Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #493

There are 3 types of fun: fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer.

Is it PvP?

It’s all PvP. In fact, Rust is the most PvP thing in all of PvP.

I don’t know what that means.

Rust players know what that means. My whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest, so I think I won the game. And we’re idiots. We’re reading the forums, and the forums are just flaming us all the time: “There’s lag on this server,” and, “Can’t log into that server.” That was our perspective of what was happening.

When I showed up at that show, it was one of the most emotional things in my life. It was nothing but an outpouring of love. I had believed I would never work any place but Blizzard. I loved it. It was a part of who I was, and I felt I was a part of it. I literally thought I would retire from the place. I never thought the day would come, and that was it.

How painful was it to say goodbye?

It broke me.

Now, meanwhile, as far as the outside world is concerned, you've disappeared off the face of the earth, but you were actually working on a game. The following is a conversation with Jeff Kaplan, a legendary game designer of World of Warcraft and Overwatch, which are two of the biggest, most influential games ever made. He is genuinely one of the most amazing human beings I've ever met. In the many conversations I was fortunate enough to have with him, including while playing video games, he was always kind, thoughtful, hilarious, and still and forever a legit gamer, through and through. Of course, he's always quick to celebrate the incredible teams of creative minds he has gotten a chance to work with over the years, and they are truly incredible. Blizzard has created some of the greatest games ever made, games that to me personally have brought me thousands of hours of fun, meaning, and happiness, from Warcraft, to StarCraft, to Diablo, WoW, Overwatch and more. So for that, a big thank you to Jeff, to the entire Blizzard team, and to every creative mind in the video game industry, giving their heart and soul to build video game worlds that we fans get a chance to enjoy. This was a super fun, inspiring, whirlwind conversation, pun intended, with one of the most beloved gamers and game designers ever. Full of memes, lulz, wisdom, emotional rollercoaster moments, and of course, Blizzard video game lore. Jeff left Blizzard in 2021, and has been secretly working on a new video game called The Legend of California that I got a chance to play with Jeff. It is incredibly beautiful. Set in the 1800s Gold Rush era of California, it's an open world online multiplayer game, part adventure and action, part survival. Sometimes creating a feeling of loneliness and desperation, and sometimes just awe watching the sun rise over a beautiful landscape. It's unlike any game that Jeff has ever worked on, and it's a game that I genuinely can't wait to play with all of you. You can wishlist it on Steam. Join the alpha later in March, I think, and early access is on the way. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Jeff Kaplan.

You were first a legendary video game player, in particular in EverQuest, before you ever became a legendary video game designer on World of Warcraft and Overwatch, which I think is a wild journey to go through—from gamer to designer. But first, let’s go way back. When did you first fall in love with video games?

I was lucky. I was born in that golden era of coin-op, so I literally remember the first time I saw Pac-Man. I was with my Uncle Ronnie, and he just kept feeding me quarters. I think he wanted to play but was too scared to, so he would just give his little nephew quarters to play Pac-Man.

I remember being at my brother’s graduation in Philadelphia, and they had an Asteroids machine in the lobby. That was one of the first coin-op machines I had played as well. My brother and I would try to get the high score, and we’d finally get it. But we had to go to bed early because we were little kids. Then in the morning, somebody else had beaten our high score.

I grew up in Southern California in the 1980s. I was born in 1972, so I was a kid with that skateboard-and-BMX culture where we’d ride two towns over. We knew all the pizza parlors, liquor stores, and arcades, and we just lived in that coin-op phase. That was where the love started.

Then you started to see things like Pong. You’d go over to a friend’s house, they’d have Pong, and it was just mind-blowing: We’re playing this thing on the TV, and it was so much fun. Atari was a big thing at that time as well. But the big one for me was actually Intellivision, because my dad was an executive recruiter, and one of his clients was Mattel. He said, “Hey, they gave me this thing,” and he would get discounts or free games.

My brothers and I just loved Intellivision. We would just play it endlessly. The comparison was always, “Is this game close to what’s in the arcades?” It was such a golden era. I think the big moment where it really blew open and hit the next level was when the NES came out. The NES with Super Mario Bros. was gaming at the next level at that point, and I have warm, fuzzy memories even thinking about it to this day.

I remember we played Super Mario Bros. for weeks, my brothers and I. Then I had a friend come over, and he showed me all the secret stuff in Super Mario Bros. that I didn’t know existed at the time. It was like, suddenly, the world opened up more and games could be more.

Then there was a big PC gaming push that hit me. My parents ran their own business. My dad was an executive recruiter, and they bought an IBM. This was when it was DOS, before MS-DOS existed. I was so disappointed, because other kids had the Amiga or the Commodore, which were better for gaming than the IBM at the time.

My mom really encouraged my brother and me. She bought Zork. It was just Infocom word games, where your imagination would take you. Zork holds a place in my heart that I think few games will ever touch.

It’s a text-based game?

Text-based game. You just type in, “Go west. Open mailbox.”

Okay.

But it’s that power of imagination. It’s why the book is always better than the movie.

Yeah. So you’re starting to see these creations of worlds that you can navigate. You can step into this world and you can lose yourself in that world.

Yes. You’re transported. You’re living there.

Was Zork popular?

Zork was insanely popular. Then there was Zork II and Zork III.

A trilogy—the Zork trilogy. I see it.

It was weird. Sometime in the 1990s, there was this era of what they called CD-ROM games. That’s how they branded them. They made a return to Zork, but it now had graphics. Somehow, that just shattered everything, because the Zork you knew in your head didn’t exist anymore.

Zork was fantastic. I think it might be open source now, which I think is fabulous. I highly recommend Zork.

There was also, in those days, on the PC that we had—our IBM—Ultima, which was Richard Garriott’s series. He was Lord British. We knew him as Lord British. The first Ultima I played was Ultima II, because Ultima I was before my time.

That series was this RPG-based PC game, and the worlds were just so rich. There was Yew Forest and all the characters. You could get on a rocket ship. You’re playing in this fantasy world, fighting demons, and yet somehow you could get on a rocket ship.

There was all of this crazy stuff that would happen in games that were based in the world. There were bouncers in the towns and merchants, but if you really wanted to, you could try to rob these people or kill Lord British. That was something that was super hard. When you’re just a jackass kid, you spend your time endlessly trying to do these things over and over. Ultima was really a profound kind of experience for me.

And, of course, that led to Ultima Online, which is a legendary game in itself, perhaps connected to EverQuest. You were sort of starting to build these worlds that are massively multiplayer online video games. Can you take me through that journey? As you started to get into the online MMO world, what was influential? What was fun for you?

The big one for me was EverQuest. But, like you mentioned, Ultima Online was sort of the predecessor. It came before EverQuest. It was one of those unfortunate times in my life when I was actually in grad school.

You were busy.

I was busy, and I missed Ultima Online. I would have had that experience. When you hear the Ultima Online stories, they’re some of the craziest, funniest stories.

I know somebody who learned how to poison in the game, and then they would poison apples and leave them on the ground. Somebody else would be adventuring, then feed the apple to their horse and kill their horse. Then they’d steal all their stuff. Ultima Online was kind of the earliest grief-based experiment—really, when you’re treating the humans like ants in an ant farm. That was kind of Ultima Online.

Yeah.

My first online gaming experience—what defined online gaming for me—was Quake, Doom, and Duke Nukem. It started with Doom, where you could basically use a LAN. You could network with your friends, or you could connect with a modem and hook up with somebody.

That was mind-blowing: just seeing another entity in a video game and saying, “That’s a person on the other side of that.” That was magical—that moment happened, and that person could be in another room or across town from you.

And Quake kind of took it to the next level. That’s where everybody knew what they were doing. The systems were more refined, and this Quake community formed with all of these great websites and mods.

The community was divided into two castes of players: the low-ping bastards, the LPBs, and then the rest of us. I remember rolling into Quake matches on a dial-up modem with a 300-ping connection, and I thought it was the greatest thing ever. It was just connecting with people.

To this day, the only gaming website I read—I don’t read any of the news sites anymore—is Blue’s News. Someone actually teased me recently. I linked him a story and said, “Oh, did you hear this new thing’s coming out?” I sent the link, and he said, “Dude, this is from Blue’s News. What time machine did you just step out of?”

A guy named Stephen Heaslip—I’m probably pronouncing his name wrong, and I apologize—but it was actually through that site that I learned about EverQuest. They had those programmer .plan updates, the .plan files. Guys like Carmack would post about what code they were writing, how they had optimized something, or just their personal life. The Ferrari talk would always happen once they had achieved success.

There was an id Software programmer named Brian Hook, and he said, “I’m leaving id to go work at Verant,” which became Sony Online, “to work on this game called EverQuest.” I was like, “How does anybody leave id, the greatest institution in all of gaming ever, to work on any other game?” I thought, “This guy must be crazy. Whatever this EverQuest thing is, I need to see it. I need to know what’s going on.” If he hadn’t made that post, I never would have checked out EverQuest.

We’ll talk about EverQuest, but since you mentioned Carmack and Quake, what can we say about the genius of John Carmack? Why was he such an important and influential human in the history of gaming?

Those early geniuses at id Software—I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you right now if they hadn’t had the breakthroughs that they had at the time. Gaming engines were evolving, but the level of breakthrough that they achieved with Wolfenstein 3D was extraordinary.

I remember playing Wolfenstein when it was a 2D game. You’d run around, dress up as a German, and throw a grenade. To see it in 3D was incredible. It’s funny: you look back at the screenshots or videos of it now, and it seems almost childish. You think, “Why were you so excited about that?” But you were transported.

It was the intimacy of first person: putting the hands in front of you, holding the gun, being transported to Nazi Germany, but you’re the hero fighting the Nazis. Then came the evolution. When Doom came out, I was a huge Army of Darkness fan, one of my favorite movies of all time. I was like, “This is Army of Darkness, the video game. Give me the boomstick. Here we go.”

There were the graphical advances, but it wasn’t just how the game looked; it was how it played. The smoothness, the responsiveness, the sharpness of the gameplay kept getting better. You have to credit id in those days, Carmack, and Romero. As somebody who worked on an FPS, I know that wouldn’t have existed without them. Credit where credit’s due.

And by the way, we should say your range as a gamer is incredible. You are a legit first-person shooter gamer, but you also obviously love the richer, exploratory kind of MMO game. It’s fascinating.

On the technology stack that brought something like Quake or Wolfenstein 3D to life, there’s a threshold of realism that you pass where you can immerse yourself into that world. I had the same exact experience when Wolfenstein took a step to 3D, and it was like tears in my eyes. It was incredible. I remember Wolfenstein 3D as being ultra-realistic. It’s silly to say now, but it was the feeling that you were there.

Yeah, what an incredible age. Some of that storytelling—a lot of that—is the technology that brings that kind of 3D world to life. It’s incredible. But before we get too far on that tangent, you mentioned grad school. We should mention that you have a master’s degree in creative writing from NYU, and you wanted to be a writer. You told me your main influences were Kerouac, but also Hemingway, Salinger, Bukowski, and Orwell.

What drew you to storytelling in that medium of writing? What aspect of the human experience were you trying to put down on paper?

It started with being a fan first—being inspired and reading. It’s not only being transported to a different world or into a different person, but also the way that stories can touch emotions in you and trigger feelings sometimes you didn’t even know you had. That was very appealing to me.

The big challenge with it—and I think this is for anybody who creates anything—is putting yourself out there. To some degree, there’s a lot of ego that goes into that moment where you say, “Well, I’ve been reading 1984 or The Green Hills of Stranglethorn, and I think it’s amazing. Now I’m going to try to write something that somebody is going to read.”

That’s a giant leap of faith. It’s a moment of putting yourself out there completely, and there’s got to be some part of that that’s ego. There’s some part of it that’s masochistic.

I think for people who want to create and build stuff, they can’t help but do it. You don’t really have an option. That’s just how you’re wired, and you’re going to do it anyway. I admire people like Emily Dickinson, who can just write all the poems and leave them in a drawer to be discovered by somebody else. That’s one way to go about it.

Yeah, Franz Kafka. A lot of the stories he wrote were never published, and he asked for all of them to be destroyed. It’s only because of his friend, who ignored his request, that we even have many of his stories. Clearly, there’s some masochism there, some tortured soul. But then there’s also the ego, like you mentioned.

I was entertained by this story of James Joyce. When he was a young man, 18 or 19, he declared that he was going to be the greatest writer of the 20th century. He turned out, in the eyes of many, to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

But there are millions of kids just like James Joyce—writers—who declare exactly that and turn out not to be. In some cases, in many cases, maybe most cases, you have to have that ego to say, “I’m going to…” I read 1984, and I’m going to write the next 1984.

Yeah. I do think ego is a big part of it. It’s one of the many lessons I’ve learned. Hearing your Kafka story is funny, because fast-forwarding to how my writing career ended, I literally threw away everything in a dumpster.

I used to keep copious notes—my writing journals, everything I ever read, every story idea. I probably had 20 volumes of just handwritten notes. I also kept personal journals to keep the writing habit up: what happened in my day, how I was feeling, all of that.

Then, either digitally or typed, I had all of my manuscripts, and I threw it all in the dumpster.

What was that decision? Do you remember that decision? What was that like, to just take that part of your life and put it in a dumpster?

I think it was necessary. This is rationalizing it after the fact, which is easy to do, but at the time, I think I was so broken and so defeated by failure that I needed the moment.

It was like throwing in the towel for a boxer. It’s that moment of, “I’m not going to win this fight, and I need to move on from it.” If any element of that was sitting around, I’d be tempted to try again or bring it out of the drawer 10 years later.

We should mention that you did give it a real try. You’ve mentioned receiving over 170 rejection letters in 1 year when submitting your stories. There was a lot of rejection. It was a long chain of rejection. What was that like, the rejection?

It was hard. I had moved from New York. I did the most terrible, dumb thing that I knew I was doing at the time. I had a really great group of writer friends from grad school in New York, and I think writing is a very lonely, solitary thing.

But weirdly, writers kind of support each other. Who do you give the story to? You don’t want to give it to your mom or dad. You kind of want to give it to somebody who’s going to really punch you in the nose and tell you what’s wrong with it. I had left that writing circle to move back to California.

Did you take a bunch of drugs, take your typewriter, and drive across—

No.

—across the United States and then write a book about it? Or, just to take Kerouac as an example. Anyway, sorry. You went—

I might have been more successful had I done that.

Sorry. So you went back.

I moved back to California, and I did it for a girl. I think within 2 months of moving back, we were broken up. I knew it when I was standing in my empty studio apartment in New York and was about to close the door for the last time. I had that little voice on my shoulder saying, “Dude, what are you doing? You’re making one of those epic life mistakes that’s going to come back to haunt you.”

I ended up alone in California, and I think it was a good 3 years that I structured my life so that I would write for 8 hours a day, because it’s that writer’s habit. You have to just force yourself: “This is a job.”

