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Deus Ex

Ion Storm Austin's conspiracy thriller, and the game that let you choose

Classic GamesSource-checked

Warren Spector's team at Ion Storm Austin built Deus Ex on the Unreal engine, and Eidos published it in 2000. It mixed first-person shooting, role-playing, stealth and hacking in a near-future world of conspiracies, and let the player solve most problems in several ways. Edge called it 'the anti-Daikatana'; it topped the British charts that summer and won BAFTA's PC game award.

Deus Ex opens with a job for a new agent: terrorists have taken over the Statue of Liberty, and you are to deal with them. How you do it is up to you. You can go in shooting, pick off guards with a sniper rifle, stun them with an electric prod, slip past in the shadows, hack the security cameras or find another way in. The rest of the game works the same way, across New York, Hong Kong, Paris and a secret base in the Nevada desert, while the story unfolds into a conspiracy involving the United Nations, the Illuminati and a plague.

It came from an unlikely place. Ion Storm was the Dallas company John Romero had founded, and in 2000 it was best known for the long, public failure of his Daikatana. Its Austin studio, run by Warren Spector, released Deus Ex the same year. Edge called it “the anti-Daikatana — a game that not only lives up to its hype, but often exceeds it”. PC Zone called it “the new action role-playing benchmark”. In Britain it stayed in the top ten for three months, and in November 2000 BAFTA named it the PC game of the year.

Fast facts

  • Developer: Ion Storm’s studio in Austin, Texas.
  • Publisher: Eidos Interactive.
  • Director: Warren Spector. Lead designer: Harvey Smith.
  • Engine: Epic’s Unreal engine, with improved lighting and physics.
  • Released: PC, June 2000 in North America and August 2000 in Britain; Mac in 2000; PlayStation 2 in 2002.
  • Price: £34.99 in Britain, according to PC Zone.
  • Hero: JC Denton, an agent of UNATCO, an anti-terrorist force.
  • Minimum PC: a 300MHz Pentium with 64MB of memory and a 3D graphics card.

Spector goes to Texas

Spector’s career already ran through the games Deus Ex would be compared with. He had produced Wing Commander, several Ultima games, Ultima Underworld and System Shock during eight years at Origin, and then spent about a year at Looking Glass. In the summer of 1997, to some surprise, he joined Romero’s Ion Storm and set up a branch of it in Austin. The German magazine PC Player visited him there early in 1998 and reported that the test level for his first Ion Storm game was the London Underground.

Other designers were following the same thread. In 1998 the American magazine Maximum PC listed Thief, from Looking Glass, and Deus Ex as two games that would bring back the style of System Shock, pointing out that the people behind them, Doug Church and Warren Spector, had been “two of the central talents involved in System Shock”.

Spector has always resisted being called the game’s sole author. “Auteurs are rare in games today,” he told Edge in 2011, “and collaboration is almost always the real story.” The credits name Harvey Smith as lead designer, and PC Player introduced Smith to its readers in 2000 as the game’s chief designer.

A world built for choice

JC Denton works for UNATCO, a peacekeeping force dedicated to fighting terrorism. The world is poor and sick. A plague called the Gray Death is spreading, and the only treatment, a drug called Ambrosia, is being kept for the rich and powerful. The terrorists want it handed out. Edge’s reviewer thought that “ethically, they have a point”. Denton’s body has been rebuilt with nanotechnology to serve UNATCO, and before long he starts to doubt that he should.

The player shapes Denton in three ways. Skills such as lockpicking, computers and rifles improve with skill points, which are earned by completing objectives. Augmentations are nanotechnology upgrades installed from rare canisters, and each slot offers a choice between two, such as seeing through walls or telescopic targeting, running fast or moving silently. Once installed, an augmentation cannot be swapped. Edge gave the example of regretting not choosing toxic protection when an easy route through a waste pipe appeared. Inventory space is limited, so a player who carries heavy weapons has less room for lockpicks and other tools.

