Deus Ex – Celebrating the 20th Anniversary

Ion Storm released Deus Ex on June 22, 2000. Now, 20 years later, the game is widely known as an introductory stepping stone into the shadowy world of conspiracy theories for many, and a cult-classic immersive sim that offers its players a sense of unparalleled freedom. In order to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the game’s release, Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos have put together a remixed soundtrack album entitled Conspiravision: Deus Ex Remixed.

You can purchase the album by following the link above, while this PC Gamer article shares some additional information about the creative process behind it. An excerpt:

“Some songs have aged a little better than others mainly due to their composition,” says Alexander. “UNATCO is a timeless classic and always will be. The remix, while updated to a degree, isn’t much different than the original.”

Michiel agrees. “The thought of a makeover for UNATCO has been on my mind for many years as I thought it was way too short. That problem has now been fixed and then some.”

He’s not kidding. The remixed theme, now called Home Base (UNATCO), is a full eight minutes longer. While still recognizable, the original’s ambient synth noodling has been filled out and sounds like something that would have played over the end credits of the Deus Ex movie (starring Christian Bale) that fans always wanted.

“In most cases I tried to remain as close to the originals as I could,” says Michiel, “but some songs warranted a change of pace or even a completely different genre. The UNATCO combat song, which I’ve been told was fairly well hidden in the game, was slightly timid and has gotten a huge boost.”

Then, there’s this TechRadar interview with Scott Martin, one of the original programmers on the project. A few sample paragraphs:

“A big chunk of the development team came from the Looking Glass and Origin Systems tradition,” Martin said. “Ultima, in particular, was famous for dumping a million tiny details into the game world. Even those of us who didn’t work for those companies before we joined Ion Storm loved that kitchen-sink approach and tried to take the same approach with Deus Ex.”

For Martin, whose responsibilities included building a user interface library for the Unreal engine from scratch and designing the behavioral AI for the game’s NPCs, this kitchen-sink approach translated into making the NPC denizens of their game world behave in a radically new way.

“At the time, [Unreal Engine] had a purely shooter-based AI,” he explained, “which could handle movement towards targets but not more subtle NPC behavior. I added a lot of new AI states to the code, especially for non-hostile NPCs, and gave them the ability to wander, patrol, follow the player, sit in chairs, etc.”

And finally, you may also be interested in this Rock Paper Shotgun article where the game’s developers look back at how they managed to produce something so timeless. For example:

Pacotti: A lot of locations and missions got cut as we tried to make the date. I wrote dialogue for rescuing people who had been taken out to a pirate island. There was a White House mission that seemed pretty pivotal at the time. The president was a puppet of the Illuminati – he’d been replaced with a clone, and you rescued his daughter.

Bare: Deus Ex was my very first job in the industry. I came on the project for the last year and a half, and Harvey pretty much dumped a bunch of levels into my lap. They were at varying stages of maturity. I had a huge amount of freedom.

Smith: There were very few check-ins. Eidos was over in the UK. Those guys would fly in for an important quarterly check on how the money was being spent, and party so hard with the Ion Storm Dallas guys that they would inevitably email us and go, ‘We’re gonna make it down to Austin next time’. Therefore we were allowed to make our crazy, crazy game.

Romero: One of my co-founders, Todd Porter, wasn’t making a game anymore. So he was just doing whatever he wanted to do, which was getting involved in Deus Ex. He tried to shut down Deus Ex probably two to four times – just get it cancelled.

We had a real long meeting, and I remember telling him – I don’t care what you’re hearing down in Austin, whatever Warren makes is great. I don’t care how he does it, if they’re having a circus every day in the office. So we’re leaving them alone and we’re not cancelling the project ever.

Todd Porter, Ion Storm co-founder: I never tried to cancel any projects nor would I have had the power to do so. I really had very little interaction with Warren and left Ion long before Deus Ex shipped.

[John Romero strongly stands behind his statements regarding Todd Porter’s involvement.]