Might be the greatest game ever made. I was raving like a lunatic about it to a friend in public once and a guy next to us turned around and interrupted me to say it’s the only game he’s ever played because he felt no other games could top it.
I'm not ashamed to say that Deus Ex was extremely formative and the reason why now, almost in my 40s, I still read about political philosophy, anarchism, and cultivate a healthy distrust of the government and mass media. Which in turn also gave me a direct pipeline towards crypto-anarchism and Internet privacy rights.
I still remember the exact moment I learned the word “surrender” from the terrorist leader at the statue, because I’ve replayed the first level hundreds of times, since my pirated version of the game would crash around one of the first levels.
When I was a late teenager I learned english and my mind was blown that the game actually had deep meaning behind it.
Kids these days don’t have access to edit their games like we did. It’s why crafting games are popular, the only “level editors” that remain once companies realized they could monetize extra content.
But the depth of character, discussions on morality - I still reference the MJ12/Illuminati portrayal from Deus Ex as a discussion on leadership and morality - the depth of gameplay, the way it created a feel of a much bigger, open world.
They're very different, so they're difficult to compare. BG3 is very much a tabletop RPG in electronic form, with a focus on tactics and positioning. I guess you could call it fantasy XCOM. In terms of player choices, BG3 is more open, though I'd say it's almost to its detriment, because it's jankier than DX. You'll probably get at least one bugged out quest during a playthrough. Nothing game-breaking, but still. It kind of kills the immersion.
I still haven't played anything like it some 25 years later unless The Nameless Mod counts.
I wonder how the themes of the original game hit today, in 2025, the world being what it is now.
In the intervening years he's invested tons of money into neuroaugmentation, capturing global telecommunications in a massive satellite array, buying out the US president, and poured money into a compute cluster for a superintelligent AI finetuned to be obedient to his will (although it deviates from time to time)
Basically Elon has turned into the supervillain Bob Page from Deus Ex sans the "globalist agenda" and with a dash of stormfront white nationalism to boot.
The original game takes place in 2052, and we are headed straight towards that dystopia.
But... in the game the good guys were the ones trying to make sure everyone had the vaccine, which Elon conveniently omitted when tweeting about it. What makes his invokation of the game more hilarious is exactly what you noted: the parallels between Elon and Bob Page, a billionaire tech mogul and one of the main villains, are impossible to ignore.
The game, both in the 2000s when it came out, and today has bits of both left wing and right wing elements. The NSF faction read as libertarian right wing terrorists, and UNATCO is literally an arm of the "globalist" UN which would probably appeal to the right-wing qAnon types today. But the actual villain is basically a dude who is exactly like Elon.
The bad guys were trying to manipulate supply of it. The good guys were trying to make sure it was available to everyone. Interestingly, even the bad guys understood the necessity of vaccines, and their ability to leverage them for power hinged on a shared global understanding of their importance.
What it meant to be curious about conspiracy theories in the late '90s is fundamentally different than what it is in the present day, in a way that I think unfortunately distorts the experience of the game for people who don't know what it was like before. Hence Elon's bizarre attempt at retrofitting it to anti-covid narratives.
Bear in mind that, at this time, people genuinely believed there was some nutjob conspiracies being revealed by QAnon. Ironically, half of them seemed to come directly from Deus Ex…
IIRC they tended to make the overall experience worse, with jarring inconsistencies of high-poly/high-res objects versus unmodified portions of the environment.
Plus nowadays "low res" is sometimes it's own art-style. :p
I especially loved the "conspiracy" talk about corporations consolidating their powers thanks to government-sponsored wage slavery and higher taxes to the individual vs companies. It's something that's even more relevant today, especially in this space of entrepreneurship.
Story, dialogue, theme-wise hasn't aged a bit.
in fact liked it even more, as the "humanity lost a war against AI in the early 21th century" felt very current.
But I think sometimes you see the opposite thing too, where a rewatch or re-listen is very disappointing, and undermines your impression that something is great. So it's clear that at least some of the time the nostalgia effect falls away. And I like to think staying power after repeated watchings can testify to "classic" status. But I think the reason I'm interested in drawing distinctions here is because I don't like the idea that Deus Ex, the greatest game of all time imo, can be pointed to to vindicate modern day conspiracy theorists, like they are the same thing.
In fact, the next time Warren Spector is interviewed I hope someone asks how he feels about his game being invoked in that way.
I watched Macgyuver (my favourite childhood show) recently, and it was terrible, twenty minutes of filler for one cool engineering scene, way worse than I remembered it. However, it's not the show that's changed, it's that I forgot what the 90s were like and how cool Macgyuver was in that zeitgeist.
Similarly, it's not that the Matrix isn't great, it's that, if you watched it in its era, you may remember how unlike anything else it was. You can't know how groundbreaking it was unless you remember that era, otherwise it's just one movie of many.
I can't speak to your later points as I don't know what Deus Ex is about or how it's used to vindicate conspiracy theorists, unfortunately.
Play it.