Trivia / Deus Ex: Invisible War

• Creator Killer: The game's overall failure destroyed Warren Spector's industry and fan respect. While he almost had a Career Resurrection with the success of the first Epic Mickey game, the failure of the second game would mostly undo that and lead to him exiting the video game industry to teach at the University of Texas. Since 2016, he has returned by joining Otherside Entertainment but little has been done to undo the damage that Invisible War's failure had left on his reputation.
• Executive Meddling: Eidos insisted that the game be developed with a console in mind, and that it be built on the heavily modified Unreal 2 "Flesh Engine" despite the amount of technical issues with it.
• Genre-Killer: Immersive Sims never had it easy from a commercial standpoint, being often overshadowed by their more straightforward counterparts, but they still cultivated enough of a dedicated playerbase. However, the game's overall failure (not helping was that it was released right after Call of Duty), soured what remaining goodwill there was towards the genre. Ion Storm Austin closed soon after and the genre became dormant. It wouldn't be until the success of BioShock that the genre would start its road to recovery.
• Troubled Production: The engine the game was built on, a heavily modified version of the Unreal Engine 2 dubbed the "Flesh Engine" was capable of great visuals, but it was a technical nightmare to work with. Disaster happened when the lead engine coder left partway through the project and left no documentation behind, leaving the rest of the team scrambling to fix critical engine issues. The Xbox also proved less powerful than the developers anticipated, and combined with the engine issues forced the developers to significantly cut down levels and take extreme measures to try and save on memory usage, such as shutting down the entire game and restarting it on every loading screen. These problems also affected the development of Thief: Deadly Shadows, which was developed concurrently with Invisible War and used the same engine.
• What Could Have Been: A May 2002 preview by PC Gamer showed screenshots that depicted wide open levels. It was also called Deus Ex 2: Invisible War, since there were apparently no plans for a console version at the time.

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