A multi-month delay for Deus Ex turned into a huge payoff for one of its best characters, says designer Harvey Smith

Nobody likes game delays. Sure, a delay is temporary and suck is forever, as Gabe Newell once said, but it still chafes. But sometimes a little extra development time can go a very long way. In a new interview with the NoClip podcast, immersive sim maestro Harvey Smith shared one such story about Deus Ex, explaining how it leveraged some extra post-production time to give a much bigger role to one of the game’s most famous NPCs—and make it a much better game in the process.

Smith’s tale actually followed a remark by Ben Horne, his co-founder at the new Black Pony Immersive studio, who said, “You can elevate a good immersive sim into a great immersive sim in a very short amount of time, a matter of months, if you just protect a post-production time.”

Publishers generally don’t want to hear that, Smith added—although he obviously agrees with the sentiment—and so 20-some years ago, when Ion Storm Austin asked Eidos for more time to tighten up Deus Ex, “We geared up for this giant fight.” Instead, Eidos just said yes.

“They were so distracted by what was happening in Dallas with Daikatana and such that they were like, ‘Sure, sure, sure. Take five more months, take six more, whatever you need.’ And we were like, ‘Oh, cool. Okay’.”

What was happening in Dallas, as Smith put it, was essentially chaos, which you can dig into via our history of Ion Storm. But, as Smith has previously related, it was a useful distraction for Ion Storm Austin, which did indeed get the extra time it wanted to really nail down Deus Ex.

A focus of that extra dev time was one of the game’s foremost NPCs, “this German guy with a skull gun” named Gunther Hermann—who, for the record, very much wanted a skull gun but as far as I know never actually got one despite filing the required paperwork. “He’s kind of a big presence in a couple of missions, you go on a mission with him, and then he just vanishes,” Smith said. “He has no closure. He’s not even in the game.

“So, I literally said, I can drop him into Paris, a big fight in the cathedral, which is an empty building right now, and I can hide some triggers on the roof with data links, and if you’re crawling around on the roof because you have ‘super jump’ or whatever, I’ll have him say, ‘I’m watching you, Denton, like an insect crawl around on the roof. I am watching you through the satellite, which I am linked to right now, Denton.’ You know, so we do this kind of thing, and players go, ‘Well fuck, somebody’s watching me from a satellite.’ It’s like smoke and mirrors, and then you get in there and you fight it out with him.

“If you’ve been paying attention, you know that these earlier models, the cyborgs, they have kill phrases, him and Anna Navarre. And this was an idea that we took from Neil Stephenson or somewhere, so Denton can say this like long crazy kill phrase and Gunther just fucking dies, right? And it’s a powerful moment. And we never would have had that in the game had we not gotten that extra time to just look at our game.”

This is fascinating for me personally because I had that exact experience: Skulking around a Paris cathedral, quietly working my way inside, when all of a sudden Gunther busts in on the radio to let me know I’m not fooling anyone. Giving it even more weight, I discovered before our final confrontation that Gunther had been waiting for me for some time—and that MJ12 troopers had heard him quietly crying, probably because I’d previously killed Navarre, his cyborg partner and someone for whom he apparently had deeper feelings than were immediately apparent.

Making it even better (and I swear this is true), Gunther bugged out near the end of our fight and ended up running into a corner of the cathedral basement, where he stood, silent and unmoving. He looked like what he was—an utterly beaten, broken man, who’d had everything taken away from him—and I couldn’t bring myself to kill him. At the time, I thought the option to show him mercy was intentional, like other hidden NPC choices in the game. (It didn’t happen in subsequent playthroughs, though, and I’ve smoked ol’ Gunther’s ass every time since.)

It was a powerful moment, as Smith said, and it’s kind of wild to imagine a version of Deus Ex where Gunther doesn’t get his big finish—and what else might have been left on the cutting room floor besides. Something to keep in mind the next time you find yourself grinding your teeth over a delayed game.

Smith reiterated the importance of that point at the end of his story. “If you are listening to this right now and you fund games, give your team a post-production,” he said. “Give them three to six extra months and you will win some awards and you will make a bunch of money, instead of leaving a crater in the ground.”

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