We were making a game designed to bust through genre boundaries, and I thought a little competition and argumentation would lead to an interesting synthesis of ideas. “I put together two groups of people with differing philosophies – a traditional RPG group and an immersive sim group. In a postmortem on the game inside the November 2000 issue of Game Developer Magazine, Spector talked about why his team faced so many design challenges. Unfortunately, the Deus Ex’s development was so troubled that it would take another two years, and wouldn’t hit the market until Summer 2000. Spector’s team set up a new office in Austin and began working on their dream project in August 1997, hoping to release the game by Christmas 1998. Fortunately, John Romero – flush with cash from the Doom and Quake series – was happy to let Spector and his team join his new company, Ion Storm. In 1997, as Looking Glass Studios continued to face financial troubles, Spector and his team were laid off from their jobs. Unfortunately, Spector was working for Looking Glass Studios, which didn’t have the budget to fund the kind of game that Spector dreamed of making. In 1993, burnt out on fantasy and science-fiction tropes, producer Warren Spector decided that he wanted to design a game set in the real world and started to draw up a design document for a game he called Troubleshooter.

But to better understand the impact of Ion Storm’s original shooter/RPG hybrid, you have to time travel back to the beginning of its development, in the early ‘90s.

The diversity of today’s first-person shooter market is due – in large part – to the inventive trailblazing of the original Deus Ex. Now shooters are one of the most common video game genres on the market, delivering everything from high-intensity shootouts like Call of Duty to thought-provoking stories like BioShock and even sprawling loot-fests like Borderlands. In the early ‘90s, id Software flipped the gaming industry on its side when it popularized the first-person shooter with Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.

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