2d ago

Deus Ex's influence on Elon Musk 'may be its longest, worst legacy,' says its writer

www.pcgamer.com

Elon Musk thinks Deus Ex is "one of the best games ever". It's not exactly a hot take. But his taste in games also displays an impressive lack of self-awareness. Musk sees himself as an outsider and heroic figure taking on the status quo, despite being the world's richest man, the owner of X, and a sometimes-ally of Donald Trump.
When Musk rails against 'the establishment', it's only when it threatens his vast fortune, his ability to indulge in hate speech, or when he's promoting conspiracies. Indeed, he posted multiple tweets during the Covid-19 lockdowns where he drew connections between essential measures to protect the vulnerable and the plot of Deux Ex, where a man-made pandemic is deployed by the world's richest man to advance a political power play.
Unsurprisingly, Austin Grossman, who wrote Deus Ex alongside Sheldon Pacotti and Chris Todd, is not a fan of Musk's take on the classic cyberpunk immersive sim.

Comments

Chozo @fedia.io 2d ago
Elon tried to get CDPR to add him as a character in Cyberpunk 2077, not realizing that he's literally Saburo Arasaka.
- sp3ctr4l @lemmy.dbzer0.com 2d ago
  He actually is in Cyberpunk, if you fuck with the ini files and model directories / file paths / name references a bit and do some reverse engineering... at least as of v2.0.
  They may have cleaned it up by now, I've not fucked with it much in a while.
  Elons's face would only ever populate onto NCPD officers, and he has a balding, thinning hair style, similar to how he did prior to joining Tesla, before he presumably started get hair plugs or transplants of some kind.
  I never did find any voice lines from Elon though, ElonCop would just have generic male cop voice as with the rest of the NCPD.
  I think what happened is he did get a proper facescan done... around or right before when Nvidia barged in and told CD Projekt: You need our money, we will give it to you if you act as game dev guinea pigs for our newfangled AI rendering and lighting tech which utterly obliterates the design principles of 20+ years of 3D game engine design.
  At that point, they had to rearchitect... everything, and the library of models/faces that they were going with up till that point ended up having to be more or less tossed, they made a new one, and only a few references to the older 'library' remain as basically legacy bits of the game.
  Thats my uh, 'game theory'.
  
  coyotino [he/him] @beehaw.org 1d ago
  All ElonCops are bastards.
thisbenzingring @lemmy.sdf.org 2d ago
In said interview, Grossman told the site that "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."
And even more scathing: "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.
LOL the last part of the article is the best
sp3ctr4l @lemmy.dbzer0.com 2d ago
I have been saying, for I think years now, that Elon thinks he is JC when he is actually a even cringier version of Bob Page.
He literally had JC as his Twitter avatar for like a year at one point.
Its so fucking pathetic.
I guess I am glad the actual scriptwriter agrees.
Elon is the fakest try hard gamer that has ever existed, landing us in a reality that is somehow more absurd and ludicrous than even the wackier elements of DX, all because daddy didn't love him and he just wanted to be cool.
Cyberpunk as a genre is a warning, not a fucking aspirational instruction manual.
I guess we can only hope he neuralinks up his own brain at some point, and then shortly thereafter discovers the folly of making it use bluetooth.
ramble81 @lemmy.zip 2d ago
Can he use his money to get the final game made? It may improve my perception of him by 1%… or maybe 0.1%
Midnitte @beehaw.org 1d ago
I wouldn't consider Elon literally ignoring the reality of Deus Ex (i.e. Elon is the villain) to be its legacy.
Elon being a dumbass is his legacy.
Not like we consider killing John Lennon to be Catcher in the Rye's legacy
cub Gucci @lemmy.today 2d ago
It would be better if he read Kapital instead in his adolescent years
- thisbenzingring @lemmy.sdf.org 2d ago
  or The Iron Heel
  He should have tried to be the hero of that story... He could actually still do it and the outcome would probably be the same either way.... (the hero does not make it to the end of the story)
- Deyis @beehaw.org 2d ago
  I doubt it would have changed anything.
BurgerBaron @piefed.social 2d ago
I don't believe for a minute Elon is intelligent enough to play Deus Ex considering he pays people to play brain dead ARPG for him.
- ranandtoldthat @beehaw.org 1d ago
  I love poe. Outside of occasional theoeycrafting, which he clearly paid someone else to do, it's a very chill game and requires very little thinking once you you've played it for a bit. The complexity and difficulty is frontloaded, playing time literally makes the game easier (hence grinding) and he just skipped all of that. That whole thing with him claiming to be good at the game was so surreal.
araneae @beehaw.org 1d ago
Elon Musk when an actual plague he may even believe to be an actual bioweapon spills into the schools and churches while the bodies pile up in the streets
Don't worry Grossman. For every bootlicker that played Deus Ex and took the Illuminati or control endings there is at least one of us who took the insane "We'll start again in villages!" ending just so none of the game's rich psychopaths could win. And I promise my next playthrough of Dishonored will be an ACAB abattoir.
Don't let the kind of guy DX was about stopping go on to define the past, please! That's the exact kind consent fabricating bullshit the bad guys built Eliza, Icarus and Daedalus for in those games. We never asked for this.
AlpBerNil @feddit.uk 2d ago
lol

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