Patrick Johnson

Bearing in mind this was getting on for 18, 19 years ago... this is as far as I recall. I joined Gears while 2 was still in production, so I knew the longer-term intention before I started working on 3. Adam I do remember specifically, Myrrah I don't. Dead Adam was planned from the first game, but the detail was only settled during production on 3. I remember saying to Cliff, "He's got to do a Marie Curie," i.e. Adam has to self-experiment, knowing the risk. (If you don't know the Marie Curie bit, it's worth checking it out.) Adam is consumed by guilt for what he's done. Even though self-experimentation is a valid method that scientists have used for centuries, even up to the present day (remember the guy who got a Nobel a few years ago for finding the bacterial cause of gastric ulcers by infecting himself?) it's also Adam's way of going into the study with a bottle of brandy and his service pistol. He knows he has to pay the price for not warning anyone the Locust were coming. He's found his guilt increasingly hard to live with, and he's not prepared to experiment on prisoners. He has to infect himself with lambency, knowing that if he succeeds with the weapon, he dies. Now, Myrrah – I don't remember when Myrrah's end came into it, but I'm fairly sure it was intended from the start. It would be weird if it wasn't: it's the logical end. This is an existential war to the death, us or them. (Or in this case, us or them or the other them as well.) Someone's got to lose. I think I would have argued against anyone suggesting I write it as some redemption or rehabilitation because it wouldn't have made sense at any level – humanity's on the brink of extinction, the desperate stakes were embedded from the start ("Understand what a world had to do to survive",) and Myrrah not only won't stop, she can't stop, for the same reasons that humans can't either. On a broader issue of writers defaulting to "we're better than that," the moral debate is a common element in the rest of my work because it's a fundamental question to address if you're going to write about combat beyond the ceasefire and the enemy's still breathing. I'm fond of the foreign policy advice "Capability, not intent." :)