Comment by adamrezich
19 hours ago
> The most infamous and chilling “proof” of Deus Ex’s alleged facility for predicting the future is a view of the New York City skyline that you can see in the very first mission. This game that was released fifteen months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, nonetheless shows only empty sky where the twin towers of the World Trade Center ought to be. As the people who made the game have always been quick to explain, this was not intended as a conscious statement of any sort, much less a prophecy. The towers were left out simply because the rendering engine couldn’t handle any more polygons. But still… what a coincidence! It’s almost enough to make you believe that the ghost of the Oracle of Delphi really does haunt Deus Ex.
I always wondered how this was supposed to make any sense at all given that the skyline (a screenshot of which is shown right there in the article!!) is clearly a 2D image rather than being polygonal…? Couldn't they either make said 2D image larger to accommodate the towers, or budget a mere two additional tris for a second 2D image of the towers…?
(I posted this in the comments section of the article but apparently it did not pass moderation! Strange!)
Looked it up, and apparently Harvey Smith, the lead designer, said, in an interview with IGN [0]:
> When we made the skyline in the background we had pieces with the Twin Towers and pieces for the other parts of the city and for New Jersey. The texture memory was so high that I couldn’t use it all. I took one of the pieces and put it on one side, flipped it and put it on the other. So I made New York out of one half of the city so the Twin Towers were out.
> When people complained, we just explained that it had been destroyed by terrorist attacks. We start the game with the Liberty Island statue having been destroyed by terrorists a few years before. We just said that the towers had been destroyed too. And this was way before 9-11. Years.
Then, in 2012, Warren Spector said, in an interview with Game Informer [1]:
> Did you notice in the skyline on the City of New York, there’s no Twin Towers? […] It’s entirely coincidental, but this game about terrorism… and the Twin Towers are not part of the New York City skyline. […] We got rid of the Twin Towers, and I wish I could say we did it on purpose and we were, you know, sort of seeing the future, but it was actually just a mistake. The guy, the artist who did the skybox just, uh, left em out. And it sort of worked out in an unfortunate sort of way.
There's more about this that one can find online, including how apparently an image of the towers exists in the game's files, but hey, I'm not the one researching and writing the article and making claims that are plainly false on their face, which anyone can visually verify by looking at the screenshot right there in the article that is supposed to illustrate this supposed technical constraint!
Jimmy should probably fix the article to mention any or all of this, rather than repeating the often-retold urban legend, given how much he seems to care about factual accuracy in his writing! (Or at least he used to? It kind of seems like this article is just an excuse to bloviate about Conspiracy Theory Culture Being Harmful These Days, more than it is to dive into the history of the creation of the game or a substantial analysis of its mechanics?) But, alas, he did not approve my comment, so maybe someone else can point this out to him instead.
[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/02/18/dx-visible-interview
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOPHmbulMp4