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Wednesday, January 05, 2000

Deus Ex (Ion Storm)

I was fortunate enough to work with a great team of writers on Deus Ex , which included Sheldon Pacotti and Austin Grossman. We dubbed ourselves the New Fabulists after our tastes in fiction. While Sheldon handled the mammoth task of writing the dialog for the game (the dialog script, when printed, measured almost nine inches thick) and Austin helped with additional dialog and AI barks, I was left to flesh out the game world. Deus Ex was a totally interactive universe, which meant every book and newspaper had to be written, every computer had to contain e-mail, every datacube had to have data, every object had to have a description -- and they all had to extend the back story of the game even as they informed the player. It was a little daunting, but I had a lot of fun. I also wrote the scripts for the cut scenes and animated them using an in-game engine built around proprietary extensions to the Unreal Editor -- not the easiest of tasks, but in the end I hope it paid off for the player.

I've provided the original scripts for the intro and endgame cut scenes, which differ somewhat from the final versions (and yes, they contain spoilers if you haven't played the game). I've also moved one of the "novels" I wrote for Deus Ex, "Jacob's Shadow," to its own page with a separate introduction since it seems to be a popular topic among fans of the game.

For those who really want to take a look at all the work involved, I recommend the Deus Ex text archive maintained by STL ("Creating a really believable world is just insanely hard"), an exhaustive and annotated collection of almost every piece of text that ever appeared in the game. There you can witness my increasingly futile attempts to come up with scenarios that explain why members of a super-secret global conspiracy keep leaving their passcodes everywhere.

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