TheRetroArcade
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Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
Overwatch beat out an intergalactic RPG and a StarCraft MMO.
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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.
"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 fre...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
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Every Thursday
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From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
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Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
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Once a month
SFX
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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.
"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 fre...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?