worry about that too much. I'm the luckiest guy in the game business in that I get to make the games I wanna make the way I
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wanna make them. and I try to make games that I want to play or that I find appealing and hope enough people find them appealing that I get to make another one. So subtlety and intelligence are important to me and if
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I have to dumb down a game to sell 20 million copies, I'm gonna not make games anymore. Okay, thanks.
Speaker A
Yeah, the applause was a little weak for that one. Hi, Warren. My name is Michael Haim. I'm actually an editor at GameSpot.com. Deus Ex means a lot to me, so I could ask you like a million questions, but I'm not going to do
Speaker A
that. So I'd whittle it down to maybe one, maybe two. Okay. Sorry. So I want to ask, how much of a hand did you have in the sound design and the music? And was that made in parallel to the game, or
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did you... Was it Alexander Brandon who composed most of the music? Yeah. Did you actively work with him? Because music in the game is one of the most standout things to me. I still listen to the music all the time. And the System
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Shock soundtrack. Those are my two favorites. And Disney Epic Mickey. Those are the three that I still listen to. No, well, you know, and there is a fourth. No.
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No, Alex worked, you know, three doors down from me and I was in his office all the time because I love sound. Back then, more than today, but even today, at some level, as great as our graphics are, we're still making radio plays.
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And in 1997, that was even more true. So sound design was critical. I mean, audio designers, give yourself a pat on the back. Or one person applauding. So, Again, as the game director, I had a slide that was the creative box. I mean,
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that's really important to me. It's my job to define the limits within which a game is going to exist. It's not my job to say, I want a C major chord there. So, you know, I kick things off, and
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then it's my job to make sure that everybody's staying in that box, right? And so it was the same with Alex. I mean, if he... did a Calliope thing, I probably would have said no, but he's a genius and did an amazing
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job. The sound design on Deus Ex was incredible, but my role was mostly saying, hey, that's really great, Alex. Are we out of time?
Speaker A
I'm afraid we're out of time. Like I said, I can take a few questions outside. Thanks a lot.
Topics:Deus ExGDC Festivalimmersive simulationrole-playing gamefirst-person shooteradventure gamegame designcyberpunkshared authorshipgame development history
