Detroit: Become Human

• 1. Introduction

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  Detroit: Become Human, an adventure game from the studio Quantic Dream, had sold 15 million units by January 2026. That makes it the best-selling game the studio has ever made. Sony Interactive Entertainment published it in 2018. Its premise puts the player inside androids built to serve people, who begin to think for themselves. How did a short demonstration grow into a full game? What does a story look like when its leads can die and the plot carries on without them? And why did critics praise its ambition while picking apart its politics?

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• 2. Three Androids

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  In 2038, a caretaker android named Markus returns home with his owner and alerts the police to a suspected burglary. Confronting the intruder, Markus breaks past his programming and becomes a deviant, an android with full autonomy and sentience. Police arrive and shoot him. He wakes in a landfill of broken androids, escapes, and finds Jericho, a derelict freighter that shelters other deviants. There he rallies them to fight for their rights. Their acts of civil disobedience catch the public's attention and draw more androids to the cause. Depending on what Connor does, the FBI may attack Jericho. If Markus survives, he and the others plan a final march to an android recycling centre. The result is either a war or peace talks opened by the president.

  Connor is a police investigator android sent by the CyberLife corporation to assist Lieutenant Hank Anderson of the Detroit Police Department. Hank is an alcoholic who hates androids. As the pair investigate an outbreak of deviants, they may form a bond or an enmity, and in one branch Hank takes his own life. While hunting Markus' group, Connor can begin to deviate, or he can hold on to his programming. If he defects, he infiltrates CyberLife Tower and tries to turn every android there into a deviant. That brings a confrontation with Connor-60, another "machine" Connor model, who may be holding Hank hostage. Hank, Connor or Connor-60 can die. If Connor stays loyal, he tries to snipe Markus at the final protest, and either a SWAT team or Hank can stop him. If peace has been won, Connor can choose whether to shoot Markus during a speech.

  Kara works as a housekeeper android for Todd Williams and his daughter Alice. When Todd attacks them, Kara escapes with the girl and becomes a deviant. The two cross Detroit hoping to reach Canada, which has no specific laws involving androids. Along the way they befriend another android named Luther, who joins the journey. An android sympathizer sends them to Jericho to obtain passports. If the FBI attacks Jericho, Luther, Kara and Alice may all die there. Kara also learns that Alice is an android, a replacement for the daughter taken away by Todd's wife, who left him because of his drug addiction. The pair can reach Canada by bus or by boat, survive the recycling centre, or die trying.

  How the player steers each of these branches comes down to a handful of inputs on a DualShock controller.

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• 3. Choices And Flowcharts

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  On the DualShock controller, the left analog stick handles movement and the right stick interacts with objects and looks around. The R2 button scans a scene for possible actions, and the motion controls and touchpad are used as well. The game is played from a third-person view with a set but controllable perspective.

  There is no "game over" message in Detroit: Become Human. All three playable characters can die, and the story simply continues without them. Quick time events and dialog decisions make the plot branch in different directions.

  During a chapter and immediately after it, the player can open a flowchart that maps those branches. The player can also rewind to certain points in the story to remake a decision they regret. Some scenes add countdowns that force a fast response.

  Each android plays differently. Connor uses augmented vision to highlight and analyse clues, which lets him reconstruct and replay events that happened before he arrived. The more information he gathers within the allotted time, the better his odds of choosing a successful course of action. Markus can grant other androids free will and calculate the outcomes of certain acts.

  Scattered through the levels are magazines that the player can stop and read.

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• 4. A Demo Grows Up

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  In 2012, Quantic Dream showed a PlayStation 3 technology demonstration called Kara. It drew strong reactions and won an award at the LA Shorts Fest. Valorie Curry starred in it, and she later returned to play the title character in the full game. David Cage, the writer and director, had not planned to turn the demo into a game. He changed his mind because he was curious about what would happen next.

  Cage took inspiration from The Singularity Is Near, a book by Ray Kurzweil. The team designed the androids with reference to artificial organs, to how their energy might be generated, and to human eye movement. Each android's abilities were set by its profession. Experts in artificial intelligence were consulted to judge which technological advances were the most feasible.

  Detroit was chosen as the setting to revitalise a city that had fallen into economic decline after a historic contribution to American industry. The developers travelled there for field research. They took pictures, visited abandoned buildings, and met people.

  Back in the studio, that research fed a script of unusual size.

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• 5. Scale Of Production

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  By late 2013, Cage was in preproduction. His script ran between 2,000 and 3,000 pages and was first passed to the design team. Meanwhile, programmers built the graphics and a new game engine with advances in rendering, dynamic lighting, shading, bokeh, and physical cameras. After Mark Cerny, lead architect of the PlayStation 4, came to evaluate the engine, Quantic Dream improved its depth of field.

  In October 2016, the screenplay was finished after more than two years of work. Writer Adam Williams was hired to help complete and flesh out the story. Cage used charts and diagrams to track where the choices would lead. He wrote "five or six thousand pages of notes" and compared the story to a Rubik's Cube. Two scenes were cancelled because of how they portrayed violence.

  Casting stretched to Los Angeles, London, and Paris, in a search for more than 250 actors to play 513 roles. The actors were scanned in 3D, and those models became the characters. Shooting and animation followed. On the 8th of September 2017, performance capture ended after 324 days.

