Looking to the past to imagine the future in Deus Ex

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.

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"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."

Jacques-Belletete says that while creating the world of Human Revolution, he tried to move past the genre's most obvious influences.