Part 3
Page 1 of 4

In the past two weeks, we've taken a close look at Ion Storm's Deus Ex, the role-playing game with heavy action and adventure elements. We've brought you detailed information on the game's unique skill system, which lets you customize your characters in a near-infinite number of ways. We also rounded up a list of weapons and items that you'll find at your disposal throughout the game. This week, we wrap up our extended coverage of Deus Ex by talking with the man responsible for its inception, Warren Spector. Spector's impressive gameography includes memorable titles like Ultima Underworld 1 and 2, Ultima: Martian Dreams, System Shock, and Thief: The Metal Age (albeit only for a short time). If Spector has it his way, Deus Ex will go down in the annals of gaming as yet another one of his classics. We recently had a chance to sit down with Warren and find out some of his inspiration for Deus Ex.

GameSpot: We understand that you came up with the idea for Deus Ex before you joined Ion Storm. Exactly when did you come up with the idea for developing this game, and now that Deus Ex is nearly done, how different was your original idea from this final product?

Warren Spector: The idea that eventually morphed into Deus Ex got its start back in 1994 or 1995, when System Shock was wrapping up. I knew I wanted to start production on an immersive first-person game, sort of action-oriented but with some role-playing elements. But I was burned out on science fiction and fantasy so I came up with this proposal called "Troubleshooter." Troubleshooter was going to be set in the real world, where you play the role of the guy the CIA and FBI call in when a job is too tough for them to handle - real Bruce Willis stuff. It just seemed like time for gaming to break out of the nichy, geeky world of the fantastic and enter the mainstream with a game inspired by Tom Clancy novels, Die Hard films, and so on. Origin, rightly, thought the project was too risky, so it languished for a while.

Click to enlarge

A little while later, Tony Bratton, Bill Baldwin, John Talley, Dave Beyer, Whitney Ayres, and I - the Wings of Glory team - took some of the Troubleshooting ideas and came up with an interesting variant. It was a futuristic, on-foot, and vehicular sports/dueling game, sort of Car Wars-like. This proposal placed a greater emphasis on character development and growth and multiple solutions to problems than the original Troubleshooter. We got that one into preproduction, but it just didn't seem like there was much support for it at the time.

Click to enlarge

While I was at Looking Glass, in 1996, a lot of the old Troubleshooter concepts cropped up in Junction Point, the massively multiplayer design the LG Austin team worked on. And, finally, when I signed on with Ion, taking the LG Austin team with me, John Romero sold me on the concept of doing my "dream game." And out came that old Troubleshooter concept once again. Before any corporate lawyers start licking their chops, let me be clear that all of the fictional and design details changed when we got to work on Deus Ex. What remained was a more believable setting - the re-creation of modern cities and all - and an emphasis on giving players the power to express themselves through character development and problem-solution choices. Frankly, there's virtually nothing left from those earlier proposals other than the seed of an idea to put power back in players' hands in a realistic setting.

Next: Inspiration