It takes some game franchises a while to truly find their footing, but Deus Ex managed to make its mark right from the start.

Deus Ex - Ion Storm, 2000

Deus Ex: Invisible War - Ion Storm, 2003

Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut is a terrific sci-fi RPG shooter, thanks in part to the rock-solid original blueprint of the original Deus Ex to improve on. To see how the series got to where it is, we're taking a quick look back at where it's been, and the lessons that have been learned along the way.Deus Ex managed to pull off something 13 years ago that many games still fail to do today: offer up true player freedom.Crafting a game that lets someone play exactly how they want is no small task. Offering a ton of different skills means little, for example, when the enemies and level design don’t accommodate your personal choices. Deus Ex made all forms of combat and espionage viable, and it’s still heralded as one of the best examples of player agency done right.Deus Ex told the story of JC Denton, a UNATCO (that’s United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition, of course) agent with nanotechnology augmentations. He can run silently, turn invisible, and breathe underwater, but he isn’t all-powerful. The limited skill points you allocated restricted Denton’s range of abilities. How you spent those points dictated whether you were a rocket launching war machine, a sniper wielding computer whiz, or something in between.The story explored a terrible, global virus called “Gray Death,” which was treatable only with a rare vaccine, descending deep into alphabet soup and conspiracies on top of conspiracies, all while remaining engaging.IGN gave Deus Ex a 9.4 , praising the story, gameplay, and especially the level design.“There’s usually something in every level that caters to the various skills, even swimming," reads the review. "From air ducts to underground pipes to super-secure secret entrances, the designers really thought of a number of ways to traverse and interact with each environment so you never feel like you’re locked into one route. And the great thing is that no specific way is necessarily the ‘best’ way to go.”Invisible War is regarded as the weak link in the Deus Ex series, and for good reason. Following up one of the best games ever with anything less than gold is unacceptable to fans, and, to many, Ion Storm only brought its bronze game.Players and critics alike were disappointed with Invisible War’s technical issues, including long load times and buggy AI. The levels felt smaller and less open to experimentation, which was arguably Deus Ex’s biggest hook. The overall aesthetic also saw a shift from the semi-futuristic style of Deus Ex into a full-blown science fiction atmosphere – a move that expelled some of the series’ unique flavor.Harvey Smith, who worked on both Deus Ex and Invisible War, and more recently, Dishonored, discussed some of Invisible War’s failings at the University of Texas with fellow Deus Ex designer Warren Spector.“I feel like we f----- up the technology management of it,” Smith said. “We had bad team chemistry. We wrote the wrong renderer. We wrote the wrong kind of AI. And then we shipped too early. The story was even bad. Like, it wasn’t a bad story story. It was more like we moved into the future, which – we didn’t realize at the time – undermined a lot of what made Deus Ex great.”Despite what sounds like a lot of doom and gloom, Deus Ex: Invisible War still holds a respectable score of 80 on Metacritic. IGN awarded the game a 9 , praising its non-linear, player-dependent story.“Sure, some people will say that the game’s made too many concessions to convenience – no more skills and one kind of ammo spring to mind – but all this means is that you have fewer concerns distracting you from the main point of the game, your experience making decisions within the game’s story," said IGN's reviewer. That’s the real draw here – the sense that you’re playing an active role in shaping the destiny of the world.”Ion Storm released one more game – Thief: Deadly Shadows – before closing the doors of its Austin, TX office in 2005. The next Deus Ex game wouldn’t release until 2011 under the name of a new developer.