Fantastic Moments in Computer Games: Anna Navarre is killed in Deus Ex
The epic moments in PC games are small-scale celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
The previous god
Year: 2000
Developer: Ion Storm
The mission to kill NSF Commander Juan Lebedev on a 747 in one of Deus Ex’s early stages appears to be a direct part of your job as an up-and-coming person at UNATCO: get on the plane, squander the man, and head home to party drinks. And for a lot of players, that’s exactly how it went. JC Denton is an advanced killing machine, after all.
But Deus Ex is kind of an action shooting game, and although I didn’t have the non-lethal options that were on the table in my first missions, I had the opportunity to talk to my target a little bit before I pulled the trigger. In the end, though, my boss caught a die-hard Anna Navarre, really Furious, I demanded to stop fapping and do my job. And I also warned, usefully, that if I don’t, it will. One way or another, Juan was coming down.
That was how it seemed inevitable anyway. But it is not. It’s not immediately apparent (or at least, I don’t remember it that way), but you can choose to protect Lebedev and take Navarre instead. The notorious Flatlander woman is a very strong opponent, but I manage to get rid of him, and suddenly I find myself in a completely unexpected situation: my supervising agent was dead, and the man I was supposed to kill was too much Not Dead, and everything that led to that point, including my budding career, is now completely off the rails.
she was brilliant. Remember, this was 20 years ago, when Steam didn’t exist – the Internet as we know it didn’t really exist – and so keeping the game’s secrets and surprises was a lot easier. By all rights, I wasn’t supposed to have that kind of freedom in a video game anyway. The text says Ali killed this man. Anna says I have to kill this guy, and does a short job of him if I try to quit the job. It cannot be stopped. But it can.
For me, this is the moment that made Deus Ex: the realization that if something seems off limits but is possibly possible, I must give it a try. It completely changed the way I viewed the game world, how I played the game – and my expectations for better or worse for everything that followed. This is why people still talk about Deus Ex as an outstanding video game. this is the reason:
