The rumors were true: Deus Ex was almost created as part of an already established universe. More specifically, it could’ve been a first-person Command & Conquer RPG.
Veteran gamers are celebrating the 25th anniversary of one of the most enduring, genre-bending, and influential first-person games of all time, so it comes as no surprise we’re learning new details about its inception and what happened behind the scenes in the lead-up to that point.
We’d already heard several times, straight from creator Warren Spector and other lead creatives, that Deus Ex’s creation and development was anything but easy. It was John Romero’s Ion Storm that got it off the ground in the end, but we’d also heard that, at some point, Spector almost made a first-person RPG set in Westwood’s Command & Conquer universe that would’ve felt a lot like Deus Ex in its design philosophy. Now, we’ve received further confirmation it was literally going to be Deus Ex under a different guise. The only thing that changed? The setting… sort of.
The full story is a bit more complex, we admit it. But here’s the rundown as well as the new comments on the matter. While talking to PC Gamer for the game’s 25th anniversary, Spector went on to briefly discuss Troubleshooter, a project that would’ve starred a supercop named Jake Shooter (yes, really). “I was sick to death of space marines and alien invasions and mages with fireballs and pointy hats. I had made enough of those and wanted to do something different,” Spector told PC Gamer. The game was going to be set in the present-day and feature a more grounded story, but the ‘meat & potatoes’ of what ultimately became Deus Ex were roughly the same.
The problem? No one was willing to fund that vision. His only option at one point was to sign with Westwood to turn it into a Command & Conquer game: “My plan was just to take the genre-mashup, player choice elements from Troubleshooter and set it in the C&C universe. From a gameplay perspective, I was at a point where I was going to find a way to make it one way or another, even if it meant making another damn sci-fi game!”
Before that happened, however, John Romero came in and suggested taking the project to Ion Storm with a “blank cheque” and no creative guardrails. The rest is history. Needless to say, Troubleshooter evolved into something far brainier and more compelling than an action-RPG starring a supercop with a silly name, but at the same time, everyone sincerely loves how goofy Deus Ex turned out to be at times, so we’d say much of that spirit survived.
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