This isn't a hobby. Whether I like it or not, rain or shine, sick or healthy, I'm going to write for 8 hours a day. And I did. I was fortunate. Like I said, my dad had his company, and he hired me as a research associate.

I was calling up and generating name lists for a recruiting company. Whenever there were East Coast assignments, I would take those so I could start at around 5:00 in the morning. I created all this space for me to write.

I had a dog named Jack. He was a Jack Russell Terrier. Everybody was like, “You're a writer, and you named your Jack Russell Terrier Jack?” I'm like, “Because I named him after Jack Kerouac. It's poetic and epic.” I just looked like a dumbass, but it was just me and this dog.

I was writing intensely all that time. This was the mid-to-late ’90s, so even though the internet existed, email was very primitive, and you had to send a manuscript off as printed paper to all of them. I was trying to get short stories published in literary magazines, and you had to include a self-addressed stamped envelope.

It was expensive, too. If you didn't have money, there was a cost to every single one of them.

You had to pay for the rejection letter that you would eventually receive.

Yeah. The big thing that you were hoping for was that the editor would write you a note with the rejection letter.

Keep going.

You'd cling onto this. It was like, “Oh, Glimmer Train said, ‘Showing promise.’” You'd just hang onto that for like a week. But it was soul-crushing.

I became more and more isolated. Part of that was leaving that group of writing friends in New York. I'm prone to introversion anyway; that's the type of person I am. I was also breaking up with my girlfriend at the time. I just sort of fell into that world where all I was doing was writing.

It broke me. I went into a very deep and heavy depression. I drank too much. I really had a problem with alcohol. All those things compounded into just deep, deep depression.

There wasn't a magic rejection that broke me. That would have been epic if someone out there was like, “I'm the dude who broke Jeff that one day.” But I just had a moment where I said, “This is going to destroy me.”

I don't want to be discouraging to anybody, because I really do believe—you hear it so much—“You have to work for your dreams. Never give up.” We're trained this way: “Never give up.” The universe—actually, maybe not the universe—a group of editors at literary magazines across the United States was telling me it was time to give up as a writer, that I wasn't cut out for it. And I stopped.

Sometimes closing a door is required for another door to open. That's one of the hardest things to do: to walk away.

Yeah. I think, rightly so, our parents, our coaches, and our mentors train us not to give up. A lot of us take pride in that: “I'm never going to give up. I'm going to do this come hell or high water.”

Sometimes there's that reality, especially when you're now in your mid-20s, where you have that moment of, “Am I really going to be this? Am I ever going to find the light here?” Maybe this isn't my calling in life, especially when you don't know what the next calling is going to be.

That's so painful. It's because you've invested so much of yourself, of who you are, of the dreams you've had, of this whole conception of yourself, and you're watching yourself slide down in terms of becoming isolated and suffering more. Then you just have to somehow figure out how to get out of that.

It is true. In that situation, the way to get out is the dumpster. You have to cut it off. Is there advice you can extract from that? There are a lot of young folks who are in that same situation.

Yeah. This is one of those hindsight things where, having gone through it and ended up okay on the other side—which you don't know at the time—you see it differently.

When you're a young person in your late teens or early 20s, there's so much pressure on you. I really think adults don't help. Every time you run into your younger nephew or whoever and start to say things like, “Oh, what's your major? What are you going to do with that? What do you want to be?” It's such bullshit to do to a human being.

You're so lost in the world. Most of us are lost for our entire lives, but especially in your 20s, you're lost. So the questions like, “What are you doing? What's your major? What's the career?” and so on—that's not the point, man.

I'm trying to find my way. I'm trying to move through the world. I'm trying to run through the world to find the thing that sparks my heart, to find the passion, to find what I'm meant to be on this earth for. That is a real hero's journey of searching as a young person.

All the adults, with their wisdom, have often stopped searching. They've done the lazy, comfortable thing. They found their thing, and so now they look back and don't remember how much suffering and how much uncertainty young people have to deal with.

There's confusion, and there's pressure. The pressure we exert on younger people to have it figured out is insane.

The advice that I always give—and it sounds so stupid, really trite—is: focus on what you want to do, not what you want to be. The pressure that society puts on us is, “Do you want to be an astronaut? Do you want to be a firefighter? Do you want to be a writer? Do you want to be a game maker?”

I think we get lost in the trappings of a vision of what that role is and how to perform as a fake actor in that role. That's different from when you're off the clock and no one's asking you any questions. You're not at Thanksgiving dinner and your uncle's pressuring you about what your future is going to be for the rest of your life.

When you go home, how do you spend your time? What makes you happy? What brings you fulfillment? Through those paths, you're going to find out what you're going to become, not what you want to be. It's, “What do you want to do?”

What do you want to do—the thing that brings you joy on a moment-by-moment basis. Yeah, that's brilliantly put. Speaking of which, that's where you took the pivot. You switched to video games. How did that happen? Gradually? Suddenly?

Gradually and suddenly. When I had that fateful moment where I just gave up with writing, I had these days where I'd structure 8-hour chunks of, “This was writing time.” I'd sit solitary, typing. All that was gone.

I could still support myself, which was nice. Then I had this free time, and I wasn't spending it with anybody. I was just alone. It was me and the dog, Jack. I poured it all into EverQuest.

It was 1999 when that game came out. I had a friend, Victor, who was a lifelong friend—one of the few friends I had who played computer games, because there was a stigma to that. You didn't walk around telling people you played games. They thought you wasted your time.

My friend Vic had bought EverQuest. I was like, “That's that game that Brian Hook went to work on. Is it good?” He said, “Yeah, you've got to play it.”

The moment I logged in, I was just transported. It was the world of Norrath. It wasn't just the world itself and how it looked—I thought the game was gorgeous—it was the mechanics. I was this halfling rogue who had to go out and adventure in the world. When I killed stuff, I got experience, and I needed better loot to kill more stuff to get more experience.

The draw of progression in the game was amazing. I just lived my life around, “I can't wait until the next time I log in.” There was a lot of escapism going on. It wasn't all healthy.

When all was said and done, when I finally had quit EverQuest three days later, you could type in the command “/played” to see how much played time you had. I had, I think, around 272 played days in 3 years. You start to do the math on how much time in those 3 years I was living in that world. It was kind of insane.

Well, that's over 6,000 hours of gameplay. Wow. So, going to Perplexity, EverQuest is a long-running 3D fantasy, massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG, set in the world of Norrath, as you were saying.

First released in March 1999, it is an online role-playing game where thousands of players create characters, group up, and explore a persistent shared world. It's widely regarded as one of the foundational MMORPGs, helping define raid content, guild systems, and 3D online worlds.

That's the other component of it. It's all humans, and they group up and raid together in the game.

Yep. In the context of EverQuest, raiding is usually around 30 or more people getting together to conquer something that you couldn't beat otherwise. To do successful raiding, you usually needed to join what everyone in EverQuest referred to as an uber guild.

I took great pride in my EverQuest journey. Most of the time, while leveling up, I was unguilded, or I was in a role-playing guild with rogues only. When I got to level 50 in EverQuest, which was the top level, I got invited into this guild called Legacy of Steel, which was the top guild on our server.

Every server had a top guild. I was on a server called The Nameless, and the top guild was Legacy of Steel. The thrill of getting 30 people together to see if we could beat Nagafen, who was the fire dragon, or Vox, who was the frost dragon, and needing perfect coordination to pull it off—it was insane how fun it was.

You would literally scream out. You’re alone in your room at home, but you felt like you were there with these people. You would audibly cheer when you won, and you’d feel depressed when you lost. It was a game of high highs and low lows, and it did everything right. It was amazing.

That was a big leap for you, to go from the proud lone warrior to a member of a guild—an uber guild. And then there’s that epic story of you rising to the top to become the leader of this uber guild.

The leader—yeah. Organizing people in an online game like EverQuest is like herding cats, because everyone has their own will. Some people are loot-motivated, some people want the guild to do well, and some people are just lonely and want people to hang out with.

There was also a lot of depression in the EverQuest community. It was something I suffered with, but a lot of people—anytime you’re feeling sad or down, you’re looking for escape. One of the great things video games bring us is escapism. Escapism isn’t always bad or negative, but when you sort of abuse it to escape your real-life problems, it’s bad and negative.

So there’s a mix of pain and darkness that pain can manifest as, all part of this community.

Yeah. What’s weird is you enter the cycle where being with other people gives you camaraderie and relief and makes you feel like you’re not doing so bad in life, but you can quickly enter a cycle where you’re withdrawing from life, and it makes you feel that way even more. You can only get the fix from the game at that point. Psychologically, there’s a lot going on there.

You had to work with all of that. You had to get a bunch of people together to do a raid who were all human beings going through complicated psychological journeys of their own. Some are talking shit, and some are just quietly lonely, looking for some loot.

In the late ’90s, everyone was talking shit. The gaming culture was just a different thing back then. But it was a great group. It was super fun. It was people from all walks of life.

To coordinate these people, you just had to repeat everything about 200 times. “Okay, we’re going to port from North Ro. Everybody get to North Ro.” Then you’d have to repeat that for about 6 hours to have any chance of 20% of the people showing up in North Ro.

At first, when I joined the guild, I was just bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I was one of the few rogues in the guild, and I just wanted to be helpful. I really admired the people running the guild. We had a great guild leader, and it was just a really fun experience.

The guild leader one day just disappeared. He quit and was going through his own thing, and that’s what would happen in EverQuest. People would just disappear all of a sudden. There wasn’t a, “Hey, in about a month, I’m going to stop playing because I’m starting this new job.” People had to quit in some dramatic way, where they just disappeared. Basically, our guild leader stopped playing.

Did you miss them when they disappeared? We should say that most of the people, maybe all of them, were anonymous. You just had a username, and you didn’t really say who you were in real life.

Absolutely. In those days, there was a great stigma to mentioning any real-life information. You just kept it all really close to your chest, and you never knew who was male or female. You kind of assumed everybody was male.

Safe assumption.

It was a surprise if they were actually female. My wife, for example—that’s how I met her.

You met her in EverQuest?

I met her in EverQuest.

That is a true love story right there.

Yeah. Yeah.

Wow.

The funny part for me with EverQuest is, you play a game as much as I played EverQuest, and people are like, “You threw years of your life away. You can’t win a game like that.” I’m like, “I don’t know. Sitting here today, my whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest, so I think I won the game.”

Yeah, yeah. You’re like the “Well, actually…” guy.

Well, yeah, exactly.

Your life will be on the Wikipedia page somewhere that says, “Well, here’s an example of somebody—”

“—why video games are awesome.”

Yeah, I mean, some of it—I should mention this as an aside. For me and many people I know, yes, it’s hundreds of hours, but some of the happiest hours and days of my life. Looking back, it all worked out. During it, you are pretty low, and you think, “What am I doing with my life?” All that kind of stuff.

But looking back, just the all-nighters you pull playing a particular video game, allowing yourself to really fully be immersed, seeing the sun come up—and, by the way, many of those games for me were Blizzard games—it’s just an incredible thing that video games have been able to do.

I think it used to be, and still is somewhat the case, that books do that same kind of thing. They take you on a journey. But video games, for a long time, had a stigma. I couldn’t tell people. I felt like I was doing heroin or something. I felt like I was doing this secret, dark thing.

It usually is in the dark. There’s a secretive nature to it, like I’m doing something really dark and shady.

It wasn’t mainstream.

It wasn’t. There was a stigma to it.

One of the weirdest parts of that is, I mentioned you could type in “/played” in EverQuest. If you did “/played” on how much TV people watch, what would that look like? It would blow 6,000 hours out of the water easily.

Well, 20 years ago it would have. Not today.

Now it’s the phone, yeah.

Yeah. But it is hard to say goodbye to that world. Those are also really painful times. How hard was it to say goodbye for you?

To EverQuest? It was really hard. There were times when you would try to quit.

You took a break sometimes?

Yeah. You think you’re quitting for good. You’d have those moments of, “I’m doing this too much. I need to move on in life. I’m going to put it down and walk away, and hopefully not come back.” There were times when you did come back.

When I finally did leave EverQuest, it was actually extremely easy, because I was psychologically done with the game at the time. It was not shortly, but not too long after a new expansion had come out. At the time, it was Shadows of Luclin, which didn’t speak to me like the expansions before. The one before that was called Scars of Velious, which was an amazing expansion.

I had gotten the job at Blizzard, and I guess I’m just an obsessive person. All the time and energy that I had put into EverQuest—the second my first minute started at Blizzard, that was my new obsession.

Speaking of which, you have to tell the epic origin story of how you got the job at Blizzard. As we said, you were this legendary gamer, and now legendary troll, on EverQuest. Your username was Tigole. You gave a lot of edgy feedback to the developers, telling them, in now-famous rants, to do a bunch of things, including to pull their heads out of their asses.

You were loved and respected because you gave a lot of specific ways that the game could be improved, and that’s an important thing to say. You weren’t just talking shit. You actually really loved and cared for the game, and you gave them, in the language of the time, advice on how to improve their game.

It’s funny, because you look back at those messages, and it’s inspiring to me. It should be informative and inspiring to a lot of people, because you were really, legitimately, full-time talking shit. Now—and you always have been—you’re one of the kindest, most loved human beings in the entire gaming industry. Anyway, how did that lead to you getting a job at Blizzard?

When the first guild leader left Legacy of Steel, the founder—his online name was Dread. That was his name. He left, and our guild was kind of in this listless spin for a while.

Eventually, somebody stepped up and took his position as guild leader. That person’s name was Ariel, who was this blonde wood-elf warrior, female, who always refused to wear a helmet because they thought their character was so pretty and wanted to show their face all the time.

Ariel was a great guild leader for us and made me an assistant guild leader, raid leader, officer-type in the guild. Over time, Ariel got busier and busier and would send me messages like, “Hey, I’m not going to be online tomorrow,” or, “I’m not going to be online tonight. Can you run the raid? Can you run the raid?”

Running the raids was very natural for me. It was my first experience with leadership in my life—how do you motivate people? What does motivation look like? What does discipline look like? How do you inspire people? When do you force people versus encourage them?

It was a learning experience for me on the fly, and I had the safety net that the real guild leader would log in eventually.

I should mention, I’m just now reading about and doing a bunch of research on Justinian of the Roman Empire, and he rose from being a peasant to being emperor. I see a lot of parallels in your life journey, from peasant to emperor. But go ahead, I’m sorry.

At least EverQuest guild leader. That’s as much as I could say.

Über guild leader.

Über guild leader. Best guild on the Nameless server.

Über guild leader.

Über guild leader. So, as time went on, Ariel became busier and busier, and then one day they contacted me. We were having this whisper back and forth, and they said, “You’re going to have to take over the guild. I’m just too busy.” And then it came out later...

Well, let me back up a second. I started fooling around around this time. Half-Life 1 had come out, and with both Duke Nukem and Half-Life 1, one of the incredible things those companies did back in the day was ship the editor on the CD. If you were curious enough, you could fire up that editor and fool around with it.

