Adam Jensen is a fictional character in the Deus Ex series, the player character of Eidos-Montréal's Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016). Initially an ex-cop turned Chief of Security for Sarif Industries, Jensen is mortally wounded at the beginning of Human Revolution by an assault on the facilities. As part of his contract Jensen is forcibly "augmented" with mechanical parts that replace much of his body. Over the course of the game, Jensen tries to uncover the identity of those behind the attack. Mankind Divided follows a few years after the events of the game, where Jensen is tasked with hunting down and capturing augmented terrorists.

Jensen is a character that allows the player to impose their own opinion of augmentation, and in Mankind Divided is presented as an outsider to both the augmented and the unaugmented. His visual appearance went through various designs, ultimately taking two and a half years to fully materialize in two separate appearances for social and combat clothes. Mankind Divided revisited the design, working with an external clothing company. In both games, Elias Toufexis voices the character.

Outside of the games, Adam has also appeared in various tie-in media, and debuted in a comic series leading up to Human Revolutions release. He is a central character of said comic series as well as Black Light and Children's Crusade, and appears in some form in The Dawning Darkness and Hard Line.

Appearances

2011: Human Revolution game and tie-in comic
In the lead-up to the Human Revolutions release, a six-issue limited comic series ran from February to July. Jensen comes into conflict with the former-SWAT commander he served under, Durant, who now works as an augmented mercenary. Jensen ultimately kills Durant.

Adam next appeared as the player character in Human Revolution the game, in August. At the game's beginning, Jensen is the unaugmented head of security of Sarif Industries, a company focused on developing and researching augmentations. An attack on the facility seemingly kills Megan Reed (Adam's ex-girlfriend and head of neuro-scientific research at Sarif Industries) and leaves Adam near death. As part of his employment contract his boss, David Sarif, is allowed to heavily augment him as part of the attempts to save his life. Throughout the game, at Sarif's behest Jensen attempts to investigate the attack and its purpose, ultimately uncovering that the attack was orchestrated by the Illuminati and that Megan and the other scientists were kidnapped, not killed. In the end, Adam succeeds in rescuing Megan along with several of the other scientists, and he destroys the "Hyron Project"—an Illuminati supercomputer powered by human brains. However, Hugh Darrow, the creator of human augmentation and a rogue Illuminati member, releases a signal, from an arctic facility designed to end global warming named Panchea, that turns the vast majority of augmented people berserk; Adam manages to shut it down, but not before much loss of life. Depending on the player's choice, Jensen may either broadcast a message explaining (falsely or not) the events that happened in order to shape public opinion, or destroy the facility and leave mankind to find the answers for themselves.

Elsewhere in the game, Adam's backstory is explored through a series of sidequests. As an infant Jensen was part of a group of babies that genetic therapy experiments were performed on. Adam was the sole survivor of the treatments, and two scientists decided to burn the labs down to stop the experiments. A nurse at the labs rescued Adam and gave him to a couple, who secretly and unofficially adopted him.

In October, a piece of downloadable content called The Missing Link was released, detailing Jensen's experience after leaving Hengsha in cryosleep in part of the main game.

2016–2017: Mankind Divided and associated media
From February to June 2016, a comic named Deus Ex Universe: Children's Crusade followed Jensen's actions in the events leading up to Mankind Divided, and he was the player character in Deus Ex Go, released in August. Later that month, Mankind Divided came out, along with Black Light, a novel that focused on Jensen and Francis Pritchard during the aftermath of the first game's ending.

Mankind Divided takes place two years after Human Revolution, with Jensen now working as part of Interpol's anti-terrorist team Task Force 29. Jensen is also working with Alex Vega, a member of the secretive hacktivist Juggernaut Collective, to investigate the Illuminati's role in or control over TF29 and Interpol. Shortly near the game's start, a bomb is set off at a train station, and Jensen and TF29 are tasked to investigate it and other recent attacks. Ultimately, Jensen either arrests or kills Viktor Marchenko, an augmented Illuminati pawn who is acting as a terrorist to help drum up support for a United Nations resolution called the Human Restoration Act, intended to allow the Illuminati further control over the mechanically augmented.

The game would receive two pieces of downloadable content (DLC) that added new campaigns, both of which have Adam return as the player character. System Rift, released September 2016, involves Jensen attempting to break into and access files from Palisade Blade-01, a data-archiving site world-renowned for its security, at the behest of Pritchard. The second DLC, A Criminal Past, was released February 2017 and involves Jensen recounting his first undercover mission for TF29 to his psychiatrist as a frame story. Entering a high-security prison for augmented individuals as an inmate, Jensen attempts to find and retrieve another undercover agent in order to help stop several potential terrorist attacks, though the player may ultimately have Adam kill him when he begins to threaten another inmate's life.

