them to stay around and continue to do cool things. Certainly when I left I didn’t think
the company sucked or wasn’t cool. I know a lot of people there who I really liked and
there were some really good games being worked on. But for me, on some level I had
already said this is a cool company but a very different one, and I think ten years is
enough and there’s enough things that frustrate me that I don’t want to be here at the
moment. But even so, yeah, obviously Looking Glass was a cool group and a lot of us
put a lot of time and energy and a large part of our lives into it and it’s sad when that
doesn’t work out. So there’s some part of me that says, oh that sucks, that’s not fair, but
it’s the real world and it had a pretty good run.
The next thing you worked on wasDeus Ex. What was your involvement with
that?
I did very, very little, a
tiny, tiny amount. Obvi-
ously Warren and I talk all
the time so I’d seen design
docs whenever I was
down visiting and I would
play the game and give
them some feedback. But
I was only down there for a
couple of months, near the
end, where I tried to do a
little bit of work in making
the AI a little more forgiv-
ing. I tried to point out
some of the lessons of
Thief. I’d say, “Hey, I don’t
think you guys should do
the same thing we did, but guys on sniper towers fifty meters away shooting you in the
back that you’ve never seen? Reality yes, fun no.” I did a little bit of that, I did some mis-
cellaneous code cleanup, debugging, tried to help out with a couple of the systems a
little bit in terms of a few things that hadn’t come together or things that were really
broken in terms of performance. Obviously the game had some performance problems
when it shipped, but we did a little bit of work on that. Mostly I was just down there
hanging out and talking with Warren and reporting a ton of bugs and fixing a little bit
here and there and trying to improve some things and debug some things. But mostly it
was just “I’ll go hang out with Warren for a couple months and help out with whatever
he’s working on.”
It seemed that, to some extent,Deus Expopularized a lot of the concepts you
had pioneered withSystem Shockyears earlier. How did you think it developed
those ideas?
Looking Glass had gone on the focus focus focus track. Get something really deep even
if it’s narrow, whereas DXwas exactly the opposite. It was incredibly broad but
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Deus Ex