Jeff Kaplan, former developer on World of Warcraft, and later CEO of Overwatch and Blizzard's vice president, in a podcast with Lex Fridman reflected on his career, but also his love for gaming. During a little more than 5 hours of conversation, he talked about his gaming roots, how he ended up at Blizzard, why he finally left and what life looks like after Blizzard.
He explained how Overwatch actually happened by accident. Namely, Project Titan, Blizzard's big MMO that was supposed to be WoW's successor, and over 83 million dollars were spent on its development, never saw the light of day. After the cancellation of the project, Jeff was given a deadline of 6 weeks to propose a new game that would be ready for release on the market in just 2-3 years. After abandoning the initial idea - an MMO in the Starcraft world, by deconstructing and combining classes from Titan, they got Tracer - a heroine with 2 guns who teleports around the map, goes back through time and hangs a time bomb on enemies. They understood that they should approach each hero as a person, not as a class, and added personality and backstory to them. Using segments of Titan's classes, they prepared a total of 6 Overwatch heroes for the presentation, among which, in addition to Tracer, there were also Soldier: 76, Reaper and Bastion. The project got the green light and Overwatch went into production.
When asked why he left Blizzard, Jeff replied that one day he was called into the CFO's office where he was told that Overwatch had to make a certain amount of money (in millions of dollars) every year and that it was up to him to make sure that it happened because otherwise the 1000 people working on Overwatch would be fired and it would be up to him. He could not accept that and decided, after 19 years of work, to leave Blizzard.
After Blizzard, he founded a new gaming studio called Kintsugiyama, which currently has 34 employees. He briefly told about his first game - The Legend of California. It's an open-world, action-survival shooter set on the mystical island of California during the gold rush. Although still in the early stages of development, we got a first look at the game that looks a bit like Red Dead Redemption, and you can watch it here.
The interview itself gave a good look into game development in some previous times, why Blizzard was once so appreciated and how it fell, but also left optimism that the best times in gaming are still ahead. I highly recommend listening to the entire podcast for yourself.
