Deus Ex and the 0451 code

Long-time readers of this blog know that I am a big fan of the original Deus Ex, released in 2000 by Eidos and Ion Storm's Austin division. It's in my list of top 3 games of all time, usually topping it (depending on my mood). To vastly oversimplify, Deus Ex is a first-person shooter set in the not-too-distant dystopian future¹, where you play as a nanoaugmented agent called JC Denton, working for the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO) to help stop terrorism and carry out cool operations in a trenchcoat and sunglasses at night. Deus Ex is viewed as a great game despite its numerous glaring flaws, and I'd still recommend playing through it after a few minor touch ups to get it running on modern systems.

This post is about the origins of one of its most well-known codes. Most diehard fans will probably already know, but this is MY blog, and we're discussing MY problems.

As JC, you can use many means to accomplish your goals, such as traditional weapons, stealth, hacking, or, in some cases, punching numbers into keypads. One of the first keypads that you come across in the game is located next to UNATCO's main base of operations, which can be reached pretty quickly. It opens the door to a communications "van", which gives you a few items, and lets you use the code to open the van again when you return after completing missions for more items.

The code to this comm van is 0451.

When I first found out about Deus Ex and played through this part, I didn't think that this was special in any way. (In my defense, I was 10 or 11 years old.) As I eventually started going through science fiction and dystopian literature, I came across Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The temperature refers to the temperature at which paper catches fire.

This immediately clicked for me, and it made perfect sense to me that the code was a reference to the book. After all, the themes fit pretty well: a story about controlling the spread of information, a protagonist slowly realizing the truth behind said control, personal desire and the greater good versus society's role in personal freedom, and the need to break free from the establishment's control.

It seemed like the perfect reference, and it makes perfect sense, so that must be source, right?

Well...

A detour

A few years later, I was playing through some older FPS games and came across System Shock, an older game created by Looking Glass Studios. Due to financial difficulties caused by low game sales, as well as several publishing deals falling through, Looking Glass Studios had to close. A big portion of their employees joined Ion Storm Austin.

It turned out that one of the first codes of the game is 451.

While not as perfect a fit to the game as Deus Ex, System Shock is still dystopian science fiction, so Fahrenheit 451's comparisons apply pretty well to it as well.

So, barring some additional info, 0451 comes from System Shock, which came from Fahrenheit 451. Makes sense.

Warren Spector

In Let's Play Deus Ex with Warren Spector, Sheldon Pacotti and Chris Norden, Warren Spector (the game's sole creator) states the following:

If you've been playing a lot of Looking Glass and Ion Storm games you know that the code here is 0451, which is first used in System Shock. It showed up in Thief, it showed up in System Shock 2, it showed up in BioShock and Dishonored recently, and in both Deus Ex games. A lot of people think it was a reference to Fahrenheit 451, the Ray Bradbury book, but it was actually just the key code to get into the offices at Looking Glass in Cambridge. But it's in so many games now, it's kind of a defining thing in what we used to call "immersive simulations."

_{Side note: I couldn't remember where 451 or some variation of it showed up in the original Thief, so I had to search for it online. I couldn't find any direct uses of it anywhere, so I'm unsure as to that part of the statement. I recall an instance in Thief 2, so that may be the reference?}

This threw me off a bit.

Barring additional information, 0451 comes from System Shock, which was just the code for Looking Glass' offices. Unless someone knew if the door code itself was a Bradbury reference, then it would be impossible to know if the code itself was a reference.

Marc LeBlanc

Marc LeBlanc is an actor most famous for his work on the popular sitcom Friends a video game designer that worked at Looking Glass as a programmer on several titles, including System Shock 1, 2, and the enhanced edition and 2023 remake. In a reddit thread talking about 0451 as a code used in many other games (most that took inspiration from System Shock and Deus Ex in some way), Marc posted:

[...] I worked on the original System Shock and it was definitely a Bradbury reference. It got set as the door code for the LG office after it was in the game, which is pretty dumb from a security perspective, but hey it was the 90's.

Someone replied:

[...] just to clarify, you're saying warren spector's misremembering?

he explicitly said the code wasn't technically a bradbury reference, just a reference to the LG Cambridge door code. which is at odds with your timeline of it hitting the game first

i'm not sure why i care about this but i was just curious

Marc clarified:

Yes, Warren misremembered. We put the code in the game before the Cambridge office even existed. The office was in Lexington back then. When we moved to Cambridge, the office manager asked me what the door code in the game was, and she set it as the office door code. When the move happened, the game was essentially[...] feature complete and was in late beta, so the code had been in for a long time.

Warren was in Texas pretty much the whole time, so he may not have the best memory of what happened in which office.

Marc published a YouTube video where he talks about it while playing through the System Shock remake, with the following comments:

Ah. "...is 451". Yes. Which, I guess, now there's lots -- I only learned recently that there's a whole genre of -- I mean, I knew that there were "Immersive Sims" but I didn't know that they used the word "0451 games" to refer to that genre. It is a -- for the record, it is a Ray Bradbury reference. I know Warren said it wasn't, but it was, so the timeline is, you know, we did that when the office was in Lexington, we did that as the code. It's been in the game for a long long time... and then, when we moved to the one Alewife Center _{(Lirunote: Unsure if this is the correct transcription)} office, Patty, the office manager, I think she asked me what the code was in System Shock and she made it the door code for their actual office. Which is crazy naïve now. Like, that would be, like, a security breach of the first order to, like, publish your door code in a video game. But yeah, it was the door code for like a year, and then we moved to a different office, and then we had key cards. But it -- yeah, it was the real door code and it was really a Bradbury reference when we put it in.

So, this seems neat, and the conclusion that 0451 is from System Shock, which in turn is from Bradbury, was correct.

Unless Doug Church (System Shock's director, among other games) comes out saying that the first door code was determined via random dice roll, or it's discovered that Ray Bradbury got a time machine and travelled into the future and played Deus Ex, then went back into the past and wrote Fahrenheit 451 as an excuse to use that door code in his title (fun fact, paper does not burn at 451 degrees Fahrenheit, but it was plausibly close enough at the time Bradbury wrote and published the story), then I think that the origin is settled.