With being surgically constructed as we type, there's rarely been a better time to return to Eidos Montreal's triumphant first attempt to augment the classic series for a new generation. Not least because there's so much you probably missed first time around.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is so dense that it’s ripe for in-jokes, and Lead Narrative Designer Mary DeMarle, writer James Swallow and Art Director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete didn’t disappoint when we begged for enlightenment…

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A part that didn’t make the final cut was on the top tier of Hengsha. “Man, you should have seen the architecture we had. And the view!” says Jonathan Jacques-Belletete. “We had a look-out spot where you saw the eco city all the way across, with its layered districts influenced by rice paddies, and the Tai Yong Medical skyscraper monolithically standing in the middle of it all. All that with a humongous sun burning your eyes...”

In FEMA, a pocket secretary provides the names of Eidos Montreal employees that have been added to the ADEX list – troublemakers who should be rounded up and imprisoned. Meanwhile in Detroit, Detective Frank McCann and Officer Champagne are both named after designers, while Audio Director Steve Szczepkowski works at the local LIMB clinic.

The colour yellow gets quite an outing in DX:HR, so much so that the art team decided to leave multiple buckets of yellow paint in the game’s corridors and construction zones.

Nods to the original Deus Ex game abound in DX:HR – on news broadcast ticker-tape you could read predictions about everything from the earthquake that would sink California to mentions of the original’s famous lemon-lime fizzy pop. “Probably one of the most memorable for me,” adds Mary DeMarle, “is the diatribe that’s being delivered by a hobo ‘doomsayer’ during the Detroit riots. He’s trying to warn people about the danger posed by the Illuminati and pretty much predicts the coming of the Grey Death.”

Final Fantasy XXVII can be seen throughout the game, first added in the very week that Eidos was acquired by Square Enix. “You have no idea how serious the whole affair got!” laughs Jonathan Jacques-Belletete. “It went to the highest echelons of Square Enix’s hierarchy to get it approved for inclusion in the game.”

The most secretive email exchange in DX:HR is in a mini-storage unit in Hengsha – and it’s that of a hacker who recorded the opening conspirator conference. He’s also responsible for every Nigerian scam email in the game. “The last mail on his computer is an automated failure report from the program he created to send out these mails,” says Mary DeMarle. “It lists where every Nigerian email can be found. I love this mail especially, because it was written for me by one of the programmers!”

Meetings are good for something. “The first cutscene I wrote, I did to kill time while waiting for a meeting to finish,” James Swallow reveals. “It was used, almost totally unchanged, as the final scene in the game. Stay to the end of the credits, kids.”