Creation and design
Adam Jensen was created as the lead protagonist of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, developed by Eidos-Montréal as their debut project. Human Revolution acted as both a prequel to the original Deus Ex (2000) and a new entry point in the series. Jensen was created by Mary DeMarle, lead writer for Human Revolution. DeMarle described Jensen as a medium through which players explored the game's core theme of transhumanism, being forced to confront the issue through his unwilling augmentation being the narrative's central irony. He was also made a security chief for Sarif Industries to show the outsized power of corporations in the game's world and offer an easy view into the augmentation issue, contrasting him against Deus Ex protagonist JC Denton who works for a special military group. While much of the game's narrative was choice-driven and player-directed, Jensen had a defined personality which needed to be maintained and balanced with the gameplay design. The writing team used in-game elements, including character dialogue and in-game news, to reflect the approach players took during missions. During her early draft writing, DeMarle was going to kill off Jensen, which prompted protests from staff. Explaining this initial plan, DeMarle noted there were no plans for a sequel, and she felt "tragic heroes are always the best", but reconsidered and ended the storyline on a key choice after the team saw positive pre-release reactions to him from fans.

Jensen's character design was a collaborative effort across the game's art team, taking two years to finalize. The team looked at multiple protagonist from cyberpunk fiction for inspiration, from Blade Runner to the original Deus Ex. Their main wishes were to incorporate sunglasses and a trench coat. Developers wanted his design to reflect the transhumanist themes, showing both "the physical and aesthetic results" of his heavy body augmentation. A notable contributing artist to Jensen's design was Jim Murray. His face was unintentionally modelled on art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete. Needing a model for a piece of concept art, Murray asked Jacques-Belletete to pose, with Murray incorporating elements of Jacques-Belletete's features into Jensen's design. Jensen's character model, with a thin face and goatee-styled facial hair, were inspired by the lead character of Don Quixote and acted as a reference to the game's Renaissance aesthetic influence. He was given a slimmer build to avoid being a "big brutish dude" in the vein of characters like Gears of War protagonist Marcus Fenix.

The initial wish to have a single design for the character caused problems, with many of the early designs being described as "extremely bad" by Jacques-Belletete. Among the early designs were a combat-focused one dubbed "douchebag Adam", and a version with flesh-colored arms codenamed "Pinocchio Adam". The initial wish was for his mechanical arms to be exposed, with the amount of visible augmentations varying during the design process. The team ultimately settled on a design that combined cyberpunk elements with the game's Renaissance aesthetics. In the final game, Jensen has two looks: his civilian trench coat, used for "urban exploration" and "social missions", and a commando suit used for infiltration missions. Having two designs was a late decision, both impacting production and solving a number of aesthetic issues with the character. While a short coat was suggested so as to avoid cliches of the cyberpunk genre, a long coat was chosen after a studio-wide vote.

For the sequel Mankind Divided, the staff wanted Jensen to return, with producer Olivier Proulx attributing the popularity to the character's "badass" persona. Contrasting against his reactive actions in Human Revolution, DeMarle wanted Jensen to be proactive, though the team needed to work around the character's in-game role as a TF29 agent and the game's mission-based structure. Jensen's casual design used the version in Human Revolution as a starting point. After initial in-house drafts, the team decided to collaborate with an external designer. The coat was created in collaboration with Errolson Hugh of German design house Acronym. The coat's design was intended to be "complex, yet functional" while retaining a distinct aesthetic. Acronym were given design material from Human Revolution to inform their designs, with a real-world model being created to test the coat's real-world functionality, and a Renaissance-style pattern put in the lining to reference the first game's designs. His combat suit was also adjusted while retaining the same basic design. It was intended to have a more military style, reflecting his current profession. Both the narrative and art design contained several references to the myth of Icarus, with Jensen taking on parts of that symbolism in both Human Revolution and Mankind Divided.

Portrayal

DeMarle described Jensen as being driven by forms of love and loyalty to his colleagues and friends, with his main drive in Human Revolution being making up for his mistakes rather than revenge. The game's director Jean-François Dugas describe Jensen's hostile manner as "not mad or really angry", but unhappy at having augmentations forced on him and works to make sure he is not denied choice again. His views on augmentation in Human Revolution are described as ambivalent, with his uncertainty about the future and his own situation reflecting the player's perspective during the game's opening. DeMarle recalled that a journalist classified Jensen as a potential sociopath based on context clues and available in-game actions in Human Revolution, something she never intended. In Mankind Divided, he is portrayed as having embraced his new nature as a living weapon, with his acceptance of this reflected in both his manner and the in-game mechanics. Due to his lack of side-effects from augmentation, he also stands in a unique middle ground between augmented people and the rest of the population.

