Borderlands 2 Lead Writer on Writing Handsome Jack

After covering inclusivity in an earlier post, Borderlands 2 lead writer Anthony Burch has written another piece, this time focused on the main villain of the title, Handsome Jack. Here’s an excerpt:

We made Jack because we wanted to make a really focused, tight narrative about killing a single dude. This presented a pretty big challenge, however: if our entire story revolved around a single character if this one villain was the narrative lynchpin keeping the entire plot together then he’d damn well better be interesting.

Initially, we thought or at least I thought that moral ambiguity is interesting. I took it too far, though: I wanted Jack to be a constant frenemy, a fellow Vault Hunter who was racing you to some ultimate goal (what would eventually become The Warrior), but who would help and hinder you in equal measure. Kind of like Whisper from the first Fable game. After showing this idea to Mikey (Neumann, co-writer of Borderlands 1), he suggested that we just (pull the trigger) on Jack being an out-and-out bad guy for clarity’s sake. Now knowing that Jack should be a bad guy through-and-through, Paul and I needed to think about what made him interesting.

Since it’s Borderlands, Jack should probably be funny, we thought. But you should still hate him, because if you like him too much then you’ll stop believing in your ultimate goal of killing the crap out of him. Jack, like the story of Borderlands 2 as a whole, needed to toe the line between funny and serious we wanted him to make you laugh, then do something that made you desperately wish to put a bullet between his eyes, then make you laugh again.

We initially used this Nathan Fillion interview as a template for thinking about Jack. Fillion acts charming and funny, but also slightly arrogant in a down-to-Earth kind of way (in my opinion, there are two kinds of arrogance: boring, Empreror Palpatine-type arrogance where you just sort of cackle a lot and never show enthusiasm at anything because it’s beneath you, and the more bombastic, wink-and-a-smile arrogance that pretends to be friendly and jocular. We chose the latter for Jack.).

Did we succeed with Jack? I dunno. Your mileage may vary. I do know that initially, however, I’d completely screwed Jack up.

In the first draft of the script, Jack was a nonstop jokepocalypse. All. The. Time. You started up the game? He’d crack a joke. You died? He’d crack a joke. You fight his girlfriend? He’d crack a joke. You murder his daughter? He’d crack a joke.

After we recorded the first draft of the script, I got feedback from Paul, Jeramy (Cooke, art director) and Mikey that Jack felt one-dimensional. He was kinda funny, sure, but he was basically the same one-note joke played over and over for forty hours: (I’m Jack, I’m arrogant, I’m going to kill you, you’re pathetic, I am ludicrously indifferent to the suffering of others.)

For forty hours.