So I made a Duke Nukem level, and you'd send it off to those UK programming magazines. You'd get excited because your level was in some random magazine. Then I started making Half-Life levels.

Ariel had stepped down as guild leader, and I had become guild leader. At one point, Ariel contacted me and said, "Hey, you were talking about those Half-Life levels you made. I want to see those." I'm like, "Oh, that's cool. I didn't know you played Half-Life." He said, "Yeah, maybe we can get a server up and I can play them."

Then Ariel told me, "No, mail them to this address in Irvine." Because, again, to rewind in the time machine for a second, sending something like a Half-Life level over the internet would have taken about 12 hours. So you actually burned it onto a CD and stuck it in the mail.

I put my Half-Life levels on a CD and sent them to Ariel. He said, "You know, my name's Rob. I'm a designer at Blizzard Entertainment. I hear you're in Pasadena because you mentioned it." I would write about the Rose Parade and all these things on our website. It was blogging before blogging existed, so he knew I lived in Pasadena.

He's like, "Irvine's only an hour away. Why don't you come down, see Blizzard, and you can also meet..." Then he named four people in the guild. I'm like, "They all work at Blizzard too?" He's like, "Yeah, we're all Blizzard."

It was so weird because during that era, I didn't have a lot of money. It wasn't like nowadays, when it feels like everybody plays every game, but you had to be selective. I never bought StarCraft, Diablo, or Warcraft. I was much more of the Half-Life, Quake, Quake III guy around that time. I'd never played a Blizzard game, and I just got invited to go to Blizzard Entertainment.

Was Blizzard already legendary, with Warcraft and StarCraft? Was it building this great legend of a game company that seemingly doesn't miss?

It was very much on its way to enshrining itself as one of the legendary game companies. It was beloved by gamers, but there were still ignorant people like me who hadn't played Warcraft II, Diablo II, or StarCraft, which was shocking to people.

So you weren't freaking out, freaking out?

No, I was freaking out in a different sense. I was thinking, "Am I going to get mugged? Who are these people? Is this a scam?" You didn't meet people off the internet.

So I drove down there. There was Rob Pardo, who at that time was the lead designer on Warcraft III, and he was Ariel. So, okay, it wasn't a woman after all. It wasn't this blonde wood elf. I don't know what you expect at that point. It was Rob Pardo.

A great friend of mine to this day, Scott Mercer, was the enchanter in our EverQuest guild, a guy named Dalomin. There was a guy named Roman Kenny who was this totally psychotic wizard who played in our guild. I had lunch with these guys. We went out to Irvine to a restaurant.

Forgive me for the misuse of the phrase, but it was like my coming-out moment. We talked about games having that stigma and being embarrassed about who you are and what you like. Up until that point, I would never tell friends or family, "I love games. I'm playing this game, EverQuest. It's so cool. We just killed a dragon."

And so you were hiding this part of your identity.

I'm out to lunch with these guys in Irvine, and we're talking about dragons and swords and raid tactics, and talking shit about all the people in the guild. I literally had this moment where I felt like myself for the first time. I felt so comfortable, and that was an eye-opening moment.

After that lunch, he invited me down for a couple more lunches. I saw it as, "Now I made friends with these people online. We know each other in real life, and they happen to work for this game company."

At another one of the lunches, they invited a troll warrior to have lunch with us whose name in the game was Barfa, the troll warrior. Barfa wasn't somebody who played with us all the time, but, like Ariel, he got into the guild kind of on the side. It was one of those inside invites: "Who's Barfa?" "I don't know, but Barfa is in the guild now."

At the time, there was a new dungeon called The Hole, and we had never done it before. We jumped down into this hole and started doing the whole dungeon. Everything went wrong, as it's prone to do in EverQuest. The whole guild escaped except for Barfa, whose troll character was so big he couldn't jump out of the exit.

I had a really expensive teleport potion that no one but someone in the uber guild could afford at the time. I handed the potion to Barfa and said, "Here, use this. It'll teleport you out." I'm a rogue, so I could just stealth and get out of the dungeon on my own. I saved Barfa without really knowing who he was, and I did it with a very expensive potion.

At lunch, Rob introduced me: "This is Allen Adham. He plays Barfa." I'm like, "Oh, Barfa!" He said, "You saved me in The Hole that time."

It turned out Allen was the founder of Blizzard, and he was sort of the head of everything at that time. It was Allen, Mike Morhaime, and Frank Pearce.

What I didn't realize was what these lunches were. I just loved them because I felt like I was myself. I felt true happiness being surrounded by these people who were talking about video games, and I felt comfortable around them.

One day, Rob logged into EverQuest. He wasn't playing much at the time, and he said, "I want you to check the Blizzard job site tomorrow." I'm like, "Okay, I'll check the Blizzard job site."

They had announced World of Warcraft, and posted on the job site was a job for an associate quest designer. The funniest part was, I forget whether it was a requirement or a plus in the job description, but it said, "We really want somebody with a creative writing degree."

I'm like, "You guys set this up for me." It was a hindsight moment: actually, these guys had just been interviewing me for 6 months. They were friends, and they were really cool about it too.

I had that "fuck it" moment. The job opened up, and I applied with all my heart. They had a bunch of quest writing in the application.

Then I went through a pretty hardcore 6-month recruiting process because they had never hired designers from outside the company. Traditionally, designers were promoted from within Blizzard. They would either transfer out of other disciplines or come from quality assurance or tech support. Hiring somebody off the street was kind of a big deal for them, and they really put me through a grilling.

I met with Chris Metzen, who is maybe the most inspirational, creative person on the planet. You instantly become a fan of Chris when you're around him. They did this interview pairing with 2 guys: Kevin Jordan, who was one of the original designers on World of Warcraft, and Chris.

Kevin doesn't get enough credit for his contributions. He was one of the earliest class designers and PvP designers, but he's a really quiet guy. They paired him with Chris, and Chris just owns the room. You could just sit and listen to him. He's so creative and so passionate, and the way he articulates things is incredible.

Chris, Kevin, and I went to lunch at an Italian place across the street from Blizzard. I remember Chris stopped to buy cigarettes on the way to the interview. Every other word out of Chris's mouth was "fuck" or "shit."

I'd come from this corporate culture through my dad's recruiting business, where I'd never imagined somebody would curse in an interview or stop to buy smokes. Again, it was like, "I'm around my people." I never smoked, but being around people who didn't care about the corporate norms was so inspiring.

My last interview was with Alan and Rob, and a great programmer named Bob Fitch. I think he was one of the first 5 developers at Blizzard. They took me to an ARCO station that had a Jack in the Box. Sometimes they'll combine them; it was an ARCO Jack in the Box.

That was my final interview at Blizzard: at the ARCO Jack in the Box. I remember thinking to myself, "These guys just brought me to a Jack in the Box that's in an ARCO station. I need to work here. These are my people. This is where I belong."

It was the greatest thing ever. So, yeah, that's my crazy journey to Blizzard.

You started at the bottom and ended up at the top in a Jack in the Box. Can you speak to the low points in the depression? Through that journey, how did you find your way out?

A lot of people are sitting in those low points right now, listening to this. What kind of wisdom can you draw about finding your way out and finding your people?

There were a lot of really low points.

I'll give you the weirdest one. I started drinking a lot, and alcohol was something that I really wrestled with until my early 30s. One of the things I'm most proud of today is sobriety and having been sober for such a long time now. I remember I would buy a bottle of Old Grand-Dad, drink the whole thing by myself, and then watch the Oscars.

Of all things, I was watching the Oscars, which is just such a fake, bullshit environment. I was really drunk, and all those people seemed so together and successful and polished. That contrast made me feel like such a failure. It all seems so stupid and unimportant to me now.

I got into that constant struggle of trying not to drink, but drinking to make it feel better. I was lucky. My parents were very supportive of me, even in my 20s, even after I quote-unquote left the house. I went into therapy, and that was very helpful—extremely helpful. One thing I learned is that you have to find the right therapist for you.

It's not just checking a checkbox that says, “I went to therapy.” It's about finding somebody who helps you get out of whatever rut you're in, in a way that's healthy for you. I tried antidepressants, but I hated taking pills and feeling like something was in me and making me feel different. I never responded to them.

The hardest thing, which I've never mentioned to anyone and is hard for me to talk about, is that eventually I went through ECT, which is electroconvulsive therapy—shock therapy. That broke me out of it. I would never endorse that as a miracle. I was at such a low point that people were very worried about me and my well-being and what was going to happen. It was an extreme pull-the-rip-cord, there's-nothing-else-to-lose moment. I think that was the difference-maker, along with starting at Blizzard.

I mean, there is a deep loneliness there. Before you met those guys at lunch, you were alone in a really deep, fundamental way, in a way you weren't in New York with the writers' group, right? It must have been an incredible experience just to see the guild.

It was everything I needed. As such an introvert, you think that there are extroverts and introverts, and introverts don't need anybody, but weirdly, I think introverts almost need people more. We don't always know how to engage in the right, healthy ways, or how to find people and connect with people. It was great.

One thing that had attracted me to creative writing was the solitude of it and the fact that you didn't have to collaborate. You could just write what you wanted to write, and it was all you. You would succeed on your own or fail on your own, and that was very attractive to me. The thought of creative collaboration was actually off-putting.

I'd spent all 4 years of undergrad interning at Universal Pictures because I thought I wanted to be in film, and creative collaboration in the film industry was so unhealthy. I looked up to the film industry in an unhealthy way and admired it, and I grew up with all these legends who had come from there. But it was like a caste system. I was at the bottom of the caste system as an intern, and I saw how the other people who were low-caste in the film industry were treated. It was just horrible.

But games were different. Games were very flat. It didn't matter if you were the CEO or the boss; the way Mike and Allen carried themselves with me, an associate game designer, made me feel like an equal. I think it's not just the camaraderie. The part that shouldn't be overlooked is the work itself and the work ethic. That's what really pulled me out.

Hard work on a thing you love.

Yeah.

If you may allow me, I have to read the prophetic “One of Us” post you made on April 18, 2002. Because in some deep sense, you, I think, remained one of us. I apologize for bringing up Justinian the emperor, but you remained a kind of peasant gamer—a true gamer—who happens to also be designing the games. This post kind of speaks to that.

It's fascinating to read because that was at the very beginning, right? You didn't know anything. You didn't know the games you would end up creating. The title of the post is “If you want something done right.”

“This week, I accepted a position as associate game designer with Blizzard Entertainment. Specifically, I will be designing quests for World of Warcraft, Blizzard's MMORPG based on the popular Warcraft series. In addition to my duties as quest designer, I will also be expected to contribute to helping design the end-game content for World of Warcraft.

“The reason I'm sharing this information, besides the fact that I have a masochistic love of reading rants and flames about myself, is because I know that the fans of this site are hardcore MMORPG players. The readers of the site have also come to know my personal opinions on what constitutes a fun gaming experience versus what feels like a complete waste of time or a poorly designed encounter.”

Wow, you're very eloquent in this post and without too much shit-talking.

“You've all read my opinions on such things as tedious key camps, obvious time sinks devoid of any story or linear narrative, quests which reward the lucky over the skilled, and quest rewards which are out of sync with the amount of time and effort required to complete them. I hope that my association with World of Warcraft will serve to comfort MMORPG fans that one of us is on the other side of the fence, looking out for the interest of the player.”

You go on to describe some of the high hopes you have for World of Warcraft, which is really fun to read because you don't realize it's going to be one of the greatest games of all time, played by millions of human beings, with those millions of human beings playing for hundreds of hours, thousands of hours. It's crazy. It's funny that this “one of us” is writing at the dawn of a new age.

The final paragraph is: “So with all that is going on with me, you'll have to excuse any lapse in updates to the site here. I will try my hardest to give you slack or something to read while you should be working. But in the meantime, there's a whole world of NPCs. They need to learn the words ‘kaksagur’ and ‘mo'fucker’ and the like. Although something tells me I'm already in trouble with the boss.”

One of us, Jeff. One of us. That was a beautiful, beautiful post. Did you in fact get in trouble with the boss?

No. My boss was Allen. Allen was very understanding, and they knew what they were getting into when they hired me. That post actually embarrasses me when I hear it now. There's so much ego in it, and I think that's the 20-year-old in me saying, “I don't know what I don't know.”

“I know exactly how to fix this video game and all video games.”

But there's brilliance behind that. There's a passion behind that. When you're a gamer and you really put in the hours in a game like EverQuest, you understand what makes for a compelling experience. You don't, at that time, understand how much hard work is required to create that experience and how much uncertainty there is, how difficult it is, or how many trade-offs there are.

Your designs, when they actually are brought to the world and are experienced by thousands of people, millions of people, are different from the vision you had for them. You don't know all those elements, but you have to have that ego in the beginning, right? Do you even have the guts to try? Do you have the guts to put in all that work?

What were the vibes of early Blizzard like? At this point, Warcraft 1 and 2 were out, Warcraft 3 was in production, and there was StarCraft. These are legendary games. I spent probably over 1,000 hours in these games combined. I played Warcraft 1, 2, and 3. I played StarCraft 1 and 2. I played WoW, of course. Diablo 1, 2, 3, and 4.

I played Diablo 2 with “Stay awhile and listen,” with Deckard Cain.

“Stay awhile and listen.”

I mean, some of these characters, some of these experiences, will stay with me forever. Anyway, big thank-you to those early Blizzard folks. What was it like? What was the team like? What were the developers like? What were the vibes like in those early days?

It was the dream. When I showed up at Blizzard on my first day, the office was on the University of California, Irvine, campus at the time. They had this research and development park where, if you're a tech company, you could get office space, and Blizzard took up three-fourths of the building when I joined.

There was a building right next to it that had Cisco and other tech companies. It was all kind of techy places. It was so funny because you drive up and everything was very serious and corporate, and then outside of the Blizzard offices, everybody was wearing black T-shirts and shorts, throwing frisbees, playing hacky sack, and riding scooters and skateboards. You're like, “Okay, that's where Blizzard is.”

I remember walking in the door and thinking, “It feels like I'm walking into a dorm room,” because it was just posters on the wall. There were actually people who would have futons because they'd be sleeping, because we would work so much back then.

But the vibe was that it was very small. Blizzard, the day I joined in May 2002, was fewer than 200 people, and that included a whole group up in San Mateo called Blizzard North. Blizzard South, the Irvine group, was responsible for StarCraft and Warcraft, and there were 2 development teams at Blizzard.

It was called Team One and Team Two at Blizzard South. Team One was revered. These were the RTS guys. They made StarCraft, Warcraft II, and, at that time, were working on Warcraft III.

Team Two was kind of the red-headed stepchild. Apparently, before I joined, they had tried to spin off a second team multiple times and failed, and then they finally decided they were going to make World of Warcraft. There was a game called Nomad. I don’t know what that game was exactly, but that was what Team Two was working on at first. That got scrapped, and Allen Adham steered the team toward World of Warcraft.

