Handsome Jack

In September 2012, Handsome Jack debuted in Borderlands 2.[6] The character is introduced blowing up the train the Vault Hunters, the player characters, are on after luring them to the planet Pandora, with the ultimate goal of finding the next Vault and the power within it. Throughout the game, Jack will taunt the player through radio communications, interacting with the player in a manner Burch called similar to GLaDOS.[5] His arc throughout the game is growing to hate the player, while the player's intended arc is to vice versa grow to hate him.[6]

After surviving the train, the player is guided by the mysterious Guardian Angel from the first game to Sanctuary, the last refuge of the resistance against Jack and Hyperion. The player is initially intended to take Jack as "a funny, but ultimately harmless dick", evidenced by his early goofy taunts.[6] Throughout the game, his "dickishness" is further and further heightened.[6] Eventually, Mordecai, a player character in the first game turned an NPC ally in the second, reports that he's found a power core that could allow Sanctuary to fly safely in the air. The player retrieves it and with the help of Angel installs the core, but Angel is revealed to have been working for Jack, and the core instead sabotages Sanctuary's shields, leaving it to be almost destroyed by Jack's moonshot cannons from his space station orbiting Pandora, Helios, before Lilith the Siren teleports it away. Angel continues to help the Vault Hunters afterward, however, betraying Jack and revealing the Vault Key is with her. As the Vault Hunters prepare to raid the base Jack keeps Angel in, he captures Mordecai's pet bird Bloodwing, mutating her and then killing her after the player beats the bird in a boss fight. This moment is meant to be the first time Jack becomes a serious threat in the game.[6]

The Vault Hunters find Angel's chambers, where they find out Jack—revealed to be her father—is using her Siren powers to charge the Vault Key, keeping Angel locked up and injected with a substance called Eridium to power her up. With Angel's help, the Hunters destroy the Eridium injectors and in the process kill her. Jack swears vengeance on the Hunters, who in turn do the same after he kills Roland and kidnaps Lilith to continue powering the Key. Eventually, Jack is faced in the Vault, and he takes control of the monster within it to fight the player.[4] With his monster defeated, Jack may then be killed by the player; otherwise, Lilith will do it.

The Pre-Sequel!, set after the first Borderlands and before the second one, explores Jack's rise to power. Jack (also known as John) is introduced as a low-ranking programmer who, despite the animosity of Hyperion CEO Harold Tassiter towards him, has managed to obtain command of the Helios station. Jack intends to unlock a Vault on Pandora's moon Elpis, and to this end hires six Vault Hunters: Wilhelm, Nisha, Athena, Claptrap, Aurelia, and one of his body doubles, Timothy. However, Helios is invaded by the Dahl Corporation's Lost Legion, and Jack and the Vault Hunters are forced to evacuate to Elpis. The leader of the Lost Legion, Colonel Tungsteena Zarpedon, takes control of the Eye of Helios, a weapon of mass destruction aboard the station, and uses it to begin destroying Elpis, claiming that it is for the greater good. Jack begins a campaign to retake the station; he destroys a jamming signal disabling Helios' defense systems and confronts the corrupt Meriff of Concordia who was working for Zarpedon. Although Jack initially spares the Meriff, the Meriff shoots at him when his back is turned, leading Jack to kill him, now deciding that mercy is a weakness. Jack then creates a robot army, using the AI Felicity as its core, but the Vault Hunters are forced to destroy her when she becomes unwilling to be used as a weapon. With the aid of Mad Moxxi, Roland, and Lilith, Jack and the Vault Hunters then invade Helios Station, kill Zarpedon, and retake the station. However, Roland and Lilith betray the group at the behest of Moxxi, who believes that Jack is dangerous and not the hero he claims to be; they destroy the Eye of Helios and nearly kill Jack and the Vault Hunters. The group heads to the Elpis Vault to exact revenge. They enter the Vault, kill the alien Eridian guardians protecting it, and discover an ancient artifact. Jack uses the artifact and gains knowledge of a powerful Vault monster sealed in Pandora that will obey whoever unseals it. Lilith teleports in and punches the artifact into Jack's face, severely disfiguring him before disappearing; Jack proclaims his intention to take control of the monster and raze Pandora. He murders Tassiter, takes control of Hyperion, and renames himself Handsome Jack. Wilhelm and Nisha remain his top enforcers, Claptrap is betrayed, shot, and left for dead and his entire product line is wiped out, and Athena becomes disgusted with him and leaves his employ.

Handsome Jack appears again in Tales from the Borderlands, an episodic game released between November 2014 to October 2015 which follows on from the events of Borderlands 2. He first appears at the end of the first episode as a hologram next to Rhys Strongfork, one of the two player characters in the game. The next episode explains his presence: Rhys, having retrieved a data file from the corpse of Professor Nakayama, who had attempted to revive Jack, has unknowingly uploaded an artificial intelligence version of the dead Hyperion leader into his mind. Jack can only be seen and heard by Rhys and cannot act physically except through the use of Rhys's cybernetic implants. At the end of the second episode, Rhys may either trust Jack or Fiona's plan to get out of a dangerous situation. In the third episode, if Rhys chooses to trust and befriend Jack he obtains further control of him. During episode four, Jack helps Rhys and his allies infiltrate Helios and tells him that an upgrade for the robot Gortys, which will help them find a new Vault on Pandora, is in his office. Once there, Jack offers Rhys to rule Hyperion together, asking him to plug him into the Hyperion computer network. The player may choose to accept Jack's offer or reject it; if the player accepts, Jack will make Rhys the new president of Hyperion, while if the player refuses Jack will forcibly take over Rhys' body and plug himself in. In the fifth and final episode, he attempts to kill Rhys by forcing a robotic endoskeleton into him to fully gain control of his body, but his plans are foiled when Rhys crashes Helios into Pandora. Afterward, Rhys finds Jack in the wreckage of the station, who lectures him about how there will always be sacrifices when it comes to success, lamenting that his past betrayals ultimately made him what he is today, and that he regrets ever coming to Pandora in the first place. Suddenly, Jack uploads himself back into Rhys' cybernetics and tries to kill him one last time by using his cybernetic arm to strangle him. Rhys desperately attempts to remove all of his cybernetics to stop him, mutilating himself in the process, and either destroys Jack by crushing the piece of his robotic eye containing him or simply leaves him trapped inside it.

In Borderlands 3, set years after the events of Tales from the Borderlands, a "Legendary" class type of gun called the "Handsome Jackhammer" can be found and collected by the player, which contains an artificial intelligence version of Handsome Jack inside it. Jack's voice is also heard during the "Childhood's End" side mission, which explores the origin of Angel's Siren powers emerging during her childhood, her accidental killing of her mother, and Jack's subsequent imprisonment of her.