The man forever fated to be known as the creator of Deus Ex would like you to know that he did not, in fact, create Deus Ex. Not single-handedly, anyway. In a video marking the 25th (oh my god) anniversary of the first Deus Ex, Warren Spector emerged from his hermitage to wish everyone a very merry what a shame.
“I’m pleased and proud because, like every developer, I hoped to make something that lives on in people’s minds for long… I never expected or even dared to hope that Deus Ex would be so long-lasting, yet here we are.”
Spector is pretty emphatic about that “we”: “You don’t ship anything, let alone anything good, without a great team. The Deus Ex concept may have been mine, but the game itself, and all kudos aimed at it, belong to the great, great team that bought into a vision and made it a reality.”
He’s right, of course, and he’s been banging this drum for a while. You might well have seen a now-memetic snippet of an interview Spector gave all the way back in 2001, where he’s quoted as saying that “There’s a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person,” right before being described as, you guessed it, the creator of Deus Ex.
Hell, I’ve probably done it myself in a few headlines. It’s an easy shorthand and—to get defensive for a second—I think most readers are smart enough to know no one is really saying Spector created Deus Ex on his own in a garage like Tony Stark, but rather that he had a key leadership role.
But Spector’s 100% right to acknowledge the contributions of the entire Deus Ex team, and namechecks a few of the leads—Harvey Smith, Chris Norden, Jay Lee, Sheldon Pacotti, and Alexander Brandon—without whom “there probably wouldn’t have been a Deus Ex at all.” Which is no world I want to live in, frankly.
“I’m proud as hell of the work they did back in 2000,” says Spector, “but I’m at least as proud that we created something bigger than ourselves… We made a game that seems to have influenced games that followed, and we created a world people want to revisit over and over again. So here’s to the next 25 years. See you in 2052!” 2052 being—if you’ve shamefully forgotten—the year Deus Ex is set.
It’s always nice to see Spector, and Deus Ex—which will forever be one of the greatest games ever made—deserves its hoopla on a milestone anniversary. But I am curious if, you know, this means something, man. The Deus Ex YouTube channel on which Spector’s birthday greetings were posted had been dormant for seven years until someone remembered the password (NSF001 / smashthestate) and uploaded the fancy PS2 version of the game’s opening cutscene nine days ago. A few days after that, we got Spector’s anniversary message.
Between this and the strange rebirth of Deus Ex’s console version earlier this month, I can’t help but wonder if the series is slowly twitching back to life. Like so many other things, it all went to hell in the wake of Embracer’s collapsed $2 billion deal, which scuppered no end of projects including, reportedly, a new Deus Ex, but I’m curious if these signs point to the series coming back in some way. A new game? Probably not. At least not yet. But hey, if Embracer wants to hand the OG (and Invisible War, while we’re at it) over to Nightdive to work its magic? I’d be a happy man. I’ve been looking for an excuse to reinstall.
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