We reinvestigate the Deterministic Lattice Gas introduced as a paradigmatic model of the 1/f spectra arising according to the self-organized criticality scenario. We demonstrate that the density fluctuations exhibit an unexpected dependence on systems size and relate the finding to effective Langevin equations. The low-density behavior is controlled by the critical properties of the gas at the absorbing state phase transition. We also show that the deterministic lattice gas is in the Manna universality class of absorbing state phase transitions. This is in contrast to expectations in the literature that suggested that the entirely deterministic nature of the dynamics would put the model in a different universality class. To our knowledge this is the first fully deterministic member of the Manna universality class. © 2012 American Physical Society.