Deux Ex is the PC classic we all love to bang on about: the FPS that arguably created the immersive sim, releasing players from the shackles of linear corridors and mindless baddies into a world where freedom of approach was the secret sauce. Its plot and stylings were also sophisticated for the time, with the player a blank slate in a world full of grey areas and ethically dubious choices.
Knowing that this is where Deus Ex ends up makes its starting point all the funnier. Before Deus Ex designer Warren Spector joined Ion Storm in 1997, which would ultimately develop the game, he was pitching it to his then-studio Origin Systems as “Troubleshooter.”
Speaking to Robert Zak in the next issue of PC Gamer, Spector says this would’ve been around 1994 and he’d had enough of the tropes that dominated the genre. Troubleshooter would be a “real-world roleplaying game” because “I was sick to death of space marines and alien invasions and mages with fireballs and pointy hats. I had made enough of those and wanted to do something different.”
The initial story was, shall we say, less refined than the grim near-future vision of Deus Ex. The hero was called Jake Shooter, a supercop that the intelligence agencies would call in for jobs that were just too goddamn tough for normal agents. I cannot get over “Jake Shooter” as a protagonist: it’s like the name a videogame character would have in The Simpsons.
Spector was wary of overpromising how much “real world” the game could simulate. “The game was going to be set in the current day, but I realised early on that players all knew how the current day worked,” he says. “They knew how a phone worked, how a TV worked, how a computer worked. We couldn’t simulate anything at a level of detail that would meet players’ expectations.”
The pitch didn’t land at Origin, partly because of Jake Shooter, but mainly because Spector’s fellow devs couldn’t quite see the endpoint under his melange of ideas. “Deus Ex was part shooter, part stealth game, part RPG. I mean, how do you sell that?” says Spector. “The argument I got from the Thief folks was that if you give players a gun, they won’t sneak. I was also asked, ‘Why don’t you just make a shooter?’ I learned the power of the word ‘no’ when pitching Deus Ex, let me tell you!”
I am guessing that, at some stage, Spector also learned the power of calling your protagonist something like JC Denton. You can read more in PC Gamer’s full interview with Spector in our next issue, which arrives with subscribers July 15.
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