Great fiction can’t fix bad people. That’s one takeaway from the fact that Elon Musk seems to love the classic sci-fi immersive sim Deus Ex despite it being a game precisely about how people like him are ruining the world. One of the game’s writers recently explained how that’s the worst part of its legacy.
Released in 2000, Deus Ex follows anti-terrorism operative JC Denton, who uses his cybernetic enhancements to uncover the conspiratorial forces trying to take control of a world ravaged by social upheaval, economic collapse, and a plague. It’s both an investigation of how propaganda shapes society and what it means to be human, in addition to being a really clever stealth action game about hacking people’s private email.
“That kind of political weight and social satire is a real common thread between Deus Ex and Dishonored,” Austin Grossman, who co-wrote the Warren Spector-directed hit with Sheldon Pacotti and Chris Todd, recently told PC Gamer. “It is the thing that Elon Musk likes, creepily. It is creepily in Elon Musk’s worldview. So that may be its longest, worst legacy.”
Musk has repeatedly called Deus Ex one of his favorite games ever. When the pandemic began in early 2020, he even described it as feeling like something from the game’s plot. Musk also happens to be one of the world’s richest people, on track to become the first trillionaire, whose tech empire includes companies trying to implant devices directly into people’s brains. Reading the oral history of Deus Ex‘s creation, there’s little doubt the Diablo cheater would have been considered one of the baddies in its world.
“It’s bizarre that Elon Musk would not recognize where he actually sits in the Deus Ex universe, because it is not in the JC Denton role,” Grossman said. “Musk plainly imagines he’s the JC Denton of this world—a plainspoken everyman, standing up to the elite. As is obvious to everyone, Musk is the one with power and he’s just pathologically incapable of honest introspection.”
He continued, “I would say Musk is like a Deus Ex villain, except that the franchise doesn’t have any villains as whiny and self-servingly delusional as he’s shown himself to be.”