The levels are built around those choices. Guards react to what they see and hear: they fire, run for alarms and investigate bodies, so PC Zone advised hiding the bodies out of sight. Computer Gaming World gave a typical situation, four soldiers, a camera and a turret guarding a door, and listed the ways through it: snipe the soldiers and use a grenade, or find the ventilation shaft, among others. Talking to the many other characters opens up side quests and information, and some choices change how characters treat Denton and which missions come next.

Edge’s reviewer faced one of the game’s first moral choices, when Denton’s brother’s flat comes under attack. The magazine chose neither to fight nor to flee, and “hid in a cupboard”. Listening to the fighting outside until the cupboard was “ripped apart by stray gunfire” was, it said, “terrifying, slightly embarrassing, and a perfect illustration of the freedom” the game allowed.

The game does not tell the player whether a choice was right. “In Deus Ex there were as many people who thought you were a jerk for killing everyone as for killing no one,” Spector told Edge in 2010. “The game doesn’t judge — you judge yourself.” Asked which ending he would have chosen, had he not designed the game, he said it “depends on my mood”.

Reviews

Edge gave it nine out of ten in September 2000. Its review praised levels that were “mazes carved from cities, each holding secrets”, and said: “Games often claim multiple completion methods, but rarely achieve their goal with this much variation and style.” Its complaints were the story’s slide into “third-rate sci-fi nonsense” in its later stages, “some appalling voice acting” and long loading times.

PC Zone reviewed it in September 2000 and gave it its Classic award, which the magazine reserved for games scoring 90 or more. Paul Mallinson wrote that it had “leapfrogged System Shock 2 as the current benchmark in the role-playing genre”, because of its cast: “In System Shock 2 … you were out on your own — in this there’s a proper cast of characters and their interaction is a joy to behold.” At PC Gamer, which had reviewed it the month before, seven of the fourteen reviewers listed Deus Ex as their current favourite game that autumn.

Computer Gaming World was more divided. Its October 2000 review called the game “the love child of Half-Life and System Shock with some Thief thrown in for good measure”, and said the core of it “can be boiled down to one word: choice”. It also listed “a stuttering frame-rate, goofy gameworld logic, and idiotic AI”. The magazine’s later survey of 2000’s role-playing games said the design was fine but “its actual execution was hampered by performance, AI, and stability issues”.

Sales and awards

Computer Gaming World’s columnist Desslock noticed in February 2001 that “Europeans love — and I mean love — Ion Storm’s Deus Ex”. It sold well in North America and spent several weeks in PC Data’s weekly top ten there. In Britain it stayed in the ELSPA top ten for three months and was number one for most of August, against Diablo II and The Sims.

In November 2000 the British Academy of Film and Television Arts made Deus Ex its PC game of the year. Edge, reviewing 2000, called it “a deserved winner”, and noted that Ion Storm had “amazingly” silenced its critics with the game.

Later versions and sequels

A Mac version followed the PC one in 2000. Deus Ex came to the PlayStation 2 in 2002, and Edge reviewed that version in May. It was called Deus Ex: The Conspiracy in North America.

Ion Storm Austin’s sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, came out at the end of 2003 for PC and Xbox. Edge gave it seven out of ten, calling it “a great game” that “genuinely suffers from overstretched ambitions”. Spector himself later thought it had been set too far in the future: “We lost some of what made the game special, which was that it’s just around the corner.”

After Square Enix bought Eidos, its Canadian studio Eidos Montreal made a prequel, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011), set in 2027. Edge’s review observed that it “begins clumsily and in at least that sense it’s a true successor to the first game”. Its sequel, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, followed in August 2016. In 2022 Square Enix sold Eidos Montreal, its sister studios and the Deus Ex name to the Swedish group Embracer. In January 2024 Embracer cancelled a new Deus Ex game that Eidos Montreal had been working on for two years, and the studio laid off 97 people.

The first game came back into the news in September 2025, when Aspyr announced Deus Ex Remastered for February 2026. Players criticised its new graphics, and in December 2025 Aspyr postponed it with no new date and refunded pre-orders.

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