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Comment by karel-3d | Hacker News Reader

I played it last time in 2007 or so.

I wonder how the themes of the original game hit today, in 2025, the world being what it is now.

Several years ago Elon Musk did an interview with Marques Lee Brown praising the original Deus Ex and stating his disappointment with the sequel.

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.

"At last, we at Unicorn Startup, Inc have built the Torment Nexus from the famous sci-fi story Don't Build The Torment Nexus"

The HK Universal Constructor, with its chunky Unreal 1 polygons, pretty much matches what I imagine for the Torment Nexus.

One thing I found especially disgraceful was Elon pointing to the games narrative as a reason to be skeptical of measures to limit the spread of covid, noting that in the game the a plague intended for social control.

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.

Technically in the game both the disease and the control of the supply of vaccine are used for social control and political leverage. It was a plotline ripped directly from popular media at the time, mainly the X-files Movie which had a very similar if not identical plot of shadowy government conspirators named the "illuminati" spreading an virus but secretly manufacturing a vaccine for themselves, their families, and certain government officials.

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.

>and the control of the supply of vaccine are used for social control and political leverage.

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.

In 2 years it matches the date of the prequel Human Revolution. On the technology side there's still a lot that remains sci-fi, but the themes are at least on the horizon.

I recall watching a review in 2020/2021 where the reviewer stated how awkward he felt about the way it just took every conspiracy theory and just asked “what if it were true?”

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…

Deus Ex was drawing from a palpably '90s flavor of fascination with aliens, conspiracies, and alternative history. In the present day that same subject matter is unfortunately associated with things like vaccine denial and anti-democratic nationalistic movements. It's the difference between the X-Files and Alex Jones, essentially.

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