Jeff Kaplan, once the face of Overwatch at Blizzard, hasn’t led the hero shooter in over five years. The former director of the game left the company in 2021 for reasons he would later go on to describe as the “biggest ‘fuck you’ moment” of his career, when an Activision Blizzard exec threatened to lay off a thousand people at the company if Overwatch didn’t make a certain amount of money that year. Since then, Aaron Keller has stepped into the director role and, despite a rocky couple of years, has managed to right the ship. What does Kaplan think about how the game has turned out? Well, he’s actually made a conscious effort to not engage with the game since his departure, so he doesn’t really know.
In a lengthy interview with GameSpot, Kaplan talked about his experience of going independent with his new studio Kintsugiyama and working on the western action game The Legend of California. In the interview, GameSpot asks about how his relationship with Overwatch changed when he stepped down from his director role, and he says he’s content to remember Overwatch as it was in 2021 when he left. He cites his previously removing himself from World of Warcraft as a learning experience that made leaving Overwatch easier, as it was very difficult for him to sever his relationship with WoW because it was “such a part of who [he] was and how [he] identified.”
I was more prepared for that with Overwatch. World of Warcraft was more painful for me to leave than Overwatch was. And with Overwatch, I had a very almost clinical separation, knowing how the WoW thing had gone. I’ve literally not played the game since April 2021.
We had added Echo. She was the last hero. And that’s my memory of Overwatch–how it played in April of 2021. I don’t, for my own psyche, I don’t read the subreddits. After I said my goodbye to competitive Overwatch and the Overwatch subreddit, I never go back and read. I don’t watch YouTube [videos]. I don’t search for my name in Overwatch. I don’t search for Overwatch. I sort of just disconnect. I actually tell all the algorithms like, “Yeah, I’m not really interested in Overwatch anymore. I know you think I’m the Overwatch guy, but like, that’s just not for me anymore.
And I just do that for a healthy separation. I do have those moments, very emotional [moments], where sometimes I’ll see a picture from BlizzCon 2014, where we announced Overwatch. It is, to this day, one of the most special days in my life, you know?
Watching Chris go out there and announce it, and getting to follow it up with him. The way my team felt about it. I’m so immensely proud of everything that everybody at Blizzard, not just Team 4, did to make Overwatch a great game. Like, SNFD, or Story and Franchise Development, the cinematics group at Blizzard. [It is] the most talented cinematics group in the history of video games.
Despite it all, Kaplan says he still has “so much pride” for having spearheaded the game, and holds his former colleagues in the “highest regard.” But then he makes a comparison to Napoleon Dynamite character Uncle Rico, who is still mourning a football career he never had and wistfully watching videos of football games when he was younger.
“Okay, there’s that character, Uncle Rico, who’s like, ‘I was good at football,’ and he’s always like out there, like watching the old videotapes of himself,” he explains. “I don’t want to be Uncle Rico! Overwatch happened. I was a part of it. There’s a group there now and Overwatch is now about them. Both the players and the developers, that’s their Overwatch now. They’re making it, they own it, they play it. I’m onto this new thing, and that’s where I’m at in my life.”
Since Kaplan left Blizzard in 2021, Overwatch has gone through many changes from the original blueprint he pitched for it at Blizzcon 2019 when the company planned to make Overwatch 2 a PvE-driven game with a campaign and replayable missions. The game dropped the 2 from its title earlier this year after a soft reboot ushering in a new storyline and a new focus on frequent story updates with cinematics, comics, and audio dramas.