There was an amazing designer named Eric Dodds. He would later go on in his career to be the game director of Hearthstone. He and Ben Brode were basically the core designers behind that. But Eric and Kevin Jordan were these 2 key designers working on World of Warcraft for Team Two, and then you had this tech group that was headed up by John Cash.

The first day that I showed up to work on Team Two, they said, “You have to go get your login from John Cash.” I’m like, “John—the John Cash from id?” John Cash had a skin. You could be John Cash in Quake III.

Then he saw me, and he was a huge EverQuest player. He was like, “You’re the guy who runs Legacy of Steel.” I’m like, “You’re John Cash.” We had that moment where we kind of fanboyed out on each other. The vibe was so cool there.

There were very few producers. A game team has 5 core disciplines that make a video game. You’ve got engineers or programmers who are writing the code. You’ve got the art team that’s making all the visuals for the game, and that spans everything from 3D modeling—characters and environments—to animation, tech art, and making it all work.

You’ve got game design, which some companies don’t have. The artists and the engineers do it. Valve famously has very few designers because everybody there is a designer. But in companies where design is a discipline, which it very much is at Blizzard, game designers are the people creating the game experience, setting up all the systems and content in a way that gets the player to navigate through the game.

So that’s part of a story, part of this quest design, and part of it is how you move through the game world.

Yes. Game designers—there’s a spectrum, just like with art and engineering, of roles within game design. Some are more focused on the systems side. Any game that you’ve played where loot drops—Diablo IV, World of Warcraft, Escape from Tarkov, whatever—if there’s loot dropping, a designer has planned out very carefully what drops where and at what percentages. That would be a systems designer.

A content designer is somebody who’s going to make quests or write storylines. There might even be a narrative designer, which is even more focused on the story. Designers run the gamut, and then you’ve got these jack-of-all-trades designers that can do it all.

That’s the design group. There’s production, which is project management, and production is different at every game company you go to. If you talk to someone from EA or Blizzard, production might be very different. They might be the boss, they might actually be a designer, or they might be more of a project manager.

One of my favorite disciplines on a game team, which is often overlooked, is sound and audio, comprised of the sound designers and composers. I think there are 2 things that no one realizes how much they bring to a game until they’re missing, and that’s audio and lighting.

Most of the time, we’re playing without these things, and it just feels a little off and wrong. When you have a great lighting artist or a great composer or sound designer, they transform the experience. You’re tapping into these senses that you wouldn’t otherwise. That’s who comprises the game team.

Is the lighting—all the different kinds of graphics—under the art team?

Yeah. Lighting is going to be under the art team, but they’re going to be best friends with the graphics programmer. As I mentioned with design, there’s a wide spectrum on the engineering team. You have some guys who are architectural geniuses, coming up with the server-client model, the networking, or whatever. Others are more focused on gameplay.

On Overwatch, we had an audio programmer doing nothing but audio hooks for the audio team. On every game team, you’re going to have graphics programmers who work with people like the lighting artists, environmental artists, and character artists on shaders, and basically any way to make the game look the way it should.

They’ll always ask, “What’s your vision? What are you trying to get it to look like?” They’ll want an illustration of what the world should look like, and they’ll be the ones who say, “I know how to write code that will let you do that.” You partner a great graphics programmer with a great lighting artist, and that’s actually the creative tension behind games.

That’s what makes game teams so unique. If we were to line them up on some crazy spectrum, on one end, you’re going to have the artists who are creative—dare I say, emotional. They are artistes on that end. On the other end, you have the most logical, brilliant programmers whose minds just work very differently from the most creative artists.

Artists could be sitting in a meeting and just illustrating. If there’s any piece of paper, they’re drawing on it. Programmers are so brilliant and organized in their thinking, and everything is so logical. In the middle are people like the sound designers, the game designers, and the producers. They’re kind of a little bit in all those fields.

But it’s the brilliance of taking people who are so vastly different in their interests and talents and aiming them at that shared goal, or that shared vision of the game, that really makes something special.

You showed me the size of the team for World of Warcraft, but you’re also well known for working on quite small teams to create these incredibly huge games. What is the power of a small team in this kind of context, where there’s that creative tension? Is it because a small team avoids the compartmentalization, where the artists now have their own wing or building where they never talk to the engineers?

Jeffrey Kaplan

Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. The bigger the team, the more you become a cog in the machine. On a small team, the way I like to describe it is that you get to have a loud voice.

If we’re a small team, let’s say we’re going to make a game and it’s at the incubation period of a game, and there are only 10 of us, all 10 of us are in the room for every decision. I’m not a server-networking guy, but I’m in the room for that discussion. I’m not an illustrator, but I’m going to sit in the room when we decide what the art style looks like.

As soon as the team starts to grow, we become compartmentalized. It’s exactly like you said. There’s a weird thing that happens that’s just a human-nature thing: the less you interact with somebody, the more you become alienated from them and vilify their point of view.

You tend to look at what they do and say with skepticism rather than trust and belief in them. I find that on smaller teams, where we all know each other’s names, I know what everybody’s working on every day, they know what I’m working on, and everybody can talk to each other, there’s none of that stereotyping of a discipline.

On big, unhealthy teams, you start to say things like, “Well, the artists just don’t get it. They don’t understand what we’re trying to make.” When you back up and think about the statement that you just said, it’s such an asshole statement. Really, all the artists don’t get it?

First, that’s not true. Second, that’s demeaning to them. They signed up for this. This is their life’s work, too. This game is going to be as much theirs as it is mine. So who am I to say a statement like that?

Yeah. It’s harmful to a discipline to think that you understand the world and most other folks don’t, that you have nothing to learn from them, really, and that they’re deluded in some kind of way. That’s so powerful.

Jeffrey Kaplan

Fast-forwarding a little bit, when we formed Team 4, which went on to make Titan and ultimately fail, and then that got rebooted as the Overwatch team, the idea that I tried to get through to the team was to make an assumption.

Blizzard is one of the top game developers in the world, and we were very fortunate when I was there—and I imagine it’s this way today—that we could recruit whatever talent we wanted. The best of the best wanted to come work at Blizzard.

If you go through the paces of that and say, “Okay, when we recruit somebody…” Let’s say we’re recruiting an artist to make props—boxes, chairs, whatever. That is the best prop artist in the industry. That’s who’s going to show up on our doorstep.

When they show up here, we should treat them like the best prop artist in the industry instead of starting from a place of doubt and cynicism. When that person speaks up and says, “I think we should do this. We should do X instead of Y,” instead of saying, “Well, I’m a believer in Y. Why are you against my idea, X?” you should take a moment, take a deep breath, and say, “Man, the best prop artist in the industry is suggesting something. Why don’t I listen to it?”

I actually do it for myself, like this kind of thought framework or thought experiment.

Jeffrey Kaplan

Whenever I'm talking to a new person, especially if I feel a little bit of that feeling myself, it usually happens with a really young person, like an undergraduate student or someone like that. I pretend that they're the smartest person in the world in my head. It puts me in the mode of assuming I have a lot to learn from them, and it helps. You actually really listen. I literally think they're the smartest, wisest human on Earth. It helps me.

You know, I'm no expert. I'm a game designer, so as much psychology as I know is how to manipulate people into having fun, hopefully. I don't have an important job. But psychologically speaking—

That's fun.

Jeffrey Kaplan

One thing I think a lot about is ego, and I think about insecurity. Insecurity is something we all have. All of us as human beings have insecurity; it just manifests itself in different ways. As we go through our life journey, the insecurity also changes.

Some people, for example, use their insecurity to rip other people apart. Some people destroy themselves through their own insecurity. Some people destroy everybody with their insecurity. But I had that moment as a young lead, when I was first made a lead on World of Warcraft, where I felt it was very important to be right and to be shepherding the correct idea.

I actually got pulled aside. Pardo and I had a meeting with a couple of people who weren't game designers, and it's always tricky as a game designer because everybody is constantly throwing ideas out on a game team. There's never a shortage of ideas. We were in some meeting about something, and these people threw out these ideas.

I wasn't mean to them, but I very systematically, like an insecure, ego-driven new lead, said, "Let me tell you why that's wrong, and let me tell you what we're going to do instead." After the meeting, Pardo pulled me aside and said, "You're a very smart designer, but you shouldn't do what you just did to those people. You should always listen to what people have to say and try to make their ideas work."

I just kept thinking, "Okay, anytime an idea comes my way, let's try to make it work." It went from this kind of thing that I didn't believe in to actually being a core part of who I am today as a leader, as a game designer, and as a game director.

Some of the best ideas have come from developing other people's ideas, where your first reaction is, "No, that's wrong," and then just sticking with it and going, "But how could we make it work?" The most gratifying part, when it succeeds, is that they get all the credit, and you've elevated this person whose idea wouldn't have been championed. Their idea, which the insecure, egotistical lead of the early 2000s would have just said no to, is now the thing everybody in World of Warcraft or Overwatch is loving. They get all the credit.

I should give context to the listener who doesn't know about the great Jeffrey Kaplan: you're one of the most humble people, and you always give credit to the team for everything and anything. Everything we talk about today, I know you're probably constantly resisting giving credit to yourself instead of the team. You're the famous "Hi, I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team," right?

As a small aside, thank you for your humility throughout your career, and thank you for always celebrating the team. But let's talk about WoW. Let's talk about World of Warcraft. Tell me what the early days of developing WoW were like.

Maybe we should talk about what World of Warcraft, or WoW, is. I'm going to Perplexity here. World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online RPG where you create a character, level it up by doing quests and dungeons, and progress your gear and power in an open fantasy world called Azeroth. At a basic level, you move, use abilities from your action bar, follow quests, and gradually learn a combat rotation that fits your class.

There are all kinds of characters, roles, and classes. You pick a race, appearance, starting zone, and small racial bonuses, and a class that determines how you fight and what your role is in groups. Can you continue and fill in some of the gaps? What is World of Warcraft?

Jeffrey Kaplan

World of Warcraft, first of all, more than anything, is a world. It's a world that you can live in with real other people, and everybody is living out their fantasy.

Chris Metzen, who was the creative director on World of Warcraft, and Allen Adham, who's one of the founders of Blizzard, call Chris "the heart and soul of Blizzard." It's almost like when you're making a Blizzard game, you're making Chris's imagination at some point. Chris famously said, "The lead character of World of Warcraft is the world," and I always believed that.

You're trying to create this place that's exciting and dangerous, but comfortable and uncomfortable and gorgeous. It should feel massive, and it really is. It can take half an hour to get from one end of the world to the other. But it's this world you're living in.

The world is divided into 2 warring factions. There's the Horde and the Alliance, and that was a very important, very controversial decision made by Allen Adham, who was the champion of the Horde and Alliance.

And in the early days, there was a really strong division.

Jeffrey Kaplan

Strong division.

You pick a side, and then you hang around with only people of your kind.

Jeffrey Kaplan

Yeah, and you get it tattooed on you in real life. The number of people who walk up to me and show me their Horde tattoo is incredible.

That's awesome.

Jeffrey Kaplan

It's epic. It's become who they are. If you were to say, "Hey, Lex, come play World of Warcraft with me. We're Alliance on Tichondrius," you'd be like—

Right.

Jeffrey Kaplan

"Dude—"

Lose my number.

Jeffrey Kaplan

"Alliance?" Like, "Okay, I don't think we can be friends anymore."

But the Horde-Alliance decision was really controversial because in EverQuest, it was mixed-race. They had all the races, kind of like WoW did, but they could all group with each other. Pardo and I came from EverQuest, where we felt like this was a horrible decision Allen was making.

Allen, Rob, Bob Fitch, and I would have lunch every single day, and we would just talk about WoW and the core design of WoW. Rob wasn't even on WoW at that time; he was finishing Warcraft III. We would fight over the Horde-Alliance split, and whether it was a good idea or not.

Allen came from more of the Dark Age of Camelot community, which was another massively multiplayer online game that was more PvP-based. He said the magic of that game was that it had 3 factions, and he liked the fact that you were instantly on a team. You weren't a loner in the world. Whether you liked it or not, you had people on your side.

Rob and I argued and argued against it. Then, sometime before beta, Allen retired. He went on to run a hedge fund, got super into poker, got super into finance, and left. He retired, I think it was 9 months to a year before WoW shipped, which is kind of nuts.

Rob took over as lead designer in Allen's stead, and to Rob's credit, the first thing he did was go, speaking to what we were talking about earlier, "Allen's a smart guy. The fact that he was fighting so hard for the Horde-Alliance split, we've got to do it."

Rob and I changed our point of view, got on board with the Horde-Alliance split, and went all in.

The early days of WoW were a great team. It was a mix of these veterans that we all looked up to. We had Mark Kern running the team. Shane Dabiri was a legendary Blizzard developer. Bill Petras was the art director. Then we had Metzen, who was the cool big brother we all aspired to be. I'm older than Metzen, but I looked up to him like a big brother.

There were a lot of us who had never done it before, and they had also pulled a lot of people from other teams and other game types. For example, the guys building the dungeons were hired from the Quake community. Because we didn't have any hardcore MMO designers on the staff at that time—Kevin, Eric, and Alan were sort of the only designers—they started building Quake dungeons, Quake levels as the dungeons.

At one point, WoW was even made in QERadiant, which was the Quake engine. They later retooled it so they were using a proprietary engine. We were this hodgepodge, like the Bad News Bears, a mix of veterans and people like me. I'm just some fucking idiot who played a lot of EverQuest, and I end up at Blizzard.

Designing quests.

Jeffrey Kaplan

Yeah. Like, okay, we're going to design World of Warcraft now.

I've said this later with hindsight: I think a huge part of WoW's success, especially with the early WoW team—Team 2 in its earliest formation—was that we didn't know what we were doing.

Titan was the example for me. Titan was Blizzard's attempt at making an MMO after World of Warcraft. We failed horribly, and we had the best of the best on that team. It's because everybody was too much of an expert on how to make a groundbreaking, phenomenal MMO.

World of Warcraft was a bunch of people at a very successful, sure-of-itself company that had made StarCraft, Diablo, and Warcraft, with a bunch of yayhoos who were basically like, "Yeah, we can compete with Sony Online." At the time, they were making EverQuest II. If we go back in the time machine, EverQuest II had been announced, and EverQuest fans were just drooling for EverQuest II. It wasn't, "Oh, cool, World of Warcraft." EverQuest II was going to take the chalice and run with it.

And then, of all things, they announced Star Wars Galaxies, and they had a brilliant designer on that, a guy named Raph Koster, who had come from Ultima Online. He's just a really smart game designer. If you ever watch one of his lectures—he lectured a lot at GDC—we were like, “Oh my God, they're making EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies, and they have the Star Wars intellectual property. We're fucked. How are we going to compete?”

Everybody had seen the success of EverQuest, and everybody was going to make an MMO. It was just a question of who was going to win.

