Mount Weather

Mount (Mt.) Weather, in various design documents and prerelease concepts of Deus Ex, is a secret government facility that serves as a bunker for government officials during a national crisis, as well as a site for technological research. While Mt. Weather was originally planned to have a significant role in the story, it was entirely cut from the game as development progressed. No mention of Mt. Weather is found in either the finished Deus Ex game or any of the subsequent titles in the Deus Ex series.

Shooter: Majestic Revelations design document
In the design document for Shooter: Majestic Revelations (an early concept of Deus Ex), Mt. Weather is a secret bunker for United States government officials after the country was placed under martial law due to a nationwide drug crisis engineered by Majestic 12. The facility is located underground and can only be accessed via tunnels from Camp David and the White House. Majestic 12 plans to assassinate the government officials there, including president Philip Mead Riley and his cabinet, by sabotaging the oxygen system of the facility.

In a mission taking in the middle act of the Shooter: Majestic Revelations concept, JC Denton finds a way into Mt. Weather and saves the government by fixing the sabotaged environment system or otherwise supplying oxygen to the facility. The following named characters are listed as part of the mission:


 * President Philip Riley Mead
 * The First Lady, Rachel Mead
 * The First Son, Philip Mead II
 * The First Daughter, Sarah Mead
 * Vice-President Margaret Williams-Hamner (referred to as "Margaret Williams" in other parts of the design document)
 * The VP's Husband, Michael Hamner

After the mission, Mt. Weather becomes the player's new base of operations.

Deus Ex Bible
The role of Mt. Weather was expanded to being a technology research site in addition to a presidential bunker. The Deus Ex Bible, which is a compilation of content from Deus Ex design documents, states that the Daedelus AI was created by Mt. Weather researchers under Majestic 12 control. Another part of the document states that Bob Page secretly and accidentally created Daedalus in the labs hidden deep underground at Mt. Weather while "building on Everett's pioneering work." This description of the origins of Daedalus is somewhat different from the description that "Daedelus was originally conceived by Morgan Everett," which also appears in the Deus Ex Bible.

Additional commentary from Warren Spector in the the Deus Ex Bible states that at one point, there was "a series of missions involving the White House and Mt. Weather." Ultimately, however, "plot changes made Mt. Weather unnecessary." The commentary suggests that over the course of development, the White House mission entirely replaced the originally planned content involving Mt. Weather. The White House mission would also be cut later during the game's development.

Deus Ex design document version 13.12
Deus Ex design document version 13.12 indicates that both the Mt. Weather and the White House missions had been cut from the game by December 1999, as neither mission appears in the missions list of this document. Nonetheless, remnants of Mt. Weather still appear in the document, including the aforementioned lore content of Mt. Weather being Daedalus's place of origin (this content, or some version of it, was later incorporated into the Deus Ex Bible).

A few mentions of Mt. Weather remained in the document's mission descriptions, providing clues on the role of the Mt. Weather mission before finally being cut. The description of Mission 09 (the 8th mission in the final game) mentions "hints...about preparations for the Mt. Weather scenario, in which the government moves to secure locations" (note that "scenario" here refers to the government evacuation scenario, rather than an in-game mission). This description, which appears to be describing an early introduction to Mt. Weather, suggests that the Mt. Weather mission was planned to place after the player's visit to the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard.

The description of Mission 14 (the 12th mission in the final game) refers to "information Daedalus provided in Mt. Weather," suggesting that the Mt. Weather mission was planned to have taken place before the player's visit to the MJ12 Missile Silo.

Deus Ex: Insurrection
Mount Weather is mentioned again in one of the candidate plot concepts for Deus Ex: Insurrection, a cancelled, never-announced sequel to Deus Ex: Invisible War. In the plot concept, set directly after the events of the Deus Ex, the player takes the role of a black-ops operatives who escorts the president from the White House to Mount Weather via the underground passage when White House is under siege by NSF forces. The plot concept states: "In Mount Weather, the player is given a stable base analogous to UNATCO in the first game, where the drama of the U.S. leadership's inner circle can unfold over time."

Trivia

 * The depiction of Mt. Weather was based on the real-world counterpart, the in Virginia. According to Spector, Mt. Weather came to the developers' attention when they were researching real-world conspiracies that could be used as a foundation for the Deus Ex fiction.