Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch was born from bitter failure and a moment of unexpected inspiration more than a decade ago. Soon after it launched on May 24, 2016, Overwatch became a cultural touchpoint and an icon for diversity. By October 2022, Overwatch had sold approximately 50 million copies, making it one of the best-selling games of all time. It saw competitors rise then drown in the tides of an ever-expanding sea of canceled projects. Over the last decade, the oft-copied hero shooter stagnated and disappointed, growing out of touch with its most devoted fans. It’s an underdog story, a cautionary lesson, and a redemption tale of the kind you might expect from its own flawed, relatable heroes.
Before Overwatch, there was Titan, an ambitious MMO that Blizzard hoped would recreate the substantial success of World of Warcraft, the MMO responsible for much of the company’s growth at that point. Despite having such high hopes for the project, though, Blizzard allocated comparatively little to it, as WoW devoured most of the company’s resources. And the Titan team was struggling.
To mark the 10th anniversary of Overwatch, Polygon spoke to five members of the development team, many of whom have been working on the game since its earliest days, to reflect on its evolution. They include:
- Aaron Keller, game director
- Walter Kong, general manager
- Dion Rogers, art director
- Pete Lee, associate art director
- Scott Lawlor, audio and technical narrative director
The interviews below have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Aaron Keller: We were struggling with Titan, and I remember just before the end of that project, we had a big team-wide playtest. It didn’t go very well. I remember coming out of that, talking to Dion [Rogers] and Pete [Lee] about an issue we had. Inside this building in Bay City, which was like San Francisco for that game, there was a prop — an apple, just a piece of fruit. It was on a counter, and the size of the apple was larger than a character’s head, like the size of a pumpkin or something.
I remember us talking about how we had gotten one of the most basic fundamentals of game design and development wrong: the scale of the world. And it kind of cascaded into this big topic, where we were literally talking about whether we had to go back and scale the entire world down, or scale up all of the characters in the game. I mean, it was just kind of representative of one of many pieces of that project that weren’t going right. Just weeks later, it was canceled, right as we were checking in on our scaled-down versions of our characters.
Walter Kong: It was a fairly painful failure.
Keller: We had this meeting — it’s now infamously known as The White Chair Meeting, because there was just a bunch of white chairs set up in our lounge, and nobody really knew what they were for. That’s when they called us all together and announced the cancellation of Titan.
It was devastating, because a lot of us had worked on Titan for five or six years. We built up this world and became very invested in it. As a creative, as a craftsman, this is what you do it for. You can’t really accept this reality — that all of that stuff is just going to disappear. I still remember the moment that they hit the button to archive that project, deleting everything that we had done.
But following that, we started this process where we’re like, okay, what else can this team do?
Kong: Our parent company at the time felt like, “Hey, here’s an opportunity out of a negative event to find a way to resource World of Warcraft.” But there was a group of people that were very passionate about creating something new for Blizzard and had a very strong desire to essentially fight for the right to build something new out of the ashes of the previous game.
Keller: They moved a lot of people off of the Titan team. We were left with maybe like a core of 30 people or so, and we still thought of ourselves as the MMO development team. So we had this process where we were going to take two months to work on new pitches, and we were going to do a month on each one.
The very first one was a Starcraft MMO. I still have some of the paper maps of zones that we would make for Starcraft, and we went through that. We got a whole deck put together, and then we immediately pivoted to another game. I might get some of this wrong, but I think we called it Cross Worlds or something like that. Another big MMO, new IP, something totally new.
I think that’s where the Cassidy concept originally came from. It was one of the key art pieces for that game.
Pete Lee: The Cassidy picture has a hidden story that we never told to anyone — and probably not many people in this room know about either.
So the art team’s task was just drawing the character, and [concept artist Arnold Tsang] asked me to draw the character’s background, too. I was like, “Gee, I have a deal. So, if I draw this background, you give me a coupon to draw a character, like, whenever I want to.”
I still have that coupon, and haven’t used it yet.
Keller: We were a few weeks into that [Cross Worlds] pitch, and somebody on the team — I think it was Jeff Goodman, our original lead hero designer — mentioned doing a hero-based shooter with abilities and a cast of like 50 characters, or something like that. The idea just caught like wildfire.
No one could keep working on Cross Worlds, and everyone’s talking about this game. People started sending in pitches for heroes. All these email suggestions were pouring in about using things that we had on Titan, which is originally where Tracer, Reaper, and Genji came from. There was an idea for this Russian woman that rides a bear, and for her ultimate, the bear pulls out two AK-47s and stuff like that. That was a little bit further than Overwatch ended up going, but we just couldn’t help ourselves.
Lee: When that transition was happening, Chris Metzen, our creative director, was having a talk with us, and the one thing that I still remember is when he asked if we remembered the older design rules we had to follow. There was a lot of “Don’t do this, don’t do that. The cars can’t fly, this thing can’t do that.”
He said, “Pete, forget everything. Forget every ruleset and limitation we talked about. Just go for the fantasy. Go for pure fun.”
Everything changed, at least from my perspective. We got all excited and just started pulling out all the fun ideas we wanted to see. That was just the perfect moment. Whether the idea was good or not, we spent a long time developing the stories and setting of this world, so we just needed to filter it, take out the unfun parts and just squeeze like… the most fun juice out of all this stuff that we created. We packed it with fantasies and dreams, and that was the moment the idea of Overwatch became super exciting,
Scott Lawlor: Metzen joined Team Four in the last year of Titan‘s life. Prior to that, there were a bunch of cool concepts in Titan that just never congealed into a unified vision. There were a lot of good ideas, but the world itself just felt kind of disjointed, and there wasn’t a ton of fantasy in the world.
