Games - UNATCO

	Games - UNATCO

The UNATCO (United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition) is a fictional United Nations organization in the PC, Macintosh, and PlayStation 2 video game Deus Ex and its sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War.

Basic information

UNATCO were formed in the early 21st century as an ad hoc response of UN member nations to the growing problem of international terrorism in certain ways quite similar to the black organization "Rainbow" in Tom Clancy's novel Rainbow Six. By the game year, 2052, UNATCO has become a standing counterterrorist police force based on Liberty Island in New York City. The motto of UNATCO is from the Sententiae of Publilius Syrus: "Nihil aliud scit necessitas quam vincere," loosely, "Necessity knows nothing other than to conquer."

The exact date of the genesis of UNATCO is unclear: several characters have worked for the organization for many years, including Samuel Carter, Paul Denton and Gunther Hermann. The game's protagonist admits to adolescent dreams of working for the organization. For the two decades before the game's present day, UNATCO were one of any number of UN peacekeeping forces deployed to various areas of the globe, a roster of the most effective and elite counterterrorist forces in the world.

In the recent past of the game setting, UNATCO has grown from its roots as a loose anti-terrorist confederation. Before the present world crisis, it had less power as an organization, and far less funding for its non-cybernetic policemen. UNATCO spent most of its not-inconsiderable UN appropriation on cybernetic research, resulting in a small core of specialists "augmented" by mechanical prosthesis and orthosis. Such "augmentations" are unsightly and the cause of great social stigma among the population at large. In the game setting, an entirely new generation of cybernetic soldiers indistinguishable from the non-"augmented" human beings begin to take over from the older "mech-augs," or mechanically "augmented" soldiers. Given that a new generation of weapon systems can take five to fifteen years to develop, it seems likely that UNATCO made the gradual transisiton from the unofficial relationships between counterterrorist forces in UN member nations to a full-fledged United Nations mission some time between the years 2031 and 2035. There is a long-standing relationship between INTERPOL and UNATCO: the relationship might well be analogized to that between a police force and its SWAT/SORT team, albeit on an international level. The current director of UNATCO, Joseph Manderley, is a veteran INTERPOL cop.

UNATCO's fame grew until 2051, when a terrorist bombing of the Statue of Liberty caused the President to ask UNATCO to permanently coordinate counterterrorist efforts in the United States, establishing a permanent base on Liberty Island. UNATCO funding also increased significantly during this period, allowing UNATCO to begin recruiting policemen on its own rather than attempting to hire away experts from other police/military organizations. By the game's present day, the organization has between five and twenty UNATCO Deployable Units or UDU, each with a complement of fifteen crack counterterrorist commandos.

These UDU are often led and coordinated by agents, specialists who have managed to distinguish themselves in UNATCO's structure. Most of these agents came up in the organization before the Statue bombing, and are in line to undergo augmentation surgeries themselves if they have not already done so. Due to the high cost of military augmentation surgery, there were probably only twenty or so mech-augmented agents in the history of UNATCO. In the game world, there are civilians with mechanical-cybernetic augmentations, although these prosthetics are probably only in use in mechanical occupations requiring high degrees of judgement not suitable for robot labor. UNATCO's cybernetic special agents, because of their prosthetics and orthotics, are often the most recognizable face of UNATCO, and are UNATCO's most feared and effective arm, both because of their superhuman abilities and because of their long counterterrorist combat experience.

The game's protagonist, J.C. Denton, starts out as an agent for UNATCO.

Characters in the game that are or were at one time UNATCO agents include Denton; his brother Paul Denton; the Israeli sharpshooter Anna Navarre; the German heavy weapons specialist Gunther Hermann; the New York entrepreneur Jordan Shea, and the American ex-general Sam Carter.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for UNATCO ]

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