Deus Ex - Retrospective @ EDGE

EDGE has posted a new retrospective about the orginal Deus Ex.

JC Denton was just a codename; Deus Ex’s sunglassed protagonist was really named after you. Emails from your closest friends used your real name even while mission briefings called you JC – a neat conceit to let voice actors address you naturally without robbing you of your identity. But the personality transplant of you into JC Denton gets more involved the more you play. He riffs off your dialogue choices, second-guessing your attitude to the people you talk to, but remaining non-committal enough to reserve your right to a mind-change. However gravelly his voice, that gently inquisitive tone makes him unusually soft-spoken, philosophical and smart for a hero, which makes it all the easier to stomach becoming him.

Characters know JC when the game opens, but no one knows what he can do. He has no significant past or track record because you weren’t there; the game can no more judge what he would have done than it can guess at his real name. Whether your brother, afterwards, is gruffly congratulatory of your professionalism or apoplectic at your insanity – “You’re a complete jackass!” his exact words – is a function of your personality rather than JC’s.

The story, intended in 2000 as enjoyably pulpy trash, looks meatier stuff to modern eyes. Ion Storm Austin excluded the World Trade Center from the New York skyline – to save on texture memory – and postulated that the twin towers were destroyed in a terrorist attack in the near future. You end up working for a terrorist group responsible for decapitating the Statue of Liberty with explosives – the copper carnage of which now serves as the headquarters of the anti-terrorist unit you betray and ultimately destroy. Bizarrely, there are even references to a worldwide avian flu pandemic breaking out shortly after the turn of the millennium.