The programmer's shortcut means that the game will not crash, but it will also not display the ships. In the game's story, the enemies have discovered cloaking technology, rendering their ships "invisible" to the player. Smith's 3DO, struggling to display the variety of ships, but prevented from crashing and shutting down, simply stops rendering ships. To Smith, they appear invisible. He believes they are cloaked.

"We're flying these missions where we're fighting invisible ships and the only thing you can see is if the AI uses the afterburners, because those are shared between all the ships. They all have the same afterburners. So periodically you would see the afterburners jet on.

"One day, one of the programmers was in there and he was like, 'What the [censored] are you guys doing?' And we're like, 'We're fighting the cloaked Kilrathi ships; what are you talking about?'

"The very first time that we let an outside person into the office to play Deus Ex, she ran around on the dock for a while and she would do things like pick up the trash can, pick it up, throw it down, go pick up a crate and throw it into the water, dive into the water next to it, try to chase some fish. Then [she] got on top of the crate as it got out of the water, broke it, then swam back down to pick the things up, swam under the dock, tried to get the bird from the dock.

"We were sitting in agony thinking that we failed. 'She's miserable! Like, she's just running around the dock. The first 30 meters; she hasn't even left it yet. She hasn't gone on the mission. She hasn't gotten her gun yet. Like, what the [censored]?' And then she kept on playing and she was like, 'This is fantastic! I [censored] love this! I can do this all day!'"