Deus Ex is celebrating its 25-year anniversary right now, June 23, 2025. Under, we chat with designer Steve Powers about how he created some of the franchise’s most iconic levels.
Steve Powers has by no means visited Hong Kong, however he’s been there in his goals.
As a designer on the unique Deus Ex, he walked town’s in-game streets each day for greater than two years. Improvement was, he says, “a little bit of a haze” of arduous work and not less than as soon as, when he closed his eyes at night time, he noticed these digital canals and neon-lit alleys: these sides of meat hanging available in the market and the fog draping a temple within the metropolis middle.
Powers, the lead designer of the Hong Kong stage, says he wished to present gamers a “John Woo fever dream”–and 25 years after the immersive-sim basic was launched, the house he created feels as evocative, beneficiant, and lavish because it did then, from its underground nightclub flashing with strobe lights to the precarious balconies a dozen flooring up, coaxing the participant to leap into the gray night time.
Hong Kong is only one of 13 ranges in Deus Ex, but it surely appears like a recreation hub in itself. It’s a warren; its related areas really feel, directly, totally distinctive and but nonetheless from the identical world, or not less than the identical thoughts. From talking to Powers on a video name from his dwelling in Texas, it’s clear that Hong Kong’s simple stream comes from his singular, private, and admittedly inauthentic imaginative and prescient of what that metropolis ought to really feel like–and from a transparent want to reward gamers’ curiosity.
He was considered one of 4 designers who every owned a bit of Deus Ex, and these items had prescribed inputs and outputs. For Hong Kong, the player–JC Denton–is arriving to study extra about shadowy antagonists Majestic 12 and the mysterious Maggie Chow, in addition to to seek out the scientist Tracer Tong to allow them to neutralize their self-destruct “kill swap”. The participant should go away Hong Kong having discovered the reality concerning the hyperlinks between Majestic 12 and a worldwide plague, and having acquired a robust weapon for the sport’s second half: the long-lasting, glowing Dragon’s Tooth Sword.
Inside these parameters, Powers had near-total artistic freedom. Developer Ion Storm couldn’t pay for a Hong Kong journey, so he drew on his love of the motion director John Woo, and turned to the monumental guide assortment of the sport’s director, Warren Spector. “He had a large shelf filled with image books from Hong Kong, so I’d actually flip by means of these and put post-its on pages,” he says. “That is the place it got here from: John Woo, Hollywood, and stacks and stacks of books.”
The picture in his head was of a busy, smoky avenue at night time, lit solely by vertical neon signs–that turned Tonnochi Highway, named after the real-life Tonnochy Highway in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district. He bolted bits on, “like constructing with LEGO,” and this unguided, free-flowing method led to “glad coincidences.”
For instance, he created a tall constructing and hollowed out a comfy condo, designed in order that gamers might study extra about their brother, Paul Denton. Powers went into the engine and peered out the window, as a participant would.
“And there is this tall constructing [opposite], and I believe, it would be cool if I might see one thing up there. After which the items simply begin popping out of that–oh, that’s the place Maggie Chow [should] reside. If I used to be Paul Denton, I may very well be spying on her from right here.” Instantly, he hopped over the highway and constructed Chow’s condo, the place the participant will later discover the Dragon’s Tooth Sword.
“The means I wish to work is simply to get in a stage that’s blocked out, and placed on my ‘participant glasses,'” Powers says. “I’m not going to consider stage design, or the tutorial ideas of creating a recreation, I simply go, ‘What do I wish to do proper now?’
“I like attending to a spot and searching down and also you get a bit tingle in your tummy as a result of it’s so excessive up … And I wish to run, and leap over a chasm, and land on a balcony on the opposite facet. That sounds cool. After which I determine why it’s there after the very fact.” Within the completed recreation, gamers can certainly leap from Maggie Chow’s constructing to that first condo Powers constructed.
His constructing upwards and outwards was not at all random, he says, and was guided each by the plot–players should go to a market, a membership, a triad base, and a hidden laboratory belonging to the VersaLife corporation–and by a want for modifications of rhythm. However the consequence feels serendipitous. You recognize while you flip a nook that the music, the colour palette, and the vibe will shift, and also you’ll discover one thing value investigating.
