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.
This uneasy stuff, unthinkable in a game today, is at first jarring next to the gleeful absurdity of Illuminati plots and FEMA spooks. But it eventually starts to blend with the trash, the gradient blurring between fiction-become-fact, fiction partially fulfilled, and pure science fiction. Because the kind of madness that ends up changing the world always does seem absurd until it happens.
More than simply enduring, what makes Deus Ex still exciting today is just how much it made you feel like a secret agent. Enough games inform you that this is what you are, then thrust an assault rifle into your hands and only ask you for nothing more than to open fire. Deus Ex stuck faster to its promise, and repreatedly lured you into situations that couldn’t be tackled with direct action. For each you needed a plan, because JC is deprived of the three luxuries game heroes typically coast on: accuracy, resilience and a polarised moral compass. He’s famously cack-handed with a rifle, routinely loses arms, legs and his life to single bullet wounds, and the voices in his head can’t agree on who he’s allowed to kill. And for each of his inadequacies, it was you who had to compensate.
The morality of your mission gets so muddled that it’s not unless you refuse to assassinate an unarmed terrorist – and listen to JC’s justification of your decision – that you realise doing so would have been illegal. The authority of agency to which you’re accustomed is suddenly undermined, and you end up considering profoundly un-game-like issues like whether you even have a right to follow your UN-sanctioned orders. The game was remiss in never meaningfully distinguishing between knockouts and kills, but it’s a testament to how much it shook us out of our game-logic mindset that many players still insist on the former.
JC’s wild, near-comical inaccuracy with basic firearms, meanwhile, gave you a larger share of the responsibility for success in combat. For one, it’s probably how you’d shoot in real life, and for another, it meant you had to engineer every situation. You had to make sure that, by the time you were spotted, you were close enough to guarantee a headshot. And unless you’d upgraded your pistol skill dramatically, that meant nearly point-blank. Easy enough with one enemy, given how near-sighted they are, but any more always required some form of subterfuge. A fire-extinguisher in their eyes, a proximity mine hidden on the alarm panel, or a reprogrammed turret just around the corner.
Overcoming these odds with tricks, decoys and improvisational violence is precisely what being a secret agent should be all about, and more importantly, it’s entirely your doing. And that’s the crux: you lived and died by your own ingenuity, quick thinking and daring. That’s why JC needs to be inadequate, that’s why the toolset needs to be so large, and that’s why they need you to feel like yourself rather than a pre-existing character: the game wants more of you.
This article was first published in Edge Presents: The 100 Best Videogames in July 2007.
The post Retrospective: Deus Ex appeared first on Edge Online.
via Edge Online
http://www.edge-online.com/features/retrospective-deus-ex/
