"I did beg Doug to implement the Lean," Spector admits.  "He and I were having dinner at the Texas Chili Parlor here in Austin, after a round of intense story and game discussions and I just whined at him about it. It seemed like totally the right thing to do.  I have to believe that everyone who played Underworld and Underworld 2 felt limited by the inability to lean and the time had come to address the matter."  From here on out, then, the heroes of Spector's games would not stupidly side-step around corners -- often right into oncoming gunfire.  Instead, they'd creep up to that corner, then lean sideways, just far enough to peak around it.

Thief included "the Lean"

The Lean would become a near-trademark in Spector's games, and was carried over into Looking Glass' late 1998 masterpiece, "Thief"-- though again, Spector humbly takes but little credit for that title: "I spent a lot of time talking with Doug about his vision of the game and the gameplay. I talked him through some troubles he was having articulating how missions should be documented."  Though he also helped with personnel and scheduling, he adds, "I don't even put it on my resume."

Warren Spector left Looking Glass to join Ion Storm in 1997

When John Romero recruited Spector away from Looking Glass  -- most gamers would certainly agree this was one of Romero's smartest decisions as of late --Spector found himself in the ideal position to implement aspects of all his previous games, and the theories he's developed behind them, into "Deus Ex".  Primary to its design is his attempt to fully divorce computer role playing from its dice-and-paper analog:  "To my mind, if we CAN craft a believable physics simulation that lets players manipulate objects in direct believable ways, why would we ever want to introduce die rolls to determine the outcome of such object manipulation?  I tend to get a little doctrinaire about this, going from capability to obligation (i.e., if we CAN do something we MUST do it) but that's just me."

Along those lines, the world of "Deus Ex" is relentlessly immersive:  most objects are movable, usable, destroyable.  Rather than leaving success or failure to an arbitrary skill roll, or a computerized game master artificially pushing the story (and you) along, the Spector team has worked hard to give the player an enormous wealth of methods by which to accomplish a given task.

"It's funny," muses Spector. "Some folks who've played the demo and some press guys who've played the full version of the game are saying some of our maps seem a little empty. I just want to ask 'em to name a game that has MORE stuff you can play with, more ways to get past every obstacle!"  By doing that, Spector suspects that they're just realizing how little interaction there is in most FPSs, beyond the usual intercourse of full-scale carnage, and the flushing toilets from "Duke Nukem 3D".  "It's almost as if we gave people so many more options than they're used to, a taste of the kind of freedom to explore and interact they crave, that they can see for the first time what they've been missing."