  The game was made by the 180 staff members at Quantic Dream, with further work outsourced to the Philippines, China, Vietnam, and India. It contains 35,000 camera shots, 74,000 unique animations, and 5.1 million lines of code. On the 23rd of April 2018, it was released to manufacturing, four years after work began.

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• 6. Sound And Image

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  Bryan Dechart plays Connor, Valorie Curry plays Kara, and Jesse Williams plays Markus. Clancy Brown, Lance Henriksen, and Minka Kelly portray the supporting characters Hank Anderson, Carl Manfred, and North.

  Each playable android has its own composer. Philip Sheppard wrote for Kara, Nima Fakhrara for Connor, and John Paesano for Markus. Sheppard's cello sequence in Kara's theme was inspired by the flames of a log fire. The motif layered over it came from the two syllables in her name. Fakhrara built custom instruments and used vintage synthesizers so that the sound would suggest Connor's robotic nature. Paesano wanted Markus' music to be "like a church hymn", mirroring his rise into a leader.

  Sheppard recorded at Abbey Road Studios with the English Session Orchestra. Paesano worked at Synchron Stage Vienna with the Synchron Stage Orchestra.

  The look of the game also varies by character. Director of photography Aymeric Montouchet used "thick grain and shaky long lens" with shallow depth of field for Kara. Connor got "small, tight grain" and a blue palette, while Markus got orange and white colours.

  The soundtrack also includes songs by Detroit-based musicians such as The Whiskey Charmers, Emily Rose, Thornetta Davis, Rocket 455, Model 500, and White Shag.

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• 7. Release And Controversy

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  On the 27th of October 2015, the game was announced at a Sony press conference during Paris Games Week. It appeared at E3 2016 and E3 2017 with trailers showing more playable characters and gameplay. After E3 2017, Cage confirmed a 2018 release, and the game reached the PlayStation 4 on the 25th of May 2018. Pre-orders came with a dynamic theme and a digital soundtrack. The digital deluxe edition added a copy of Heavy Rain, a digital art book, two dynamic themes, and ten avatars. The soundtrack became available for streaming on the 22nd of June 2018.

  After Paris Games Week in 2017, a new trailer drew criticism for its portrayal of child abuse. It showed a scene in which a 9-year-old girl named Alice is attacked by her father. Dechart defended the trailer, saying the story "elicits empathy".

  On the 24th of April 2018, a demo of the first scene, "The Hostage", arrived on the PlayStation Store. An Amazon Alexa skill guided players through it. In Japan, the game was promoted with a live action short film called Tokyo: Become Human. A launch trailer and two animated English-language shorts followed. The shorts introduced Elijah Kamski, creator of the androids and CEO of CyberLife, and Chloe, the first android to pass the Turing test.

  At the March 2019 Game Developers Conference, Epic Games announced that Quantic Dream would bring Detroit: Become Human, Heavy Rain, and Beyond: Two Souls to Windows. Quantic Dream would self-publish them, exclusively on the Epic Games Store for one year. Pre-orders opened in November 2019, and the Windows version launched on the 12th of December. A Steam release followed the next year.

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• 8. Reception And Sales

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  Metacritic summarised the critical response as "generally favorable". OpenCritic reported that 71% of critics recommended the game. Chris Carter of Destructoid called the setting "believable" and "captivating". Michael Goroff of Electronic Gaming Monthly called the effect of players' collective decisions "incredibly satisfying and sometimes unexpected" and named it the game's "biggest accomplishment". Andy Hartup of GamesRadar+ went further, calling it "the new gold standard... for meaningful choice in gaming". Several reviewers also praised the performances of Curry, Dechart, and Williams.

  The criticism was just as pointed. Kimberley Wallace of Game Informer thought Markus' story was the weakest of the three, citing "predictable speeches" and "black-and-white decisions". Peter Brown of GameSpot called the historical allegories "on-the-nose" and "distracting". He also said the flowchart was "ultimately detrimental" to immersion and wished it could be switched off. Colm Ahern of VideoGamer.com, by contrast, singled out the flowcharts as one of the game's few redeeming qualities. He wrote that the game "wants to move you" but "really doesn't".

  Sales told a different story. Within two days of release, the game reached fifth place on the United Kingdom chart. In its first week there, it topped both the overall and console sales charts. In the United States, the NPD Group later confirmed sales growth of more than twenty percent over Heavy Rain. It was the third best-selling game overall, and the top seller on the PlayStation Store in May 2018 after only six days on sale. In Japan, it opened with 39,548 units, behind only Dark Souls: Remastered, and reached 56,480 after two weeks.

  The global total climbed steadily. The game sold 1 million units in its first two weeks. Two months after release, 1.5 million people had played it. It passed 2 million that December and approached 3 million the following month. In October 2019, PlayStation 4 sales reached 3.2 million. In August 2020, Quantic Dream reported more than 5 million units across all platforms. It passed 6 million by July 2021, 8 million by January 2023, and 9 million in December 2023. By the end of 2024, it had reached 11 million.

  Awards followed too. In 2017, the game won Best of E3 at GameSpot's Best of E3 Awards. The awards listing for 2019 includes the D.I.C.E. Awards and the 15th British Academy Games Awards, with Dechart named for his performance as Connor at several ceremonies.

  The story has since spread beyond games. On the 22nd of July 2022, Kadokawa's Comic Bridge website began serializing a manga called Detroit: Become Human Tokyo Stories. Set in Japan, it follows an android idol named Reina during the events of the game.

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