In replaying the sport, I go to Hong Kong’s canals and get misplaced on its walkways, passing barges and rowing boats. I take a slender alley, rising right into a frosty room with meat hanging on hooks and a determine lurking within the shadows. Powers made that house, a freezer room for the Outdated China Hand waterside bar, particularly to interrupt up the nice and cozy neon colours of Hong Kong with cool blues, he says.
His want for an enormous, diverse world made adapting to participant selection, an indicator of Deus Ex, extra sophisticated. Gamers are supposed to fulfill Maggie Chow earlier than discovering the Dragon Tooth’s Sword, which can, in flip, show her half in a serious conspiracy. However her condo has a number of entrances, together with by means of a skylight, and you’ll break in to seek out the sword with out speaking to her. If that occurs, she’ll confront the participant a lot afterward, berating them for his or her “horrible manners”.
“For each single alternative I’d give the participant to do issues out of order, it exponentially sophisticated some logic,” says Powers. “What’s Maggie Chow going to say to you if you have already got the sword the primary time you meet her?”
That, to many gamers, and to Powers, is the enjoyment of Deus Ex. “What are all of the issues the participant might’ve performed earlier than getting right here, and let’s have the sport reply, make it possible for’s accounted for. It makes the sport really feel alive and actual.”
You’ll be able to break the fiction, “but it surely holds collectively simply sufficient the place sympathetic gamers create their very own logical leaps,” Powers says. “If the participant has sufficient cause to imagine that every thing is accounted for, then after they’re offered with one thing that does not work out that means, they will clear up it themselves–they’ll assist us out a bit bit.”
It’s simple to turn out to be a kind of sympathetic gamers in Hong Kong. You not solely forgive leaps of logic, however you start telling tales in your head to fill within the graphical gaps and the empty streets–about why that canal boat is parked proper subsequent to that freezer room, for instance. “The constancy is basically missing in Hong Kong,” Powers says, “however the thought is, let’s present how this world really works. A barge is available in from the bay and down the canal and comes right here, and offloads all these frozen items, and that is the place they retailer them for the kitchen. I wished it to make sense as a habitable house.”
Not each a part of Hong Kong has aged properly.
Even on the time, the native accents appeared like exaggerated stereotypes. Powers recollects criticism after the sport was launched. However lots of the characters, he says, have been voiced by native people–they simply weren’t professionals. “I keep in mind getting dinged, ‘The accents are so bizarre and faux,’ and I used to be like, that was actual folks from Hong Kong studying these traces. They have been simply dangerous actors so it got here throughout as stilted and bizarre.”
Among the characters, nevertheless, have been voiced by Western actors, together with each Maggie Chow and Tracer Tong. Powers says he wasn’t concerned within the casting and recording, however is aware of that, for a lot of the staff, it was the primary totally voiced recreation a lot of them had labored on.
“I am sure that numerous issues could be performed otherwise right now,” he says. “On Prey and Redfall we forged actors that suited the ethnic and cultural backgrounds of the characters, and once we had writers producing dialog for a tradition that wasn’t their very own, we employed the suitable consultants to evaluate and touch upon the content material in order that we might modify. I am positive if we have been making Deus Ex right now, we would have comparable values.”
This isn’t an genuine model of Hong Kong. “Anybody going to Hong Kong isn’t going to see any of this,” he says. He’s “positive it was on his thoughts” that he was portraying a unique tradition and that individuals from Hong Kong would possibly play the sport, however “there’s by no means any intent to do something apart from to do a respectful presentation [of local culture]. That was the hope.”
That is Steve Powers’ model of Hong Kong, his personal “John Woo fever dream”, his imaginative and prescient of a metropolis.
As if as an instance the purpose, Powers even modelled considered one of his physique components into the sport, after programmers on the staff confirmed him tips on how to make advanced shapes, he says.
It sits on a plinth within the foyer to the VersaLife headquarters, reflecting off the pink marble flooring, and slides again to disclose an underground laboratory the place the Grey Demise, the plague threatening the world, is being manufactured.
It’s a big hand, reaching in the direction of the participant, greedy at a globe, a metaphor for energy.
On our name, Powers stretches his fingers in the direction of his webcam.
“That’s this hand.”