How Deus Ex Predicted the Future. Warning: If you haven’t played Deus Ex, but have maybe bought it in a Steam Sale as something you’re absolutely going to play one day, this article will drive a twelve- car train of spoilers through that dream like you’re Leonardo Di. Caprio in Inception. This post originally appeared 8/5/1. Kotaku UK. A piece of driftwood internet wisdom that sometimes floats past on gaming messageboards goes something like this: every time you mention Deus Ex, someone will reinstall it.
Somewhere, wheezing for breath under the clutter of my room/workspace/habitat, is my original Deus Ex CD- ROM, which I bought aged 1. My reasoning was solid: I’d never heard of the game, but the back of the box promised guns and conspiracies, and the dude on the front was rocking some dangerously cool shades. Little Me might not have known much about global banking conspiracies or the Trilateral Commission, but you could coax him onto the cyberpunk neo- anarchist bandwagon with a pair of polarised Wayfarers and a trench coat. Fourteen years later, I’ve lost my fake Ray. Bans and even the local Brixton drug dealers don’t wear trench coats.
Sunglasses at night went out with Corey Hart (or at least with Keanu Reeves). Deus Ex did indeed have guns, but even at the time they were inexcusably horrible to use. The game’s not even a looker anymore – more a kind of papercraft tribute to how you think you remember it looked, with weirder walking animations.
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So why do I go back to it? Because leaving aside its wackier conspiracy theories, it’s the quality – the prescience – of Deus Ex’s story that makes it such a great game to play in 2. Revisit the game today and nano- augmented super- agent JC Denton’s quest to unravel a global conspiracy doesn’t seem twee or outdated. Somehow, it seems timely: moment after moment of sneering, political philosophising about money, health, corporations and the poor, punctuated by regular, 4. Unlike the most recent instalment in the franchise – 2. Deus Ex: Human Revolution – the original Deus Ex doesn’t drag you by the wrist right to the centre of its narrative.
You aren’t the bodyguard/confidant of a global leader in the human augmentation industry and your girlfriend isn’t the brilliant, one- in- a- million scientist whose research holds the keys to the future of humanity’s advancement. In DX1, you are, basically, a thug.
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A genetically engineered, laser- precise piece of next- gen thuggery, it’s true – but a punchy cog in the wheel of big government nonetheless. Video game protagonist 1. The set- up at the game’s start deliberately plays on the unimpeachable FPS hero trope.
Only if you slow down to read the game’s scattered newspapers, public information terminals and hacked email accounts do you find out how rotten the world of Deus Ex really is, and that apple only decays further the deeper you burrow. Your first mission ends with an interrogation with a captured terrorist leader.
His group have stolen a shipment of vaccine (called Ambrosia) for a plague that’s decimating all but the wealthiest in society (who can afford the cure). Your sole objective is to find out where the terrorists are taking it, so you can nab it back.“Well done!” Your handler beams over your brain implant, once you do. Mission complete.”But if you stay on after getting your answer, you can press the leader on his motives. What you get for your trouble could be an opinion column from a 2. Sunday newspaper. This guy, who until 3. Occupy movement rhetoric (“Ever wonder by the big car companies pay 2 per cent tax, while the guys on the assembly line pay 4.
Wikileaks soundbites (“Did you ever ask what it’s for? The surveillance? Is that freedom?”). Besides the boxy, 4: 3 ratio TVs back at counter- terrorist HQ, there’s not a thing in the thematic nature of DX1’s opening mission that’s aged a day.“Regarding the 9. I can’t speak for the rest of the development team, but even before the economic shocks of the 2.
I was preoccupied with the smallness of individual people compared to modern companies and governments. It’s hard to own your own career – and identity – when you often don’t even see the faces of the people deciding whether or not your job exists.
You’re even more alienated when the . This vastness of scale is a direct outgrowth of technology”. The game’s first big twist is that the National Secessionist Force (or NSF), which you’ve been bravely gun- plugging in the name of maintaining order, are actually the good guys: regular people pushed into fighting for their lives and livelihoods and then conveniently branded . The world that they live in is leaving them behind, as the rich pull away from the poor and employ people like you to police the divide.
