Last year for Christmas, a good friend got me the best gift of all: Love The Orange Box the 1997 PC Gamer US “Holiday Extravaganza” issue, 456 pages of news, reviews, interviews, and, crucially, retro full page ads from the late ’90s golden age of PC gaming.
Rogue One screenwriter Gary Whitta was still editor-in-chief, and the issue even has his 94% review of the classic Star Wars game Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. If I have a favorite part, though, it has to be the interview on page 66 with legendary game designer Warren Spector about his move to John Romero’s Ion Storm from Looking Glass Studios, a move that would precipitate one of the all-time greats: Deus Ex.
“A first-person roleplaying game,” Spector said of the project. “First-person perspective is where it’s at. I’m not much interested in doing anything else. Once you’ve got a 3D world, you might as well let the player put the camera anywhere he wants.
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“I don’t want to do hardcore, [Ultima] Underworld-style branching conversation stuff. I’m kind of taking my lead from Miyamoto and the console guys these days. That’s what I’m obsessing about—SquareSoft games.”
I was already grinning like a doofus when I realized Spector was talking about Deus Ex before we knew anything about Deus Ex, more than two years before the game would release. Then his console remark really threw me for a loop. One of the most PC of all PC games, taking its lead from console design?
(Image credit: Square Enix)
But it makes sense given the time and context. The cinematic presentation of games like Final Fantasy 7 and (soon after this interview) Metal Gear Solid were genuinely innovative and influential. Mario 64 was pioneering 3D exploration. This was a generation of console games that was finally catching up to the depth of ’90s PC without sacrificing gamepad-centric approachability.
BioWare devs frequently cited Square and Final Fantasy as influences on Baldur’s Gate and its beloved cast of characters. And compared to Ultima Underworld, which boasted a fighter jet cockpit-complex interface and no mouselook, Deus Ex was, indeed, far more streamlined and console-like.
“Simpler conversation stuff, lots of deep characterization, lots of non-combat interaction stuff,” said Spector, listing his goals for the game. “Fairly deep world simulation, posing problems not puzzles.
“I don’t ever want to play ‘Get the dirty sweatsocks and the smelly cheese and put it in the vat and stir it up and you get the magic wand,'” he asserted, referencing a frequent design gripe with the then-popular point and click adventure genre. “What the hell is that?”
“What I’m hoping [for] is: Real world plus about 50 years,” Spector said of the setting, which was bang-on for Deus Ex’s in-game date of 2052. “I’ve always wanted to do a real-world roleplaying game, but we’re not quite ready to do that. But if I can add 50 years, I can play around a bit.”
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Quaking
Another surprise: At this juncture, Spector was still planning on using id Software’s Quake 2 engine for Deus Ex, rather than the Unreal tech he would ultimately land on. Both of Ion Storm’s other games, Daikatana and Anachronox, ran on modified versions of the Quake 2 engine, but the former game’s troubled development may go some of the way toward explaining Spector’s switch.
“I’ve got a stable codebase for the first time in my damn life,” Spector said of using Quake 2. “My guys who are looking at it are saying its real parsable code, really easily extended. All we have to do is take Quake, put a conversation system in it, expand the physics system, have some cooler object interaction, and we’re done.” Guess it didn’t turn out to be quite that simple.
A 2018 Game Developer interview with Deus Ex lead programmer Chris Norden undercuts some of Spector’s enthusiasm for Quake in hindsight, particularly his “bing bang boom you’re done” presentation of getting all those immersive sim systems working on the engine.
“As much as I respected the Quake technology, I knew at the time that there was no support,” Norden told Game Developer. “We were making a very specific type of game where we wanted you to be able to do anything. Quake was a shooter engine, and that’s it. If you wanted to make something other than an FPS, it was a lot of work, and you got no support from Id. They basically took a CD of code, threw it at you, and ran away.
“The Quake tools were OK, but they weren’t very user-friendly for non-engineers. We had a bunch of designers who were not engineers, so they needed to know how to use this stuff.”
Norden was pretty definitive about Unreal being the right choice for Deus Ex: “I think if we had chosen Quake, it would have been a much more difficult game to make.”
From the archives
(Image credit: Future)
This interview was originally published in PC Gamer Vol. 4 #12, December 1997.
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Back in the PC Gamer 1997 Holiday Extravaganza, Spector contrasted the relative plug and play nature of Quake 2 with his time at Origin, where everything was built in-house, and use of proto-middleware or “not created here” code was “considered the worst crime.” Ion Storm was ahead of the curve in this regard: These days, middleware like Unreal is the norm, and there are vanishingly few studios with in-house game engines anymore.
The PC Gamer interviewer ended the writeup with an understandable caveat, the sort of reasonable note of doubt you’re professionally obligated to include in a preview or theoretical discussion of an upcoming game. “Naturally our conversation with Spector was just that—a conversation,” they wrote. “There is no game to show yet, and there won’t be for a long time.”
It’s funny to imagine that, just this once, history would have vindicated them going totally off the rails and asserting something like “I think I was just told about one of the best games that will ever be made.”