So you're feeling this immense pressure. You have this small team, this hodgepodge of an unlikely team that, fast-forwarding to Overwatch, kind of looks like the heroes in Overwatch, but is working extremely hard. You told me about crazy work hours, and not because you were forced to, but because you wanted to, because your heart was in it, because you were like, “This is everything.” You loved it.

Jeffrey Kaplan

Yeah. The games industry has a terrible reputation for insane amounts of overtime. It's just called crunch: Do you crunch or not? These days, crunch is not allowed, not permitted, and heavily frowned upon. If we were to work overtime, somebody would write an article about it the next week and say how horrible we are for working overtime.

Back then, we worked insane hours, and I mean insane hours. The longest shift I ever worked straight was 30 hours. That's when we were gold mastering Warcraft III. This was in my—I think Warcraft III shipped on July 3, 2002, so this would have been late June or early July, probably late June.

I had nothing to do with Warcraft III. I should just say that. In the credits, I'm listed as additional help or additional testing or something like that. When I showed up in May 2002, it was all hands on deck: World of Warcraft for E3. We got through E3, and then it was all hands on deck, the whole company, to get Warcraft III out the door.

For shipping Warcraft III.

Jeffrey Kaplan

For shipping Warcraft III. Because I had not been involved with the game at all, and I was a brand-new, wet-behind-the-ears game designer, they said, “You're just going to help test whatever we tell you to test.”

We were trying to gold master, and there was a crash that happened rarely. If you ran one of the cinematics—you had to be watching the cinematic after one of the levels—there was a crash. A programmer put in some logging to catch it, and then they needed somebody to make the crash happen over and over again so they could fix the bug. I sat there and watched the cinematic for 30 hours straight.

It was the funniest thing. It was almost surreal watching everybody leave. It was a trickle out: Everybody trickled out at different hours. The family guys went home much earlier than the single guys. Then I watched everybody show up again the next morning, and they were all dressed differently and looked refreshed. I was just in the same position, with my eyes beet-red.

To the soundtrack of the cinematic.

Jeffrey Kaplan

Yeah. But we crunched World of Warcraft. The date slipped, so you do this thing. I remember Mark Kern standing the team up and saying, “We're going to crunch early so we don't have to crunch later in the project.” I genuinely believe he believed that and wasn't manipulating us. But with games, anything can happen, and we slip uncontrollably all the time.

We slipped, and it created this endless death march. To this day, members of the WoW team will remember Newport Rib. If I say that, they'll have twitches, because they would cater dinner and bring it in at 6 or 7 at night. Everybody was eating Newport Rib or Panda Express. It was the worst diet ever. I actually like Newport Rib—no shade on them—but you can only eat so much of it.

The carpets were stained, and people were falling asleep on the couches. It was an unhealthy work environment. It gets pinned on executives because, at a lot of places, it is executive-driven and mandated from the top. But the hours that I worked, I never blamed on anyone but myself. I wanted to do it.

I remember coming in on Memorial Day with sand from the beach on my feet because I really wanted to get some work done that day, and working through Christmas. Those were things I wanted to do. I never felt like somebody held my feet to the coals.

Yeah, it's such a complicated thing because you could say that's unhealthy, but I know a large number of people, especially in their 20s, but actually throughout their careers, who have been at companies that do crunch for something they believe in, for something they love. It's some of the most fulfilling months and years of their lives.

It's not just fulfilling; they grow from it, they learn from it, and when they look back on that time, they can see how incredible it was. Of course, when you're going through it, sometimes it's extremely difficult, and you don't know. Then the crunch, like you mentioned, is supposed to be a month or two, but it turns out to be half a year. Maybe it turns out to be something like a Titan-type game where you never actually ship it, and it's heartbreaking.

But then you look back and realize how incredible that journey was.

Jeffrey Kaplan

I think my reflections on it many years later, having gone through pretty crazy levels of crunch and then more controlled levels, are that crunch is problematic, and people are right to be vocal about opposing it, when it's forced and unnecessary. There's a lot of, “If anybody on the team stays, we all stay,” which I think is unnecessary.

I don't think executives who take off and work 40-hour weeks should be telling anybody to stay late. I think that's wrong and immoral. But to me, as an individual, as long as I'm not telling other people to do it, my life's work is my passion, and I want to do it as much as possible.

I don't think I've ever worked less than 10 hours in a day. Ten hours is a normal-ish day to me. I enjoy working lots of weekends because I enjoy it. It brings me pleasure and fulfillment.

All of that said, from a place of caution, especially in this era when people are very touchy about it, I don't try to impose that on anybody else. I don't want anybody to feel like they're obligated to, but please understand that it's what makes me who I am—that work ethic. I enjoy it. Some of my fondest memories are from those WoW crunches.

Looking back and reading some of these stories, it's pretty cool because, as a fan on the receiving end of some of those video games, you bring joy to millions of people. It's awesome.

Let me ask you about quests. I think it's fair to say that before WoW, MMO leveling, like in EverQuest, consisted of—maybe I'm simplifying it a bit—standing in one spot and killing monsters for hours.

You helped develop, with WoW, what I would call a revolutionary idea: quest-driven leveling, where there's a story-driven, quest-driven guide through the world, and it so happens that as part of doing that, you're also leveling the character. The leveling is both fun and the engine that drives the story, which then also immerses you into the world and pulls you in more and more.

Take me through the process of developing that idea of quest-driven design.

Sure. There were actually a lot of people involved in it, and they all contributed in their own unique ways. Allen Adham was the lead designer on WoW. When we first decided we were going to have a quest-based game, we used to joke that EverQuest barely had any quests in it. It did have quests; they just weren't really in front of the player in an obvious way. You kind of had to seek them out on a website.

Allen knew that he wanted quests to be a big part of World of Warcraft, and so he hired me. That was my entry-level position at Blizzard. On the same day, he hired a guy named Pat Nagle, which was hilarious to me because Pat had this funny title of HR and Facilities at Blizzard. It was such a small company, so if you sent in an application, Pat would deal with the application, and if the toilet overflowed, Pat would have to deal with it.

The whole time I was applying at Blizzard, I was going through Pat. Then, on my first day, they put Pat and me in an office together, and he said, “Yeah, they hired me also as the quest designer.” Pat and I designed the quest system. He was the most wonderful guy, and we had so much fun.

It was Allen's idea to have quests in the first place. There was also the great designer I mentioned, Eric Dodds, who helped a lot with the interface. At first, on a whiteboard in Allen's office, we estimated how many quests we thought EverQuest had to date. EverQuest had, I think, 3 or 4 expansions at that point, and we thought, “Wow, we have to make all of these quests like EverQuest has.” It's going to be a lot of quests, and it's up to me and Pat to do it all.

We believed all we had to do was match that EverQuest number. Pat and I started working on the design of the system and how it would interact, and Eric Dodds was really involved in how the interface worked—how you were going to interact with the NPCs and all of that.

We split up the world into 2 zones. He was going to take Elwynn Forest, which was the starting area for the humans, and I was going to take Westfall, which was the sophomore zone after Elwynn for the humans. Pat and I would meet with Chris Metzen, and those were the most fun meetings ever because Chris just has stories in his head and visions. Chris is an artist, storyteller, and world-builder extraordinaire, and he sort of described what he wanted going on in those zones. You want the gameplay to follow the flow of what was going on with the stories of those areas.

So we finished Elwynn and Westfall, and we did a team playtest. Our assumption was that, because of the way EverQuest worked, players just wanted to level up. It was a level-based game: you go out, kill a creature, get experience points, and level up a little bit. The way people played EverQuest was they'd find these areas where there were lots of creatures, and you'd usually find the best experience-efficiency cycle you could find—fast-respawn, kind of easy things to kill—and that's how you would progress through EverQuest.

I remember Allen telling us, “Hey, the quests—when Pat and Jeff write quests, they'll aim us to where the creatures are.” You'd do a quest, and then you'd spend a few hours killing creatures in that area afterward, and that's how he imagined it would work. So we set up the world that way. Pat probably did a dozen, maybe 20 quests in Elwynn. I'd do a dozen, 20 quests in Westfall, and we'd do this team playtest.

We had a bunch of people on the team who had never played MMOs—guys with shooter backgrounds, StarCraft fans, et cetera. They'd play World of Warcraft. I think we played for an hour or 2, and we only did Elwynn Forest. The overwhelming feedback from our team—and these are people who really didn't play EverQuest—was, “My God, Pat, that was horrible. I ran out of quests right away.”

We were like, “Wait a second. You expect to just have quests keep going?” And they were like, “Yeah, we expect to have quests keep going the whole way.” We had an “oh, shit” moment right after that Elwynn Forest playtest, where we realized we had vastly underestimated the number of quests we were going to need.

We developed this philosophy that's kind of a shared philosophy across Blizzard games in general at this point. I've heard it outside of Blizzard, from other people in the industry, which is: you design along the path of least resistance. Basically, what that means is that, in EverQuest, the path of least resistance if you wanted your character to hit max level was to find the easiest creatures and kill them over and over again in place, which some people think is very boring. To me, I would do that for 8 hours because I think that's fun.

But in World of Warcraft, we said, “Why don't we make the path of least resistance—in this case, the way to get the best experience the fastest—not be killing creatures in one place? We'll overload the experience into the quests themselves, and then that will move you through the world, which will get you to see everything. It will enable us to tell these awesome storylines.” It did a lot for the game, and I think it was a fundamental change in the genre.

EverQuest was very popular and very successful, and it was hitting hundreds of thousands of players. WoW blew the doors open and was in the tens of millions of players. I think the fundamental difference there was that WoW allowed you to play as a single player. What makes an MMO—a massively multiplayer online game—massive is having the other people there, and they're so important, or else the world feels kind of wrong and dead. But the concept that we have to force you to interact with them to do anything is very off-putting to a lot of people.

The fact that people could come into WoW and just kind of—the game-design way of describing it is directed gameplay. Some games have extremely tight directed gameplay. For example, if you were to play a single-player game like The Last of Us, you'll have those moments where you'll come up to a log and they'll be like, “Press Triangle to duck,” or whatever the duck button is—“left stick to duck to go under.” That's the ultimate in directed gameplay. They're telling you exactly what to do.

On the other end of the spectrum is a game like Minecraft, like vanilla Minecraft, where you'll find it's very divisive amongst gamers who love Minecraft or hate it. The ones who hate it are like, “I don't know what I'm supposed to do. You drop me in this world. I'm supposed to dig or something.” That's the type of player that needs directed gameplay or they're going to cycle out. Not all players need it.

What WoW did—it doesn't seem like an innovation, it doesn't seem revolutionary—but it sort of created this directed gameplay that felt optional but really wasn't.

I think it's absolutely revolutionary. It basically changed gaming. It changed the way we see games. It was so successful in part because it became a mechanism by which you could spend hundreds of hours, thousands of hours in the game.

It's kind of—obviously, all these great ideas are always like this, right? In retrospect, you're like, “Well, obviously, if you make the path of least resistance quest-driven gameplay, then it's going to be the reason that most people play.” But it is true that I'm with you on this. I both like the quests and Cow Level. I guess you have to design for everybody. That's the tricky thing.

How do you fine-tune this? If you think of it as a loop of accept quest, kill 10 rats, turn in quest, ding, level up—that loop—how do you fine-tune that so it's maximum fun, or fun for the maximum number of people? How difficult is that?

It's extremely difficult, and not everybody's good at doing that. To some degree, we all lack self-awareness of how we tick. We're all different types of gamers, but if you ask me to describe the type of gamer I am, I might actually be giving more of a picture of the type of gamer I wish I was, or the type of gamer I want you to think I am, versus the type of gamer I actually am.

By playing lots of games—you cannot be an exceptional game designer without playing the shit out of as much as you can and understanding it on a deep level. The weirdest part about it is you're not just looking for the greatest hits. You learn just as much from a shitty game as you do from an amazing game. A lousy game can have a great system that was tuned wrong, or lacked the correct interface, or they didn't put the right visceral polish on it. There's an executional aspect to all of it.

When I'm playing, I'm not only thinking about what makes this fun; I'm thinking about what makes this not fun. I'm also watching everyone around me. My wife plays games, my kids play games, and understanding what they do and how they're different from me: why are they finding enjoyment in this? Why are they not? What's frustrating? What did they miss?

Being raw-honest with exactly what you're saying, if I were to analyze the kind of gamer I am, why do I enjoy Cow Level? And why, above that, do I enjoy loot? Why is loot so fun? What is it about opening a chest and getting a bunch of stuff? That might be at the core of what I enjoy about gaming—that, and walking around a beautiful world with nice music.

As a game designer, I am, at best, a quack psychologist. We can motivate you to do some weird things. The 2 driving motivators are extrinsic and intrinsic. All of us, at different times in our lives, in our gaming careers, whatever, can shift from being intrinsically motivated to being extrinsically motivated.

Obviously, loot is a big extrinsic motivation, but even saying that is too simplistic. For example, in the loot boxes of Overwatch, there's a masterfully designed system that was designed by a game designer, not by a businessperson or whatever, not a commercial person. Beyond that, we also had a really good team who said the visceral opening of the box—the sound it makes, the graphics, the way things spill out and animate—all of that is satisfying as well.

You're trying to tap into the lizard-brain part of it: I see a chest, I know it's going to feel good. It's going to feel good. And then there's the spreadsheet-y part of it: what does it have? Is it an upgrade? I think great game designers know how to tap into both of those things—tap into the intrinsic and extrinsic.

When I was studying writing, you would study the elements of fiction. These are just basic things like plot, character development, setting, theme, and whatever. There's no textbook that exists for game design, at least none that has been introduced to me yet. But I think about the elements of fun. What are the things that create fun for players? They're not the same. Every human being is different.

Progression is fun—the sense of progression that I'm investing. I'm putting an investment into this game, and then the game is recognizing my investment. Things like leveling and the amount of gold you have are all investment-based. There's mastery. There's just pure, raw skill.

Creativity is one. Hand in hand with creativity is customization. Some of those can be aesthetic: “Look at my customized character. I have the black curly hair, and I put an earring in my character, and I’m customizing in that way.” The other is customizing my build: “I’m going to come up with a whirlwind barbarian, and I’m the first to do it.” These are all elements of fun that designers can tap into, and in fact are frequently tapping into. But they’re never defined anywhere, and I find that players drift.

I’m the type of player who’s not really loot motivated. I’m more motivated by seeing the content the world has to offer. Often that takes me on a detour of being loot motivated, because there might be a dragon or a demon somewhere that I can’t beat without this level of armor and sword. So now I’m loot motivated for some period of time, to get back to being content motivated.

If I’m having trouble defeating a boss, I might have to go back and look at the skills and abilities that my character is using, and I have to go into creativity mode. “Oh, he has that one AoE where he puts a curse on me. If I had this counterability to the curse, I could beat the boss to get the loot, to get to the next boss.” These are all cycles that are tapping into all those different elements of fun.

