Sheldon Pacotti, principal writer for the original Deus Ex and its sequel, Invisible War, leads a quietly explosive life. He teaches game writing at the University of Texas, is a software architect at a business design, marketing and consulting firm called frog (capitalization is apparently out this year), and he recently founded New Life Interactive, which this year released Cell: emergence.

Cell is a tricky beast to peg down, fusing voxel-based, strategic gameplay with mechanics that appear to be AI-driven, but are in fact "cellular automata," or the direct result of each player's organic style -- and all of this taking place inside the body of a sick child.

This all may sound vague or convoluted (or both), so we'll let Pacotti fill in the remaining details on Cell and his influence on Deus Ex: Human Revolution -- though we can't promise you'll understand his terms any better, we do believe you'll feel intellectually enlightened regardless: