Borderlands 2’s Handsome Jack is “GLaDOS times Joker”

Behind every great game, they say, is a great villain. Okay, they don’t actually say that, and to be honest I’m not entirely sure who “they” are anyway, but I just said it and that’s good enough.

In between joy puking and wub wub, the recent Borderlands 2 trailer also revealed the game’s villain, Handsome Jack, CEO of the Hyperion Corporation and self-declared Dictator of Pandora. He’s also somebody Gearbox’s designers want you to hate, but in a good way.

“This story will still have you searching for a vault and all that stuff,” lead writer Anthony Burch told Destructoid, “but we wanted to make it feel different and have an omnipresent force that could be heckling you, reminding you that ‘I’m the point of the game and you want to kill me.’ I feel like a douchebag for even mentioning Handsome Jack in the same breath as GLaDOS or Shodan, but that was where the motivation was coming from. Someone who can talk to you and make you hate them due to the sheer douche-itude of their dialogue.”

I didn’t hate GLaDOS. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t an optional test protocol.

“The hope is that when Handsome Jack speaks, you’re sort of drawn to him in a certain way, because at its heart, Borderlands is still supposed to be a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, so he has this humour attached to him,” he went on. “The idea was to go between ‘ha ha, this dude is funny and he’s saying really douchey things,’ and him beginning to cross lines that make you want to take him out. That’s the hope, anyway – if I can be even more arrogant and say he’s GLaDOS times Joker.”

Borderlands 2 is out later this year.