And ultimately enjoying and discovering what the world has to offer you. You have a lot of hats as a gamer, so you love the RPG, MMORPG world, but you’re also a big shooter guy. Can you explain to me what fun in a shooter context is? We’ll talk about Overwatch as a specific kind of fun, maybe. But you’re also a huge fan of the ultra-realistic shooters—Call of Duty. What is the definition of fun there?

There’s a lot of skill and mastery. An off-the-cuff, flippant comment would be “clicking heads.” I’m just trying to click heads.

Okay.

Raph Koster

There’s an intimacy also to the first-person camera. Not all shooters are first-person. There is a large trend these days toward third-person. I really think PUBG and Fortnite sort of opened that third-person shooter door, and you’re seeing games like ARC Raiders that are third-person.

But to me, nothing is as pure as first-person. You’re literally living in the world as that being. You can look at your hands, and it’s that pure, visceral test of skill: “Can you click on the thing fast enough?” And when it’s PvP-based, that’s coming at you.

Could you lay out for people who don’t necessarily know what PvP and PvE are? And single-player—

Absolutely.

—multiplayer, massively online multiplayer?

Raph Koster

PvP is player versus player, so that means a combative situation. If Lex and I are up against each other, we’re attacking each other. We call that PvP. You can get killed by another player. Player versus environment is any time you’re shooting computer-controlled opponents. So if it’s a game about dragons, the dragon is the E—the environment—in PvE.

And we should say that in PvP, the P might be multiple players. It could be 5 versus 5 or 6 versus 6 for PvP. And for PvE, it could be raids where it’s multiple people, large groups of people going against the AI.

Raph Koster

Yep. Single-player is a game that you play totally by yourself. You don’t play with anybody else. You can’t play with anybody else. It’s not networked to play with other people. For example, I’m playing a game called Story of Seasons right now on the Switch, which I just play by myself. I have my farm. There’s a town. I’m meeting people in the town, and no one can come and join me and interact with that. So it’s a very controlled experience.

Single-player games can be very difficult and expensive in terms of production to create. If you think of a game like Uncharted or The Last of Us, that’s made by Naughty Dog, those are the preeminent single-player games you could talk about. They’re very handcrafted. Every experience is made just for you.

One up from that is what I call co-op. These terms become interchangeable, so I’m using some semantics here. Co-op is any cooperative experience that we can play together, but we’re sharing an exact same experience very intentionally. It’s me sharing that experience only with other people that I know.

A great example of a cooperative game—maybe one of the best of all time—is Left 4 Dead, which is a game where you and 3 other people go in and fight hordes of zombies, and you try to progress through to the end safe room. It’s a very cooperative experience. In a game like Diablo IV, you can play cooperatively with other people.

One up from that is multiplayer, and that’s when you’re engaging with strangers who are in the same world as you, but you might not have the same cooperative goals. You might have very opposed goals to them. You might PvP them, or they might just be random strangers that you pass in a town or city and never see again.

And then massively multiplayer, which is what MMO stands for—massively multiplayer online game—that’s when you’re breaking into thousands of players. The worlds become really, really big at that point.

By the way, we should say that co-op could be a remote connection, but there’s also—what would you call it?—couch co-op, where you have 2 people. Some games are really designed well for the experience of 2 humans sitting together and playing the game together, which is a really tricky thing to design for. But if it’s done well, it’s a really fulfilling experience. With a friend, with a loved one, you can play a game together. And Diablo IV, I should say, is an example of a game that does that really well. They do couch co-op. 2 people can play Diablo sitting together, and there’s a real intimate experience in that.

Raph Koster

Yeah, couch co-op—it’s funny, because it actually predates the couch even. Some of those old arcade games would have 2 joysticks on them, and then you could play with somebody else. Or there’s the famous game Gauntlet, which had 4 joysticks and 4 people playing together.

Anybody who grew up in that early console era, like the NES and Sega Genesis—the Sega Genesis was a legendary one—we would sit and play NHL 93 on the couch. Anybody who lost would lose the controller, and you could play that with up to 4 people playing.

I remember one of the big games that came out was Mortal Kombat. We would play Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis, and the house rules were that whoever lost—whether you were in your college dorm or just some buddy’s apartment and there were 5 people there—lost the controller. You were constantly cycling everybody in and out.

There’s just a magic to multiplayer: engaging and sharing in the experience with other people. That’s why I’ve never made a single-player game. I have great admiration for them. I don’t know if I could do it.

The reason I love multiplayer so much is the way I describe being a game director or game designer on a multiplayer game. It’s like—imagine if you were going to be a movie director, and you were going to have all these actors and set designers and props and writers and scripts and all of this stuff, and your goal was to get a certain movie made.

But we’re going to ask you, the director, to leave the room. You can set it all up ahead of time, and then you’re not allowed to be there or talk to anybody involved in it. Now you need the actors to have an experience, and it’s just the wildest, funnest experiment.

From a designer-creator perspective, because you don’t know what the players will create, that’s fun to see. You lay out the chessboard, you lay out the world, and then you get to watch what they create together. That’s true.

Raph Koster

I struggle because sometimes people call me the anti-story guy in games, and that really hurts me because I actually love story in games. I counter that I’m the anti-shitty-story guy.

What I mean by that is the most magical stories that I’ve ever heard come out of video games are player stories about the time I gave Barfa a potion and then I met him in real life. That’s better than any video game writing that I’ve heard in a long while. The player story is so much more interesting.

“Lex, why do you like the cow level so much? Tell me about some goofy time a loot goblin drew you into the most danger. And there was another player there, and then…” Those are the stories that I think are more interesting from games.

There are some exceptional writers in video games and some exceptional games at telling stories. I’ve mentioned Naughty Dog—they’re on another level. Valve has amazing writing, from Half-Life 2, by Marc Laidlaw, to Portal and Portal 2. I think it was Erik Wolpaw, who is hilarious, just amazing. And Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of my favorite games of all time.

That’s a game where you can see the expertise and mastery of the game design and the narrative design, and the fact that you can have those player stories of just the goofy shit. I remember, because the controls are a little awkward in Red Dead for a PC player who’s playing on console. I always get confused about taking out my gun and putting it away, and what the L1 and L2 buttons do. As a PC gamer, I’m just like, “Let me bind this stuff to where I want it.”

So a guy in town rides by and he’s like, “Howdy, partner.” I go to give him the Arthur Morgan “Hey, what’s up?” back, and I just whip out my sawed-off shotgun and blow his fucking head off. Then suddenly I’m wanted and I’m being chased, and there’s a train that takes out the posse, and—

Yes.

It's like those stories, and the fact that Red Dead can have this touching, heartbreaking story of Arthur Morgan and his journey, but you can also have the player story of blowing off the poor guy who's just trying to say hello.

And that's the combination. Rockstar does a really good job with, even in Grand Theft Auto, the radio can be a side aspect to the game. That great writing can help create the world—with humor, color, depth, heartbreak, all that stuff.

There was a moment in Red Dead where there was the Daniel Lanois song, “That’s the Way It Is.” I love Daniel Lanois, so the fact that somehow Rockstar landed him and was able to get that song out of him—I love it. There's this moment where you're riding back and they start that song.

Yeah.

Everything up to then had been gorgeous, more like a score. Woody Jackson, who's a really amazing game composer, had done the score for that, so nothing had been lyrical with words. Then they play the Daniel Lanois song, and the quotes are coming back from Dutch and Arthur Morgan. I'm just like, “Goddamn, this is... This is art.” I know it's supposed to be entertainment, I know it's a business, but the top of the pyramid is art, and it just hit me emotionally.

Yeah, there are certain games where—I mean, that moment, you just imagine the number of people who shed a tear during that moment, and that's just a reflection of how much you're invested in this world, in these characters. It's a beautiful thing.

I have to ask you about this image that you sent me. It's super cool, so I'd love it if we could nerd out about it a little bit: the zone flow for the original World of Warcraft. There's a bunch of zones. It'd be awesome if you could talk through how this world is built. Take me to that time when you were designing this, before anyone else got a chance to play it.

All the WoW stuff would start from that inspiration of Chris and the world. It was so fun hanging out with Chris because we had whiteboards all over the place. “Hey, Chris, we should make the Eastern Kingdoms. What do you think it should be?” He would just tell you the story of each of these as he was drawing. Chris is a really talented artist, so the map would be gorgeous. I have lots of photographs of Chris's maps that he would just put up on the whiteboard.

He'd say, “Here's the Dwarven Lands. There's the Wetlands with Khaz Modan up there, and that's where this tribe of dwarves was from. And then the humans are going to be down with Elwynn Forest. And then in Westfall, there's this group called the Defias Brotherhood, and they have a place called the Deadmines.”

I would talk to Chris because you want to capture the spirit. As a game designer, you want to capture the experience that's in people's heads. Take Burning Steppes, for example. It's supposed to be one of the scariest places, with lava and dragons and all this stuff. That doesn't feel like where you want to start. It feels like where you want to end, so you work the world flow in a way that puts that at the end.

But there was also some magic to the original starting areas, where we gave the dwarves and the humans a free flight path between them. The dwarf hometown was called Ironforge, and the human hometown was called Stormwind. We allowed you to fly for free. These little newbies who were level 5 or something—if you played a dwarf and I played a human, I'd be like, “Oh, Lex, don't worry. I'll come. I'll come to Ironforge and we'll hook up, and I'll just fly out to you”—which is the magic of World of Warcraft.

You have to fly over Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge, and you look down and you're like, “Holy shit, that looks scary and dangerous.” It plants that seed of things to come.

You've designed some incredible quests. Are there any that stand out that you're proud of or ashamed of? You famously designed the “Green Hills of Stranglethorn” quest, one of the most infamous quests in the history of WoW, of gaming, where you had to collect a bunch of pages. Maybe you can comment on that one or any quest that just springs to mind.

Green Hills of Stranglethorn holds a lot of emotional value for me because, among WoW players back in the day, it was unanimously hated as one of the shittiest, most annoying quests. But it holds a really special place in my heart.

First of all, it's one of the few times that I just wrote a short story that's actually in the game. It's me paying homage to Hemingway, and the guy who gives you the quest, Hemet Nesingwary, is just me rearranging the letters of Hemingway. There's another quest giver there that's Kerouac's name also mixed up.

Then it was the typical hubris of a junior game designer who thinks he's clever but is actually a dipshit. That's the Green Hills of Stranglethorn summed up. I wrote the story over—I think it was winter break. Everybody was gone, and I was so happy to be in the office. I was at Blizzard by myself, writing late at night.

The whole idea—and this is very much what I call ant-farm design, which is bad—is that you're the game designer who's playing God, and players are the ants in your ant farm, and you want to see what they're going to do. That's not the correct way to be a good multiplayer designer. But I hadn't learned that yet, and there's a really great, famous Sid Meier quote where he says there are 3 types of fun: fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer.

We catch ourselves—we're like, “We have to be really careful. It has to be fun for the player, not fun for us.” This Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest was an ant-farm design: I'm going to write this, honestly, probably pretty shitty story. I haven't read it since 2003, so God only knows if it's any good. But I wrote the story and then divided it up into all these different pages.

The quest giver, Hemet Nesingwary, wants you to put together the story. The story is that he wrote this book, but then the pages got scattered across Stranglethorn Vale. When you're doing quest design, you're really thinking about the player flow and directing them from quest-giver hubs out to these destinations, and you want them to do all the destinations. But sometimes we would do these bridging quests where you could do anything in the zone, and it sort of had this overlap.

The pages of Green Hills of Stranglethorn could be looted off any creature anywhere in Stranglethorn Vale. It was like the McDonald's Monopoly game where you have to have all the pieces or else you're not going to win. But where I really went south—I don't think the idea in a vacuum is horrible—was that the interface of World of Warcraft wasn't set up for it. The pages didn't stack, and there wasn't a dedicated container to put all the pages in, so players had very limited bag space.

As they're fighting in Stranglethorn Vale, I'm just shitting up their inventory with all of these pages. They only needed so many. You might get unlucky and have 3 Page 5s that are just junk in your inventory, and I might have 8 Page 6s. Everybody in Stranglethorn chat is like, “Hey, I'm looking for a Page 6. Anyone got a Page 3?”

That was the goal—the designer trying to puppeteer everybody. My fantasy as a designer was, “Then they're going to be social and meet each other, and players are going to be appreciative of each other.” But really, all everybody did was just get annoyed. Eventually, no one did the quest. They were super annoyed, or they went to the Auction House.

The quest is famous because it was so aggravating and annoying, and it became a way not only for me to learn from my mistakes, but, because I was very open about the fact that I didn't think it was good and that the quest had failed, it opened the door for us at Blizzard to be critical of our own work. It's always easier if you're the first one to go out and say, “Hey, guys, I think I made one of the shittiest quests in the game, and here's why.” Then it sort of challenged people to make better versions of it.

I mean, again, you continue to speak with so much humility. But WoW turned out to be one of the biggest games of all time, both in terms of popularity, how many players played it, revenue, and critical acclaim. Then you rose to become a game director of WoW, helping release Wrath of the Lich King, which many consider to be the greatest expansion.

There's a million questions I can ask here, but maybe this is also a good place to ask about the famous Blizzard polish. Blizzard, as a company, has historically—and you were certainly a big part of that—delivered these games. They just got so many pieces right, and they were well-functioning and well-coordinated, and they just felt finished in a way that a lot of other games don't get right.

What does it take to deliver this gigantic game, this game played by millions of people, loved by millions of people, in a way where it all just works?

To have a level of polish is a studio-wide culture that has to be instilled in everybody. No one can be satisfied with a bug. Every game is going to have bugs, and Blizzard games have bugs. It's a question of how quickly you fix them and with what urgency. As players ourselves, if we're playing as much as anybody else, we're going to be motivated to fix the bugs.

There are some really tactical aspects to it, too. The quality assurance department at Blizzard is the best in the industry. The people who come and do QA at Blizzard are passionate gamers. Many of them want to be developers themselves, and they're not just doing it for a job. They do it because they fucking love the game. The relationship we tried to develop between the development teams and QA was extremely tight.

Whenever possible, we also tried to sit as many QA members up with the development team as possible, depending on the logistics. In the early days, we didn't always have the space for all of QA to sit with us. We were very fortunate on the Overwatch team to have a large amount of QA sitting with us, and we developed that relationship.

In the early days there, there were these fears that, “Well, QA can't talk to the developers,” and we tried to shatter that because some of our QA members knew the game so inside out. You would just say to them, “Hey, dude. Just message me. Here's my home number. Call me if there's a bug. If you think we're gonna get raked over the coals on this, you gotta speak up. I don't care what the chain of command is. We gotta fix this thing.” So QA was amazing.

I mean, can you speak to QA, quality assurance? At the peak of the craft, what does it entail? You're basically experiencing the game and trying to figure out particular slices of that experience that could be improved?

Yeah. People simplify the role by saying, “Oh, these guys just get to play games all day and then let us know if there's a bug.” They are so systematic in the way they test stuff. They come up with these plans that are actually amazing: who's gonna test what. There's a lot of regression testing that goes on.