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As JC, you see both sides of the equation in the way that no other in- game characters do: the elite live in fancy apartments and mansions (which you break into and pillage for goodies), while New York is filled with the sick and the homeless - either living in crappy rented rooms in the dilapidated . Deus Ex’s augmentations (the biomechanical enhancements that give JC and other UNATCO agents their awesome, murderous powers (and the series’ signature mechanics)) are huge technological advances. But the more you explore, the more you realise you’re one of the chosen few who can enjoy them.
These frightened, desperate people are being stacked against a Terminator. As the defenceless NSF leader puts it before he’s carried off, never to be seen again: “Who’s the scary one, huh? Me or you?”One famous piece of trivia about Deus Ex is that, if you look at the city skyline during the missions set in New York City, the Twin Towers are conspicuously absent. The real reason for their exclusion isn’t very interesting: something to do with memory constraints. So in the game’s fiction, the Towers were destroyed by terrorists. Deus Ex was released in 2.
But the game makes a more direct prediction about terrorism in the 2. Century in its first level, in which (before interrogating the NSF leader) JC is tasked with turfing the NSF out of the Statue of Liberty. The statue itself was destroyed previously in the game’s fiction, losing its head and its torch.
But the group responsible are domestic terrorists, and the attack therefore a symbolic one: in Deus Ex’s world, the American people feel they’re now subjects of a wealthy and corrupt elite working against the interests of the common man. Politicians and their families get plague vaccine while their own loved ones die in gutters. Before September 1. Statue of Liberty seemed far- fetched, but now it’s clear that modern wars are TV shows where both sides compete to write the script. PR has always been a part of war, but 2.
The responses of the powers- that- be to the threat of terrorism in the first Deus Ex are also eerily prescient, especially in their dehumanisation of the enemy. For the first chunk of the game, JC works as an agent for the United Nations Anti- Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO).
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Although you can choose to play a stealthy, non- lethal character, if you go soft on UNATCO’s enemies, the veteran field agents will chew you out and question whether you’ve really got the stones for the job.“The terrorists have wired the platform with explosives and put in hostages”, says your sometime- mentor, Anna Navarre, of an NSF group who have barricaded a subway station. You’re free to talk to the secondary characters whom work there between missions. General Sam Carter, a war veteran, runs the armoury. He’s not happy with the way UNATCO’s mission is being handled by the higher- ups, but affirms that the majority of people working in the building – the civilian staffers and the boots- on- the- ground – are “2.
Wander down to UNATCO’s bottom level, however, and you’ll find the holding cells; several hold NSF prisoners. You’re forbidden to talk to them (though you can), and later, one of the game’s primary antagonists (a shady government higher- up) arrives to conduct the interrogations personally. Follow him surreptitiously to the cells and you can watch his . The interrogation begins with carrots, moves on to sticks, and ends with murder. The government representative coldly rationalises his actions as “responding to a threat”.
The doctrine of the Bush and Cheney administration is carved deep into the foundations of UNATCO HQ.“We may not have the premeditated lies of Deus Ex, but we do see extraordinary feats of storytelling when governments overstep or mis- step”, says Pacotti. It’s the story of totalitarianism nicely wordsmithed by the West and provided free of charge back to the rest of the world”.
But if its treatise on terrorism was Deus Ex predicting the 2. It’s almost relegated to a lone (if chilling) Easter Egg, a hidden encounter that is easy to miss altogether if you aren’t actively looking for it.
About midway through the game, JC finds himself quasi- abducted and wakes up in the secret mansion of Illuminatus Morgan Everett. It’s one of Deus Ex’s many non- combat moments.
JC’s objectives are to meet Everett, learn about the Illuminati’s plans for the world, then meet his pilot Jock at the helipad so that he can fly off to his next mission. But if you decide post- meeting that you’d rather take five to do some snooping, you might discover the code to an otherwise impregnable blast door. Behind it sits a computer running an artificial intelligence named Morpheus. Morpheus, as it explains itself to JC, is a retired prototype for part of the ECHELON network: a gigantic, automated spying system built to intercept and analyse phone conversations, emails, faxes and other forms of communication from around the world. In the game, Morpheus has since been replaced by more advanced AIs (Daedalus, Icarus and possibly Oracle). Now it is kept by Everett as a techno- curiosity to amuse house guests.
Its party trick is telling people their life stories, harvested from the digital footprints they leave online.“Human beings feel pleasure while they are watched,” it says, without emotion.