One of my favorite moments of Titan development was when Chris came in and started drawing up the Bay City map, and he’s like, “Oh, this corner here, this is the motorcycle gang area, and this is where the body modification guys hang out. Over here is where this cool thing is going to happen.” And everyone started to get these ideas churning. Years and years later, a lot of that stuff ended up making it into Overwatch — the Deadlock gang, the Phreaks, and various different things. So, even though Titan was never going to make it, having that big injection of fantasy was really special towards the end of the project. It really served us in that transition, once it came time to make all these new heroes.
We had Tracer’s kit in Titan, more or less, as the Jumper job class. You could make them have different hair colors and weapons, and they didn’t talk. But when you congealed the idea down to: Here is Tracer, she’s from the UK, she has a voice — I can’t emphasize enough how much being able to put a face and a name on these gameplay concepts really elevated the whole [pitch process].
We packed it with fantasies and dreams, and that was the moment the idea of Overwatch became super exciting.
We actually voiced her with the engineering manager’s wife, who was from Britain. She did temporary voiceover for us over some line art. That was actually one of my favorite moments during the pitch. There was a bit of line art of Tracer, this brand-new character, going, blink, blink, blink, putting the time bomb on the screen, which is now a “play of the game” sequence in Overwatch. It was all hand-drawn, and we had the engineering manager’s wife say whatever lines they were, probably something like, “Cheers, love!”
Anyway, that core concept came in super, super early, and when we put the voice over this line art, it just made everything click. We started to put all this detail and love into creating a character that was three-dimensional, rather than the more generic “create a class” kind of thing in Titan.
Dion Rogers: Coming out of Titan, we got a chance to know exactly what we wanted and what we didn’t want to do with the game. We had a really clear picture of what didn’t work and what we should hyper-focus on.
Keller: We also appreciated the very tightly controlled scope of what a project like this would be. We had just come off of something that was massive, that you could barely wrap your head around. We could point at this thing and figure out how we could actually build it quickly and do it really, really well.
We had the team vote on whether they wanted to keep working on Cross Worlds or Overwatch. It was unanimously Overwatch, and we put this pitch together and never looked back.
The team’s belief in their new project didn’t guarantee approval, though. Their post-Titan efforts were still experimental in Blizzard’s eyes, an allocation of resources that might still be better suited to supporting World of Warcraft. The company’s decision-makers needed convincing — passion and hope almost weren’t enough to do it.
Kong: While these guys were working that creative magic back then, I had been pulled into the project to put together a deck to present to our parent company. I was working on building a spreadsheet model for the business case. Meeting with management of Blizzard — just to prep for that meeting! — it felt more than a little anxiety-inducing.
I think we were all really nervous, and the meeting started out pretty rough. There was skepticism from the execs at the parent company. On the Blizzard side, we were pitching a thing we loved, and we were very good at building big, bombastic settings and kick-ass characters. We would be presenting a game with a very unique, stylized look, and the response was initially, “Well, that’s because you don’t want to compete with Call of Duty, so we get why you want to build a stylized game.” And then I felt really bad when one of the executives there said, “Oh, so you mean you’re building Call of Skylanders?” So it was a rough start to the meeting.
There was a very specific turning point in the meeting, when we put up a slide showing the lineup of heroes. The response was immediate and incredible. Our group CEO said this was unlike anything in any medium, that it was amazing, and he had never seen art like that before. From that moment, it became a meeting about imagining the future and imagining the potential of what this new IP could do. That was an incredible moment. I’ve been in the industry a long time, and I think when I’m retired, I’ll remember that day, and just how special it was to see that turn.
Development began in earnest after the initial approval, with the goal of showcasing the game at the next year’s BlizzCon. That gave the team roughly 14 months to turn a pitch into a playable build. Making a game is always hard, but the team says Overwatch was different.
Keller: I’ve never said this before, but it was easy.
There were times where we were working extra hours and working hard, but it just felt like everything came together on that project. There weren’t a lot of moments that I can pinpoint and be like, “Here’s where things were falling apart,” or, “We had a big existential crisis on the project.” It just didn’t happen.
We really started working on it, maybe in June of 2013. That green-light pitch was in October, and we were running around with a new engine with Tracer shooting red lasers out of her eyes, because we didn’t have guns yet in November and December.
Rogers: Sometimes with Titan, it felt like we were building the game and the engine at the same time, like you’re making the tracks that the train goes on them at the same time. It was pretty challenging to get art in and out of the game.
Going into Prometheus — the code name for Overwatch — we had a hyperfixation on the engine. We focused a lot on the beginning parts while we developed all the pre-production and the ideas that people had for the game, but this was a direct reflection of Titan. We knew we needed to do a better job with the tools and how we create the game.
Lawlor: Just to add to that: The difference between Titan tools and Overwatch tools was night and day.
The engineering team deserves so much credit, because it was very hard to work on Titan, and within six months, they basically reworked a lot of existing stuff that we had built for Titan into this really tight engine. Everything just worked all of a sudden, and it worked really, really well. It was part of the magic of that first six to eight months of development, that we were all able to just go 100 miles an hour.
Lee: Obviously, the whole process was a challenge that we needed to solve, but then the whole experience was very fun and smooth. It made it difficult to choose what we should add. But in a good way.
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