GameSpy: Would you ever consider adopting, say, a more anime-style look to better appeal to console gamers? More generally, have you made any conscious design decisions or concessions since you're now designing with consoles in mind?

Spector: That's a great question. I would never... Okay, never's a big word. I don't like the idea of making decisions to appeal to a particular kind of audience. Obviously we want the maximum number of people to play and enjoy our games. But fundamentally, we make the games that we want to play, we make games that satisfy us, and that please us. And we hope there's a large enough audience out there that agrees with us.

However, it is inevitable, I have discovered in the course of Deus Ex: Invisible War's development (and Thief III's) that once you start displaying things on a television, colors become more saturated. And worlds become, uh... a little less realistic in a way. It's an interesting phenomenon. It's not anything we did consciously. I think it really must have something to do with the television display more than anything else. So I think you're going to see a somewhat different look for our games on consoles than on the PC. But it's not done consciously to attract a different audience.

The dartboard is a nice touch (PC). To answer the other part of your question, now... Would I ever contemplate or allow anyone in the studio to kind of make an anime-style game? A lot of people look at Deus Ex and a lot of other games nowadays and say we're heading towards photorealism in games as the ultimate goal, right? It's not the ultimate goal. It's a cool novelty right now. We've got enough hardware horsepower to make games that look like the real world, and it's gonna get better and better and better in the sense that it's gonna look more and more real.

But what I'm hoping and what I think we're going to see is all of that graphics power not just allowing us to make more realistic games but freeing up people to make totally wacky games that look unlike anything else you've ever seen.