After seven years of silence, the official Deus Ex YouTube channel whirred to life in the past week just in time for original director Warren Spector to release a video commemorating the series’ 25th anniversary. Spector says he’s “pleased and proud” to celebrate the game’s quarter-century birthday and, at a time when some folks are taking more of a magnifying glass to game production environments, goes to some length to convey the team effort that went into its development.
“I’m pleased and proud because, like every developer, I hoped to make something that lives on in peoples’ minds for so long. I was lucky enough to achieve that. I’m amazed because I never expected or even dared to hope that Deus Ex would be so long-lasting, yet here we are.”
“Note that I said ‘we,’ Spector continues. “It’s a truism in game development that ideas are easy, shipping is hard. And you don’t ship anything, let alone anything good, without a great team.”
Spector says that though “the Deus Ex concept may have been mine,” the game and “all kudos aimed at it” belong to “the great, great team that bought into a vision and made it a reality.”
Reluctant he can’t name “everyone who worked on the game,” Spector singles out a few key lead contributors, like lead designer Harvey Smith, lead programmer Chris Norden, art director Jay Lee, lead writer Sheldon Pacotti, and audio director Alex Brandon.
These and other devs “improved on every idea I had,” Spector says, “and led the team to execute against those ideas at a level I never dreamed possible.”
Without them, “there probably wouldn’t have been a Deus Ex at all,” Spector says. “There certainly wouldn’t have been one that would warrant a birthday remembrance.”
Because “we didn’t just make a game,” he reckons. “We made a game that seems to have influenced games that followed. And we created a world people wanted to revisit over and over again. So here’s to the next 25 years.”
Deus Ex has had a rough time of it in the past few years, with a would-be entry reportedly getting canned by Embracer last year after two years of development. Even the series’ actors have told the IP owners that they’ve “dropped the ball.”
But the impact of Deus Ex extends far beyond the IP itself. Much of the immersive sim bible still used today was penned by the original game, those ripples of reactivity have reached countless other games and genres, and the folks behind modern installments like Deus Ex: Human Revolution are now working with the Fable 4 crew.
Spector, meanwhile, has a new game coming from his new studio OtherSide Entertainment: Thick as Thieves, a PvPvE multiplayer “stealth action game, with a capital S and a capital A.”
As it happens, the whole Deus Ex collection is currently 85% off in the Steam Summer Sale.
