Is this some well-documented thing that I missed?
I mean, DX has one large, male cyborg and one smaller, female cyborg. DX has tanks on legs. DX has thermoptic camo. DX has conspiracy theories and sentient AI. DX has really big guns. DX has infolinks. Ghost in the Shell also has all these. Has this been explored in detail somewhere?
Not having seen Ghost in the Shell, I wouldn’t read too much into it based on your comments. They’re all fairly standard sci-fi cliches (not that you can’t make a great game based around a bunch of cliches).
I thik it’s more that both works are derived from the same inspiration, rather than one being inspired by the other. I am certain that the folks who made Deus Ex were familiar with Ghost in the Shell; the thermoptic armor in the game is clearly a nod to the anime. However, most of the similarities come from them both being from the cyberpunk genre. The entire “sentient AI as next evolutionary step” idea is at least as old as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1982, IIRC), which is usually held up as the template for the entire genre. Ghost didn’t really have that much of a conspiracy angle. It was there, but it wasn’t played up to the extent that Deus Ex used it. I think that the X Files, and to a lesser extent The Illuminatus! Trilogy, had more influence on that aspect of the game than Ghost.
A lot of the other stuff you mention… Big guns are common to any genre that caters mostly to adolescent boys of all ages and sexes, including computer games and (esp. in America) anime. The tanks on legs in Deus Ex were a direct lift of ED-209 from Robocop, and giant robots are such a staple of anime that listing influences would be pointless. Pick a title at random, there’ll probably be a giant robot in it. Cyborgs are a fairly standard sf theme, and the “big brawny guy paired with small agile woman” thing is a pretty pervasive cliche in any genre you care to mention, but most especially in computer games. I’m not sure exactly what you mean by infolinks. If you mean the idea of plugging a computer directly into your head, again, William Gibson was there much earlier, if not exactly “first.” In general, Deus Ex and Ghost in the Shell both resemble Neuromancer far more than they resemble each other.
I’m probably going to feel really stupid, but… Who was the big male cyborg in Ghost in the Shell? Was her partner cybered? I don’t remember any hint of it in the movie (But it has been ages since I’ve seen it…).
Phoenix Dragon: In the film it is mentioned sort-of-in-passing, in the manga more in detail, that except for the Chief and Togusa (the “rookie”), everyone in S-9 is cyborged to a greater or lesser extent (and even Togusa has a neuro-link implant); and that Batou is second only to the Major in modification.
The tv series seems to be picking up this theme as well. (Btw, I highly recommend it–Pioneer should be releasing the first disk very, very soon)