Within QA, there will also be compatibility testing. The Blizzard compatibility department was amazing. They had every card, every machine, every configuration, and they would roll through to make sure there wasn't some quirk that was gonna come up on some video card or some motherboard that you weren't expecting. But it was all very systematic. It wasn't just the Wild West: “Let's play the game.”

As a developer interacting with QA, you would find that there were certain specialists. For example, on Overwatch, there were a couple of players. We were all shooter players when we were making Overwatch, but I'm not an esports-level shooter player. I'm a Gen Xer—“Remember Doom, how good I was?”—type of shooter player.

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

But we had a couple of these QA specialists who could just snipe from 100 meters out and hit the shot every time and tell us if there was a frame of input delay. Then you sit that person with an engineer and say, “Hey, I think there's some input lag here.”

That's amazing.

And sure enough, they'd be right. But you have to have that relationship where the developers trust QA. Even on World of Warcraft, they had a great relationship with QA in that they built out a full raid team to do the raids. You're not only looking for bugs—“Hey, the dragon was supposed to fly, and instead it just sunk through the world and the game crashed,” which would happen—but if you really value QA, you're asking them, “Dude, what do you think? Ten million people are gonna see this. Your opinion—multiply it, you know? It matters. What do you think? Are you having fun? Oh, yeah, this is cool. This isn't cool.”

So QA was important. The other thing that was important was Blizzard engineering. You have to architect your game to be hotfixable.

There are a couple of ways to fix games. The way most of us know is that all the software we have gets a patch. You have to update it. You have to download a new version of it. Windows—you get that annoying message, like, “There's a new version of Windows.” It takes a few minutes and you update it. Obviously, we patch our games, and that's where we fix a lot of bugs, but if you really wanna run a game like Overwatch or World of Warcraft successfully, you need master-level engineers who have architected the client and server in such a way that you can hotfix the game on a dime. What a hotfix is, is a server patch that no one's client has to go down for.

Mm-hmm. That's because you're dealing with a huge number of players, and you discover an issue and you want to respond to that issue really quickly.

Yeah. There are emergency issues, like something's crashing. The worst-case scenario is anytime the server's crashing. Or in Overwatch, a really catastrophic bug would be something where you have to disable a hero. Someone found an exploit, and you have to disable a hero from the lineup. You want to turn around that hotfix, if you can, in half an hour and get that hero back live. You might have somebody who only plays that hero, and the only reason they're gonna play Overwatch is because that hero's active. You don't want to wait for patches, and you want to hotfix as fast as you can.

And then also to improve the game quickly, just to settle things, you want to do that.

Yeah. Players feel it. That's where there's this idea of the love and the craftsmanship of the developer that you can feel. Any product—you know, your iPhone or Android or any computer or consumer product—you can feel when there are people who loved it behind it and aren't just putting it out on a shelf. Games have that as well, where you can feel the heart and soul of the developer in the thing.

Some of that is the joy and delight of there being a cow level, right? You can feel the humanity of the development team through that. But another part of that is, do they clean up their fucking yard? Does this game work? It's not just the bugs and the crashes. It's when balance gets wacky and stupid and suddenly everybody's a barbarian and whirlwinding, and no one else will play anything else. You're like, “We should probably fix that.”

Oh, those were the days. I sadly was the barbarian whirlwind guy.

One-handed.

Yeah, it brought so much joy. So a lot of people nowadays think of you as Jeff from the Overwatch team.

My name is Jeff from the Overwatch team. I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team. I'm Jeff from the Overwatch team.

But y'all must have forgot: you were the game director of WoW in an era when WoW was one of the biggest games in the world. Looking back, what wisdom can you draw from that time when you got to experience this era of gaming that changed gaming forever, with millions of people playing this video game?

It was the first game I worked on, and I joined it as this entry-level dude. I still have my offer letter from Blizzard, which was for $35,000 a year. That's what I was making.

Very shortly after WoW shipped, Allen left as lead before the beta, or right around the beta, and then Rob took over as the lead designer. Then he left the team very shortly after WoW shipped to go start StarCraft II. He put myself and Tom Chilton in charge. Tom was a designer who was a great partner of mine and a great leader, and he actually came from Ultima Online. I always looked up to Tom because he had a lot more experience than I did.

This is early 2005. The world was on fire, the servers were barely running, WoW had just taken off like gangbusters, and they basically put me and Tom in charge of WoW. At the time they promoted me, my title—I didn't even have a lead title—was Senior Game Designer. Tom and I were running the design of WoW at that time.

So I thought it was totally normal, and I thought what we were experiencing with WoW was just normal for making a video game because it was the first video game that I had worked on. I thought it was the funnest joyride because we were working on WoW, we were still working insane hours, and then I'd get home, eat dinner, and my wife and I would log in and play WoW for 4 hours. Then I'd go in the next day and work. My whole life was World of Warcraft, and I loved it.

I loved everything from the creative meetings with Chris Metzen, and what an inspiration and muse he was, down to the simplest, dumbest design stuff. As game designers, you want to talk about why a button is in the lower-left versus lower-right and what does that mean? That's 2 hours of discussion. Is there a better way? The 10,000 minutiae problems were thrilling to me.

And then there were the big disasters. In the early days of WoW, we didn't really have all the processes in place for how to deal with being a successful online game. I literally had GMs—game masters, these are customer support guys—calling my home phone at 3:00 in the morning.

I remember this one time there was some faction token in Stranglethorn Vale, and they figured out a way to exploit it. This GM calls me, panicked. It's 3:00 in the morning. He's like, “I'm just spawning...” What did we call them? “Guardians of Blizzard.” They were these giant infernals that we just made that instantly death-touched anything. We used to have them when we were in the beta, off in the distance of places players weren't supposed to get to, in case they cheated their way there.

This GM is just spawning them all over Stranglethorn Vale because he's worried that the players are exploiting. It's 3:00 in the morning, and I'm talking in hushed tones because my wife is sleeping right next to the bed.

I'm doing this because it was actually before the cell phone days, when I had a landline. I loved it. I loved the thrill of those big moments and the minutiae. I felt like, through running WoW live—which was me and Tom together with an amazing team—we kind of learned how to be the WoW team.

Putting WoW in a box and shipping it was only chapter 1 in a 12-chapter book, essentially. That first chapter was how to run the game, how to patch it, what type of content to make, how to deal with emergencies, and what our customer support should be like. We would debate whether we should have a launcher or not. In the early days, the only reason the launcher existed in WoW was to run anti-cheat on your machine.

We had a moment where we figured out how to put that into the game and out of the launcher. It was the first time I ever really had an in-depth conversation with Mike Morhaime. He said, “You gotta bring the launcher back, guys.” We asked, “Why?” He said, “There’s no better way for us to talk to our players.” I remember trying to hide the launcher, and to this day, Mike was right. That launcher turned out to be the best thing we ever had. That’s essentially what Battle.net has morphed into these days.

When it came time to make The Burning Crusade, Tom and I were leads. They had actually promoted us. There were two big exoduses of groups that quit Blizzard; they were disenchanted, if you can believe it. We had just shipped World of Warcraft, and this whole group walked out the door. I was sitting at my desk, which faced Morhaime’s office, and I watched them all go in and quit. They were the group that formed Carbine, which made the game WildStar.

It ended up taking them 10 years to make, and they were really unhappy with World of Warcraft. They were unhappy with something else, too. I don’t know what they were unhappy with. They were unhappy enough to walk out the door right after we had shipped WoW.

That’s incredible. What is it? Is it just because they put their heart and soul into the game and maybe get exhausted in a certain kind of way?

I don’t want to speak on their behalf. It’s not fair of me to speak on their behalf. I think they were promised some compensation that they didn’t immediately see.

Here’s the weird part when you make a game: when you come up with the idea and start pitching it to people, that’s the best the game is ever going to be. Then you work on it. The games I worked on take 5 years. Overwatch was 2.5 to 3 years. Every day you get closer to shipping, the imagination of the ideal game gets farther and farther from the reality, and you’re always shipping this greatly sacrificed thing that nowhere near matches the imagination of the inception of the idea. So you become disenchanted with the concept.

So in some sense, you’re shipping—you're constantly in a state of disappointment. You’re basically shipping a lesser thing than you’ve been dreaming about.

Yes.

You’re doing less and less, saying no and no, cutting, and all that kind of stuff. It’s difficult—psychologically difficult—but nevertheless, when you zoom out, the result is one of the greatest games of all time that millions of people played for thousands of hours.

Did you ever have an experience—a realization of how huge WoW was, not in terms of statistics on the server and so on, but in terms of the cultural impact it had?

The first time was the first BlizzCon, which was in 2005. When WoW shipped—and this is so weird to tell people—but on the team, not everyone, but a lot of us were very demoralized after WoW shipped.

There were all sorts of issues with the servers because the game was way more successful than we expected it to be, and the server load was just nuts. We were doing our best to hire database programmers because we didn’t know how to deal with the sheer scope of the game. But when you’re an individual, and at that time there were multiple exoduses of people who quit Blizzard, it’s really demoralizing.

They went and formed a couple of notable studios. One was Carbine; the other was Red 5. We lost our core people. When Red 5 started, our team leader, Mark Kern, and our art director, Bill Petras, quit. When Carbine started, I think it was all of our animators and some of our best programmers.

It’s really demoralizing when you lose team members like that, but we were also underwater. The servers weren’t running, we weren’t able to keep up with demand, and we had to start putting patches out. For a while, we had one animator who stuck around, and then eventually he left also. You’re doing, “Okay, we gotta now do a patch without an animator.” A lot of our art team was gone at that point, and you’re trying to keep the ship afloat. The morale was just in the shitter.

Everybody felt very down on Team 2—the WoW team was called Team 2—and felt that we had somehow failed. During that time, there was this idea to do BlizzCon. The way that started was that EverQuest had done these meetups because they knew it was a big guild social game. People would get together at some hotel ballroom, and you’d sit with your guild at a banquet room table.

To give credit where credit’s due, I remember sitting in the meeting for what was to become BlizzCon. It was Pardo who said, “Blizzard’s bigger than that. We’re not just one game, and I know everybody’s focused on World of Warcraft right now. We should do BlizzCon.”

At the time, we had a game called StarCraft: Ghost in development, and that was getting ready to show. There was The Frozen Throne, which was the expansion to Warcraft III, and we knew we were going to make StarCraft II. There was also a lot of motion happening with Blizzard North, which is a whole separate story. We thought, “Hey, we could really do a cool show that’s this BlizzCon thing.”

At first, we announced it and it was crickets. You’re excited about something, thinking, “Man, everybody’s going to love this. We’re doing BlizzCon,” and everybody’s like, “Crickets. What’s BlizzCon? Who cares?” We were idiots, reading the forums, and the forums were flaming us all the time: “There’s lag on this server, and I can’t log into that server.” That was our perspective of what was happening.

Give Mike Morhaime credit where credit’s due. He kept us committed to that launcher, and they put the BlizzCon tickets on the launcher. Before that, it had been on the website. Everybody who logged into World of Warcraft suddenly got this: “Hey, we’re doing BlizzCon in Anaheim. Do you want to come?” It sold out instantly.

When I showed up at that show, it was one of the most emotional things in my life. It was nothing but an outpouring of love. Up until that point, your perception, because you’re just reading online, was that there was such hatred. People who are passionate online express themselves in the harshest ways because it gets attention. That’s the lesson I should have learned from my early days.

It’s such an unfortunate thing, because then you met these people in person and they loved World of Warcraft. All they wanted to do was talk about World of Warcraft, hear about what was coming next, and be around other people who loved World of Warcraft.

It’s incredible. It’s a fascinating theme to me about human nature, and it’s absolutely true. I wish there were something that could solve it. But then again, maybe not. Maybe that’s just the way it is.

In person, all of the people who are passionate about a particular topic—whatever that topic is, whether it’s games or conferences or technical conferences—they’re all mostly full of love. The way they talk about stuff, they nerd out. Even the disagreements are drenched in respect, appreciation, and love for the game and for the topic.

Online, you’re right. I don’t know if it’s because of popularity or clicks, but the way of speaking on the internet is more mockery and cynicism. If you say, “I love this thing. Here’s an apple. I love apples,” or, “I love bananas. I love X,” whatever it is, you just get made fun of.

The lesson you learn from that is, “I’m just not going to speak up when I love something. Instead, I’m going to speak up about how much I hate another thing that’s similar to it.” Or maybe you join in when people are making fun of a particular quirky thing: “Don’t you hate it when bananas are too ripe?” Instead of calling out the elephant in the room, which is, “We’re all gathered here today because we love the thing.”

It’s interesting. That aspect of the internet is jarring to a lot of people, depending on the game. But if you go to Discord or Reddit, in the communities that love a particular video game, there’s a lot of intense mockery and derision. If you’re not used to it, and I don’t often go, when I go it’s like, “Wow, there’s a lot of pretty intense mockery and derision.” But you get used to it pretty quickly and understand it. I just wish there were more love.

I feel bad because I played a role in the earliest development of some of that online culture. It really was social media before it was called social media. I had this reputation for being edgier than I really was. There were a couple of notable posts that survived 30 years that people like to look back on, but they don’t look back on the ones where I’m just being chill.

And that's unfortunate. I think a lot, as a game designer, about the design of social media. Unfortunately, social media in general is designed in such a way where maximum hyperbole works, and that's how you get the most points: by being maximally hyperbolic. Usually, unfortunately, it's more in the negative direction than the positive direction.

If I say, “That's a pretty nice mug. I've seen nicer, but I like this one,” no one's interested in that. I have to either love this thing or, better, say this thing's a crime against humanity in some way. It's very self-reinforcing, and everybody feeds into it.

Especially when you're young. I got to see this interesting thing. Since we're talking about how you're from Pasadena, I've been spending a lot of time at Caltech, working on robots, and we get to see students come in from high school, undergraduates come in on a tour and hang out with the robots, and middle school students as well.

The interesting thing you see is that the younger they are, the more prevalent this effect is. All of them are afraid to show that they think something is awesome. They're all checking, “Is it okay?” You can just feel it.

The default mode is, “Whatever. Everything is stupid. This is stupid,” because that's the safe place to be. It's a real act of vulnerability. I would say it's an act of courage, especially for a young person, to be like, “Holy shit, that's awesome.” If I think this is awesome, I'm going to be the nerd. I'm going to take the risk and be made fun of for saying, “I love this.” In this case, it's, “I love this robot.”

That's an actual psychological effect that young people are also dealing with in person. I just want to say, for young people listening to this: be vulnerable, be courageous, and say you love a thing if you love a thing. Do more of that on the internet, I think.

People make up the internet. People build the internet. Young people, more than anybody else, define the future of the internet. So put more love out there in the world. If you love a video game, if you love Overwatch, say you love it.

