‘It was supposed to be the greatest time ever’: Jeff Kaplan only got 6 weeks to come up with and pitch Overwatch: ‘We were probably the most demoralised we’d ever been’
Before the rise of Overwatch there was the fall of Titan, a cancelled Blizzard MMO which was stripped for parts and used to craft the foundation of the team-shooter we all know today. Ex-Overwatch boss Jeff Kaplan had been working on Titan and was the driving force behind redirecting the team to something new. It ended up with success but the interim certainly sounds like an ordeal, with the team given just six weeks to come up with and pitch a new game.
“It was supposed to be the greatest time ever if you think about it, because you’re a game developer at Blizzard and you get to come up with a new idea,” Kaplan says in an interview with Lex Fridman. “So that sounds awesome, to everybody at Blizzard to other game developers it sounds great. But we were probably the most demoralised we’d ever been in our careers, at least I was. I didn’t know if I was going to be fired, if that was the end of my career at that point. So that was a very serious dire environment that this was happening in.”
The situation certainly doesn’t scream creative freedom. But Kaplan and the team didn’t just have the pressure of the pitches to deal with: if Blizzard were to greenlight this next project and keep the majority of the team together then the next idea had to have two things.
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“We were given two criteria that we had to hit for these pitches,” Kaplan explains. “The first one was that we had to ship in two years, and that is a very ambitious timeframe for any game, but for a Blizzard game it’s kind of insane. The second is even more ambitious and crazy: [it was that] whatever we pitched had to have the potential to have World of Warcraft-like revenue.
“At that point there was one game that had World of Warcraft-like revenue, which was World of Warcraft. So immediately I just threw out the revenue thing because it’s all just monopoly money to me, game money, it’s insane and I just don’t think about it, that’s someone else’s problem. But I did want to be as realistic as I could be about the schedule.”
So the team got together and began work on coming up with three pitches that they could bring to the Blizzard higher-ups: Overwatch, a StarCraft MMO, and Crossworlds, “a Chris Metzen vision for a universe”. It was described as a planet at the edge of the universe which was essentially a spaceport full of freakish aliens and “people from all walks of life”. But mind you, it wasn’t the full Titan team working on these pitches, which was originally around 140 people.
After Titan got cancelled, people got sent off to work on other Blizzard games like Hearthstone or WoW. Kaplan and co had ‘temp-loans’ people who came to work with the team for a short period of time, but the brainstorming team was really quite small: “There was a very small creative group that had to come up with these pitches and given six weeks and we just sort of arbitrarily decided let’s spend two weeks on each pitch.”
“The ground rule that I led with is you have to be all-in for the two weeks on the pitch,” Kaplan continues. “We have to live and breathe and want it more than anything. And I kind of warned everyone that at the end of these two weeks you’re going to think this is the only game idea and you’re not going to be invested in the next, but we’re going to throw it out as soon as we finish it and do the next one.”
In the end a conversation about what class would or could be added to Crossworlds inspired Kaplan to utilise old Titan concept art, to help come up with many of the original ideas for Overwatch heroes. “I started taking some of the old Titan characters that we had designed. We had a class called the Jumper, and the Jumper could teleport forward and rewind time and come back, and the Jumper used dual-wield pistols”—(I think you can guess where Kaplan is going with this)—”which was at the time designed after my dual G18’s from Modern Warfare 2, it was my favourite loadout, I was just cribbing Infinity Ward, that’s where Tracer’s guns came from.”
Instead of using it as a basis of a class, Kaplan asked what if this was just one person, who would that be and what would they look like? Thus Tracer was born. “Some of the pragmatic part of that was [that] I knew that Geoff Goodman was going to be on this team, and I knew that Arnold Tsang was going to be on this team, and it’s a play to your strengths moment.” Ultimately, the idea of Overwatch was the most realistic one this team of devs could pull off in two years, and that they did.
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