A screenshot from new sci-fi video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Picture: Square Enix Source: Supplied
IN the future, being crippled will be cool.
That's one of the assumptions behind Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a video game in which characters who are rich enough have parts of their bodies surgically removed and replaced with prosthetic limbs.
The world of Human Revolution is pure science-fiction, but ? like all the best sci-fi ? it isn't complete fantasy.
"It's really starting, it really is starting and it's just a matter of a handful of years 'til all these things really truly begin," says Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, the game's art director, in an interview with news.com.au.
"What's interesting is the way that soldiers that are coming back from Afghanistan or Iraq that have stepped on mines or had their legs blown away.
"Back in other wars in the 20th century, the thing was you'd get this peg leg, basically, or arm, and then you'd try to hide it.
"I saw this picture on the internet recently, like a totally candid picture... it was taken by a guy who's on the subway, right, and he's sitting on a seat. Imagine you're sitting on a bench and you're just looking at someone who's standing in front of the doors, just waiting for the doors to open and leave the train.
"You see him from the back, and he's dressed up in like, a pretty cool street style, he's got a sports jersey, basketball shorts...
"And then bang, these two robot legs are sticking out. And he's got super cool Nike shoes on, and it's just like: 'Is that for real?'
"So, for the first time ever, I see someone who?s obviously disabled, as opposed to me, and he's so much cooler than I am.
"I think we're going to be very surprised by the stuff that's going to happen in the next 15, 20, 30 years."
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the third instalment in the Deus Ex series, and the first made by Eidos Montreal.
The game follows Adam Jensen, the Clint Eastwood-style security chief of Sarif Industries ? one of the future world's leading augmentation corporations ? who becomes entangled in a terrorist conspiracy.
But visually, Human Revolution is more than your average sci-fi game. It's awash in a palette of muted browns, deep blacks and glowing oranges, and draws inspiration from places as unexpected as the paintings of Vermeer.
"I think that it's very, very important for a video game to have its own kind of visual language and its own aesthetic and its own kind of style," says Jacques-Belletete.
"It's really the attention to details in the game, there are over 1300 props, all concept-arted and designed and created in the game, they give so much credibility to all of it.
"The corporations and all the companies and logos that we invented, and we created the fonts for each of them, and things like that."
"I didn't want to just reproduce Blade Runner."
Jacques-Belletete says that while creating the world of Human Revolution, he tried to move past the genre's most obvious influences.
"When you do any cyber-punk work, there's some things you can't not think about ? the obvious stuff like Blade Runner and Akira and Ghost in The Shell, and the William Gibson books.
"(But) I didn't want to just reproduce Blade Runner, even though it's pretty much the epitome of it all.
"I really wanted to bring my own kind of flavour and vision to the game, and it was the same for cyber-punk ? I wanted to bring something new, and that's that whole cyber-Renaissance thing that we kind of invented."
Instead of the future, Jacques-Belletete and the rest of the design team turned to the past ? specifically, to the Renaissance, a period known for revolutionary advances in intellectual, artistic and scientific fields and notable figures including Leonardo da Vinci and Johannes Vermeer.
"(I watched) movies like The Girl With Pearl Earring, which was really important because the whole movie is about the early Baroque painter Vermeer. The whole movie just looks like his paintings, so it was very cool to see how those images were treated and to be inspired by that.
"And lots of fashion stuff. Fashion is really important in a game, so fashion designers like Gareth Pugh and Alexander McQueen and Vivian Westwood, they're all geniuses that often tap into the Baroque and the Renaissance to put into their modern clothing."
Jacques-Belletete says that when it comes to visuals, most Western game developers are too focused on photo-realistic graphics ? something that he believe stems from an innate human desire.
"There's almost like, this quest that we have as human beings, there's a really deep urge that's ingrained in ourselves to produce perfect replicas of ourselves," he says.
"Before photography was invented, that was almost like the main goal of the classic arts. If you look at art history it had always been about reproducing the human form and it was very crude at first, and then it reached a Renaissance, and the Baroque and all those artists came very, very close.
"And if you think about it, back then, for the longest time we didn't even have mirrors, if you wanted to see yourself it was in a puddle or something, and then crude mirrors arrived, and then better mirrors, but there were no movies, no pictures.
"Then photography arrived in the mid 1800s, and it stopped the train, because there was no point in that quest anymore, because all you had to do was point the camera somewhere, click a button and there's a perfect replica of yourself or somebody else.
"I don't look all that much at other video games, I like to look at games last."
"Because of that change, people didn't have to try to be photorealistic anymore, so that's when you started getting the Impressionist movement and all of these things.
"(But now) this whole thing restarted a bit with digital imaging, this whole kind of goal, this quest, it started anew. And it's very cool and all, but it?s something that we're really, really into in North America, and then in Japan it seems to be entirely different."
While there are a few video games that have influenced Jacques-Belletete, he says that when finding inspiration, games tend to be low on his list of influences.
"I don't look all that much at other video games, I like to look at games last," he says.
"I think that we look too much at other games when we make games, I think it's better to look at all sorts of other stuff that are unrelated but still very creative, other industries or other design stuff or art stuff.
"Because our game is also very light and dark, because it's cyber-punk, if you look at stuff like Dead Space, how they did their lighting and all these things, those kinds of games were all great references for us in terms of how to pull it off.
"I'm a huge Metal Gear Solid fan, and it's very obvious in the game, I'm not even trying to hide it in the slightest. I'm very honest with these things."
So is Human Revolution a herald of times to come, or will it one day look as dated as a 1950's B-movie? Jacques-Belletete says that when predicting the future, it can be hard to tell just what's going to come true.
"Sometimes we thought we were pushing it a little too much for 2027," he says.
"But now that we see where things are going... one of the things we say is that in 2027 we'll have a dinner and we'll boot up the game and we'll probably have a good laugh at how low-tech our vision of 2027 was."
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