“So rather than open Deus Ex with Denton turning up at the office, we started with the mission instead. The sequel, which he found wildly disappointing, starts with you hanging out in a castle chatting to people. The first Ultima Underworld, one of Smith’s favourite games, begins with the player in a hostile environment. “The original idea was that you turn up for your first day of work, get briefed, and meet your colleagues,” says Smith. But, Smith reveals, the game wasn’t always structured this way. The underground UNATCO base, one of Deus Ex’s most memorable locations, is stuffed with characters to meet, secrets to discover, and world-building to ingest. Once Denton has successfully dealt with the terrorist attack he returns to his headquarters for a debriefing-which, conveniently enough, is also located on Liberty Island. But we were making these huge, open levels because that’s the kind of game we wanted to make. We’d see the frame rate nosedive because we had too many characters and the sight lines were too long. “When we shipped the game, Liberty Island ran at five frames per second on some machines. I could put tunnels under it, I could make it multi-tiered so you could climb to the top. But what I really wanted to do was make a wide open space with something big in the middle that you could go left or right around. “I’d seen corridors, streets, and alleys before in games. But I still ended up inheriting a bunch of those maps, and it was Liberty Island that excited me the most because it was this big, open space. “And honestly, as a kid from Texas, I had no idea about these places and had never even visited them. “Warren had grown up in New York and he wanted to feature locations like Battery Park and Liberty Island,” says Smith, who was behind much of the design of Liberty Island and other locations in Deus Ex. It’s also the perfect introduction to Deus Ex’s unsurpassed freedom of play, with multiple ways to infiltrate the complex and deal with the terrorists holed up there. It’s a trial by fire, thrusting newly minted anti-terror agent JC Denton into the middle of a terrorist occupation of the island. Liberty Island, where New York City’s famous Statue of Liberty is perched, is the first level in Deus Ex.

Deus ex liberty island