Deus Ex: Human Revolution Interview

To complement their video demonstration, IGN has published an interview with art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete about the design philosophy and aesthetic thinking behind the upcoming FPS/RPG Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

IGN: Do you think the Bladerunner Cyberpunk style is old hat?

Because Cyberpunk’s been done quite a bit, I wanted to bring something new to it, and I started analysing all the transhumanist themes. Quite rapidly, you start seeing this connection with the renaissance period, because it was about the humanistic and we’re dealing with transhumanistic stuff; the renaissance was, if you want, the beginning of the transhumanist era. If you want to upgrade a system, you first need to be able to understand how the system functions at its basics, and the renaissance is the first time in the west when we start going back into antiquities research and understanding the human machine. That’s where transhumanism starts, understanding how the machine functions, and then in 2027 we upgrade that machine.

IGN: So how do you tie this high aesthetic concept into the game proper?

I thought to myself, ‘Eh, what happens if I actually mix the aesthetics from the renaissance with the baroque and the cyberpunk stuff -would that be a cool flavour? Would people say that it’s cyberpunk, but it just belongs to that product?’

It incorporates Vermeer, the renaissance, the baroque, the black and gold palette, the Rembrandt stuff, night and candles. The black represents the dystopian aspect of the game, the gold represents the human flesh-and-blood aspect, which is so much of what we deal with, and also a little bit of the hope that’s still in the world at that time before the big collapse.