Deus Ex: Human Revolution Interview

During their very own Eurogamer Expo, the guys at Eurogamer chatted up Eidos Montreal art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete about several topics related to Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Eurogamer: How would you describe lead character Adam Jensen’s personality?

Jonathan Jacques-Belletete: There’s a phrase we coined for him straight from the get-go, even before we started drawing him. It was something the game director, producer and I knew from the beginning.

We didn’t want to go for a big, tough space marine guy this cycle of consoles are saturated with. The phrase we would say was, he can kick your ass, and then he goes home and reads a good book.

That’s what we’ve been saying for the past three and a half years. He needed to be someone of an average build, with nothing too crazy, but yet someone you’d still know you wouldn’t want to mess around with.

And there really are some people like that. I remember someone mentioning this club he goes out to in Montreal, that one of the bouncers is like this really average-looking guy, but you look at his face and you know you don’t want to mess with him. He probably doesn’t weigh more than 150 pounds, but yet he looks like a total killer.

Adam has this duality. He’s an ex-SWAT member, a security specialist, he’s a bit of a bass ass. But he looks like someone who’s fairly intellectual. That’s who he is.

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Eurogamer: Is there a feeling within the studio that you’d like to do another Deus Ex game?

Jonathan Jacques-Belletete: Yeah, absolutely. I remember when we first started, I read an article where Warren Spector remembered the fact he knew the third one was started by other people, and he said, you know, I can’t wait to see what they’re going to do because this universe and those characters, I’ve lived with them for such a big part of my life.

I didn’t really understand what he meant. Emotionally I didn’t really know. Now I’ve just spent almost four years with that world we created and those characters we created that we’ve lived with every day of our lives, I know exactly what it means.

It would be cool to work with those variables again.