Across his voiced appearances, Jensen is voiced by Canadian actor Elias Toufexis. Principally working in film and television with limited video game credits, Toufexis was surprised and pleased when he got a lead role. When he was auditioning, Jensen was described to him as "kind of a Clint Eastwood character". Jensen's distinctively low and gravelly voice is close to Toufexis's normal voice, with him slightly lowering it and giving it a monotone style to both allow easy player identification and as a homage to Deus Ex protagonist JC Denton. He recalled that using his own voice for Jensen was partially responsible for him losing the role of Far Cry 3 protagonist Jason Brody after Human Revolution was released.

A challenge playing Jensen was performing lines differently depending on potential player choice. One line where Jensen vividly describes Megan's presumed killing shocked him. DeMarle pushed back against Toufexis during some sessions where he performed based on his interpretation rather than the script directions. While he had to vary Jensen's tone for different choices and conversation-based confrontations with other characters, for the main story path he was able to use his own interpretation of the character. Another memorable scene was the late-game confrontation between Jensen and Megan, who was played by Toufexis's wife Michelle Boback. The two had been arguing the day of recording, causing the two characters' argument to sound very realistic. A line he later regretted being unable to record was one of his earliest sequences, where Jensen confronts a former police colleague, when he was trying to find his voice. Comparing this early result to a poor "Bronx accent", he was upset that it remained in the final game.

Returning to voice the character for Mankind Divided, Toufexis described it as easy since he knew Jensen's character better. His main difficulty was Jensen's player-tailored portrayal in-game.  Toufexis needed to have several versions of the character in memory, so he could change his voice accordingly. While he had limited contact with staff during Human Revolution, for Mankind Divided he was able to be more involved across the production team so he could refine Jensen's character and movements. The writing team members under DeMarle would come to him and ask his opinion on proposed scenes, allowing Toufexis to portray Adam as a more relaxed character.

While Toufexis did some basic facial motion capture for Human Revolution, he was unable to do full performance capture due to budgetary limitations around adjusting his height to match Jensen's. The character's combat takedowns were choreographed and motion captured by Shawn Baichoo. For Mankind Divided, Toufexis was able to portray Jensen through full performance capture. Due to this,  Toufexis could better match his voice performance for the character. Performance capture for Mankind Divided was relatively easy due to his voice and general build matching Jensen's. Toufexis has called Jensen one of his favorite roles. When Human Revolution and Mankind Divided released in Japan, Jensen was dubbed by Hiroki Yasumoto.

Reception

Listing him as 2011's best new game character, Destructoid's Ryan Perez gave praise to the design of his apartment and how it showed off the character's inner conflict. Jack Devries of IGN, meanwhile, criticized the character's look for having drab color tones and insulted his "fauxhawk".

In her 2013 essay "Bodies, augmentation and disability in Dead Space and Deus Ex: Human Revolution", Diane Carr highlighted Jensen's role as a disabled protagonist confronting preconceptions felt by others surrounding augmentation technology. She also noted that the final choice and narrations ending the game took Jensen out of the internal narrative and had him "narrate privileged (i.e. external) insight into four possible futures" directly to the player. Philip Matthew Trad, writing for the 2015 book Apocalyptic Projections: A Study of Past Predictions, Current Trends and Future Intimations as Related to Film and Literature, analysed the game's themes surrounding Jensen's mission and interactions. He saw a recurring theme of Jensen struggling to maintain his humanity given his highly augmented state, with his ability to carry on without succumbing to their psychological side effects showing him as a stronger character than equivalent allied or antagonistic augmented soldiers. While noting Jensen as one of many complex cyberpunk video game protagonists, Pawel Frelik in the 2019 book The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture felt he continued a trend of lack of diversity in the genre and a continuance of the Caucasian-focused "American hero myth".

See also
Transhumanism in fiction

References

Cyborg characters in video games
Fictional American people in video games
Fictional characters from Detroit
Fictional Interpol officials
Fictional police officers in video games
Fictional security guards
Hackers in video games
Male characters in video games
Role-playing video game characters
Science fiction video game characters
Square Enix protagonists
Video game characters introduced in 2011