Oh yeah, I voted for Deus Ex, because I do consider it one of a kind and pretty much unmatched at what it does well. It’s also a game made by people who had cultural influences outside of conventional nerd media. One of the main works that the game quotes is a little known philosophical sci fi novel by Olaf Stapledon, which is just such a deep cut that it reflects the game designers actually thinking about their world, and the political and philosophical implications of that world. It is also a game that tried to anticipate as many bizarre actions a player could take as possible, and write reasonable or at least entertaining consequences for those actions. My favorite was if you killed the bartender in that bar in Hell’s Kitchen, the next time you return to the area, someone else is behind the bar and shouts “free beer for everyone!”
It is that kind of attention to detail that transforms these badly voice acted npcs into characters I can pretend are real. There’s just a palpable sense of discovery that I think is even better than the GB Camera’s many secrets (though I understand why the GB Camera won). One of my earliest memories of the game was finding a secret Majestic 12 base in the sewers of New York and only finding out that that was relevant to the game’s main narrative a dozen hours later. There are many one-off encounters that are later re-incorporated into the narrative that gives Deus Ex a potent sense of place.
Deus Ex was made at a time when games like Deus Ex didn’t exist. I maintain that games like Deus Ex still don’t exist. DX was fundamentally new to video games, as it blended all sorts of genres and influences together into something different. It still remains relatively new, because many of the ‘immersive sims’ that came after aimed not to just produce as much interactive depth as technology would allow to a place and narrative, but to imitate Deus Ex and Thief. They may be smoother, generally more pleasant experiences, but they aspire to no more than imitation and iteration.
Deus Ex had air vents because air vents exist in real life. Other immersive sims have air vents because Deus Ex had air vents. There’s a fundamental disconnect in design there, and it can be recognized by how something like ‘crawling through air vents’ is implemented. In the Eidos Montreal Deus Ex sequels, air vents are just a source of easy experience points, and they are one of typically 3 ways to enter the next room in a linear sequence of rooms that make up the non-hub areas of the game. They’ve been rendered into a video game signifier of Immersive Sim. Deus Ex had air vents because they are an architectural feature of real world spaces. They are part of the Nakatomi Space of the setting. They are part of the fantasy of being able to trespass into spaces that aren’t meant for people to inhabit. They are a sign of the game’s aspiration to make a space that could be real, that could function in the real world.