I couldn't agree more. As somebody who's taken a lot of heat online, like any game developer, you just get destroyed. Doing what you do, you must get destroyed. It doesn't matter—you get 100 compliments, and it's the one you're supposed to read, and you're supposed to be fine with it and have it not affect you. It'll stay with you for years. I have those.

The cheesy way I think about it is: is there some kind of social Darwinism going on? My big worry is that there are creators. Now, being a creator of anything—a writer, musician, making online videos, whatever creator means to you, making games—part of the skill set is being able to weather a fire hose of criticism like the world has never seen.

I make up these scenarios in my head. Would Van Gogh have existed if Reddit and all these things were out there commenting on his work? How many people were able to communicate with Beethoven in his lifetime, or in a week? How many influencers could comment on his music directly to him? Versus, if I want to insult Brad Pitt right now, I can just go on 10 different devices and do it.

That level of access is very dangerous, and I worry that there's a whole group of people that's receding from us who will never see the brilliance. They're being shut out by the negativity.

There's a very real example: Jay Wilson, who I think is one of the great design minds, was the game director of Diablo III. He took so much heat that it affected him to the point where he essentially retired from making games. He went and wrote novels. I was very happy for him because I'm glad he found his place, and I think he's getting back into making games now.

But we lost—we essentially lost him. Think how many people loved Diablo III and played the shit out of Diablo III. Jay is one of the people you have to thank for that. And yet that community basically removed him from making games for 10–15 years, and it feels criminal to me.

Yeah, absolutely. This is a call to action again. People out there, support young creators, especially. Support them. They need it. You think negativity has no cost, but it does. You're robbing the world of some of the great creations.

Also, allow creators to suck and improve, because that's what the process of creation is like: taking risks. Taking risks means being vulnerable, being cringe, doing the embarrassing failure where you're standing there in a silly clown outfit on stage, dancing, and nobody's laughing.

Comedians go through this all the time when they bomb, right? The act just doesn't work, and you have to go through that. You have to support creators through that journey. In order to have great things, we need to support those folks.

So, after shipping World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King—again, many consider it one of the great expansions for WoW—you stepped down as WoW's game director and switched to developing Titan, this epic, huge game that promised to be the MMO to end all MMOs.

I mean, it's kind of a legendary vision for a game, right? It's gigantic, with, like you said, a brilliant team—a team that's now hardened and knows how to make a great game. But it was canceled after 7 years in development. So tell me, what was the vision of the game, and what happened?

Sure. As we were experiencing success with World of Warcraft, there was this concept in the studio that WoW wasn't going to last forever. WoW would be maybe successful for 5 years and eventually age out. The studio would be in real trouble if we didn't have another massively multiplayer online game waiting in the wings.

Starting around, I want to say 2006, maybe 2005, the talk of starting a team really picked up momentum, and we were working on Burning Crusade. Rob Pardo took the helm to start Titan development. We didn't even really have a team then.

I remember being embroiled in Burning Crusade and going to Titan meetings. Rob pulled a group from across the company, and we started talking about what this next MMO could be and when it would get going. Eventually, it started in earnest—real development—around 2007.

The first team members joined, and it was a really ambitious project, including building a new engine from scratch. I think maybe the first team member was a guy named John LaFleur, who was just a stellar game programmer. The engine, which ultimately failed for Titan, ended up becoming the engine for Overwatch, which is a great success story for him.

The idea behind the game was that it was going to take place on a future Earth, and the players played as secret agents. By day, they all had day jobs, and by night, they went off and did cool secret-agent stuff. The secret-agent stuff was very first-person shooter, but with over-the-top abilities like you would see in Overwatch, because that's where they came from.

The by-day stuff was going to let you run businesses. We took a lot of influence from games like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, and The Sims. We had a brilliant game designer and game director named Matt Brown, who was the creative director on The Sims. He came over.

We had this vision that there was going to be all this daytime business-and-house stuff. You could build a house. You could live in a neighborhood. Beyond that, there was also a vision on the game-design and technical side: unlike World of Warcraft, which is sharded—the modern-day term for it—people play on different realms or servers.

On a WoW server, I haven't been on that team in a very long time, but back in the day, you might have 5,000 people on a WoW server before they'd have to spin up another WoW server. The big idea behind Titan was that everybody would play on one server. It was a one-server, one-world game, and the world was massive.

It was going to take place on a future Earth, and we were literally building what we called Bay City, which was San Francisco. We had Hollywood, and then we had to build all of California between them. We also wanted to build Cairo and London.

Then there was this realization: how do we connect all of these? The game had driving in it—full-blown, GTA-style driving. It was such a gargantuan, huge undertaking with a brand-new engine, a brand-new team, a brand-new IP—intellectual property—and setting, which we really wrestled over.

We wrestled over the IP, trying to figure out whether there were aliens or not. All that sounds kind of dumb and fun, but when you're building a game, especially world-building, you have to have rules. That's what makes world-building work: this exists in this world, and this doesn't. Why? Because someone said so, and it's just the way it needs to be.

That development started in 2007, kind of as ideation, brainstorming, and early work. It really got going in late 2007, and then I had to ship Wrath of the Lich King. We always did a champagne toast.

I still remember it because it was Election Day. I think it was Election Day, my birthday, and the day Obama got elected, and then I left the WoW team on that day. It was memorable in all those ways. Then I joined the Titan team, and the fast-forward part of that is that we shut it down in 2013.

That was one of the most painful development processes that I've ever been a part of. Probably deep into 2009, I knew that the game in its current form could never ship and would never exist. By 2010, after numerous attempts to convince the powers that be that this game wasn't going to happen and was in trouble, I remember going to Mike Morhaime. At that time, Blizzard was a big company, and I'm like, “You gotta shut us down. We're just gonna burn money.”

What was your intuition about why?

From my understanding, there were a few issues. One, with such a gigantic world—which, by the way, is a beautiful dream, this kind of universe simulator, because I love every game you mentioned there. They're great. I empathize with the dream. I would love to play that game.

But one of the issues, as I understand it, was that it was unclear what the quest flow was. What are you supposed to really do in this game? What's the thing that connects all of the pieces together?

It was a multifaceted failure for many reasons. Ultimately, the failure of Titan lies with leadership—team leadership, myself included. There's just no getting around that.

On top of that, a lot of games you can point to as being an engineering failure, like the servers didn't work, or an art failure, where no one responded to the look of the game, or a design failure, where it's just not fun or it's tuned poorly. We failed on art, engineering, and design, and I'm cautious about calling out art because some of the best art ever made at Blizzard was made for Titan. My criticism isn't of the art that was created. My criticism is that we never had any art cohesion, so the art looked like it could've come from 10 different games.

And we should say it cost $83 million across those years. So, a large team doing a lot of stuff, but not converging toward a game that could actually ship.

Correct. As a game designer, I use semantics a lot, and I like to define my semantics so people know where I'm coming from.

Talking about ideas versus vision for a second, ideas are easy. Ideas, I can have 10 in 10 seconds. “Let's make a 2D platformer about a mouse,” whatever. “A secret agent by day is doing all this cool shooting stuff, and by night is running a flower shop.” Ideas are just infinite. At least on creative teams, you have no shortage of ideas.

What I call vision is the ability to not only take a great idea, but shepherd it into existence, and you're doing that through inspiration first and foremost. If you need a team to make it, you need a team to believe in the vision of the idea. There also has to be a technological plan for the idea. There has to be a design plan. There has to be an art style for the plan. There has to be a pragmatic production reality to the plan.

Titan was like that. That was the hubris of Blizzard in that era, at its height. We were over being worried about World of Warcraft—“I don't know if people are gonna like it”—and we were now in the era of, “We made World of Warcraft. We can do no wrong. This next thing is gonna be the best ever.”

There was also a lot of what I call anticipatory hiring. There's opportunity hiring, and then there's anticipatory hiring. I have the exact opposite hiring philosophy. I won't hire anybody on any team until we're feeling like we gotta work overtime, or we might not ship if we don't get somebody else in here.

Titan had that hubris of, “Well, we're gonna build a really big world. We don't know the story of the world yet. We don't really have it mapped out what it should be like. We don't have the art style really defined. We don't know technically how we're gonna make the art or what the constraints of it are, but we know we're gonna build a really big world, so let's just start hiring environmental artists.”

In one year, we would hire 70 environmental artists from all over the world. We were getting visas and top-tier talent because it was the height of World of Warcraft, and nobody knew the team that they were coming onto. It was Blizzard's next MMO, top secret. Their first day at work, some poor guy from Belgium just shows up, and he's at his first day at work and he's like, “Oh, are we making World of StarCraft?” And they're like, “No, dude. Let me show you it.” And he's like, “What is this game?”

We were in that world, and we hired way too many people. The right way to incubate a video game is you have the smallest group possible, and you try to get the idea across with whatever technology you can get your hands on, using other engines, using art from whatever. You prove out that idea, and once you know what you're doing, then you expand the team.

You know the cliché of “idle hands are the devil's work,” or whatever. You have this brilliant, huge team, and we don't have a road map for what we're making or how we're gonna make it. Now you're having to deal with all these people. They're coming into your office, and you're trying to figure out, “What is the quest flow? How do I design the quest system for Titan? How can we prototype it?”

We're like, “Oh, this prop artist over here is running out of stuff to do. What props should he make? Should he work on Chinatown or the Hollywood set?” You're just making up busywork.

The engine didn't work. When we would run playtests on Titan, we would have to tell the team, “Stop checking in because it slows us down.”

We had this really great technical artist, a guy named Dylan Jones, and he was on Titan with us. I remember, in the last days, we asked him—he was a very active user of the Titan editor, which was called Titan Editor, or TED. To this day, TED is the proprietary tool for Overwatch, since Overwatch came from the Titan engine, which was called TANK.

We said to Dylan, “I want you to log your uptime in the editor, in TED.” In a 40-hour week, he was only able to work for 20 hours. You can imagine, you're building a team of the best in the industry, and they can't work.

Not only are you just burning cash faster than anybody on the planet, it's also like imagining having fighter pilots, but we don't let them fly. The creative frustration, the way that manifested itself, and how demoralized the team got—it was a disaster.

So many elements of that were done completely differently for Overwatch, which turned out to be this incredibly masterful execution on a short timescale, with a small team and a clear vision.

I read that if you were to compare Overwatch and Titan, the defining characteristic for the Titan team was that they said yes to everything, and the Overwatch team said no to everything. Meaning focus—deep, deep focus on the execution of a very clear vision.

Maybe that's the process of designing games, as you said, on a team that's full of incredible ideas because it's full of creative minds. It's constantly saying no. It's a really painful process, but perhaps it is the responsibility of leadership to just keep saying no, which sucks.

I guess it sucks to be a leader on a team in that sense because you're constantly saying no.

Being a creative leader, you're in two modes. You're pushing or you're pulling, and whatever mode you're in is the exact opposite of the team.

When they're not thinking outside the box enough or elevating the vision enough, that's when you're pushing them. “Come on, guys. Don't worry about the schedule. We gotta capture hearts and minds, inspire people.”

When they're going a little crazy and are an endless source of great ideas and really fun development, that's when you gotta pull and say, “Guys, we need to ship. The best feature we can add for the player is shipping.” That was a common phrase that we had.

So when Titan was canceled, that must've been a gigantic heartbreak for everybody. There was this moment when the plan was for the Titan team to be disbanded and moved elsewhere, but you fought for keeping some part of the Titan team—the core of the team—together. Mike Morhaime gave you 6 weeks to come up with a pitch for a new game.

You've talked about this process, and you've mentioned that there were 3 possible ideas or directions you were thinking about: a StarCraft MMO, maybe an MMO in a new IP called CrossWorlds, and then the third idea was Overwatch. Can you take me through those 6 weeks?

Yeah, the 6 weeks—it was supposed to be the greatest time ever, if you think about it. You're a game developer at Blizzard, and you get to come up with a new idea. That sounds awesome. To everybody at Blizzard, to all game developers, it sounds great.

But we were probably the most demoralized we'd ever been in our careers. At least I was. I didn't know if I was gonna be fired. I didn't know if that was the end of my career at that point. It was a really serious, dire environment in which this was happening.

We were given 2 criteria that we had to hit for these pitches. The first one was that we had to ship within 2 years, and that is a very ambitious timeframe for any game.

Yeah, crazy. That's crazy.

But for a Blizzard game, it's kind of insane. The second was even more ambitious and crazy: whatever we made, whatever we pitched, had to have the potential to have World of Warcraft-like revenue.

Yeah. Right.

And to date, at that point, there was 1 game that had World of Warcraft-like revenue, which was World of Warcraft. Immediately, I just threw out the revenue thing because it's all fucking Monopoly money to me.

This game money is... 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 about the schedule part of it.

Most of our team—the Titan team—was 140-some people. Most of that team got moved to work on Heroes of the Storm, the Diablo 3 expansion, World of Warcraft, and Hearthstone. So immediately, a large number of the team was gone.

Then we had a bunch of what we called temp loans—people who someday were going to come back to us, but we loaned them off for a six-month tour of duty. And then there was a very small team. There was a group of engineers that was mothballing Titan, so it existed somewhere at Blizzard at that point. They were also deconstructing the engine because they knew it didn't work anymore, and to make a new game, it had to be radically reconsidered into sort of what it is today.

And then there was a very small creative group that was supposed to come up with these three pitches and was given six weeks. We arbitrarily decided, “Let's spend two weeks on each pitch.” The ground rules that I led with were that you have to be all in for the two weeks on the pitch.

Pitch one was a StarCraft MMO, and we had to live and breathe it and want it more than anything. I warned everybody. I said, “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 one. But we're going to throw it out as soon as we finish it and do the next one.”

The StarCraft MMO, I actually really loved that pitch. It was called StarCraft Frontiers. The concept was less that you were playing a space marine. It was less about armies. StarCraft the RTS is always about the three races and the giant armies.

What made WoW WoW and separated it from the Warcraft RTS series was that instead of being a footman in the army in World of Warcraft, you were a lone adventurer, making your mark on the world. So we had this idea. It was based on this old Chris Metzen drawing of a space prospector.

I loved the idea that somewhere out where all the giant StarCraft battles were happening—thousands of Zerg and Protoss and Terran—there's this lone prospector on some planet, going through a mysterious dungeon, looking for minerals but finding monsters. It was that kind of spirit—

That's awesome.

More on the ground level.

I didn't even think about that, because my intuition with a StarCraft MMO would be the soldier as part of the army, right? The prospector. That's such a beautiful vision.

Yeah, I—

Looking for the resources and, on the way, finding the monsters.

You want to be on the ground. What's it like on the ground floor? I don't want to be a minion in a giant army. I want to be Indiana Jones in space.

Nice.

There was this Metzen picture of the prospector, and then two of the most amazing artists, Arnold Tsang and Peter Lee, did this concept art for Frontiers based on Metzen's space prospector. He's smoking a cigar, and he's got his foot on a Hydralisk skull.

Nice.

There's a Medivac in the background, and they're on this big alien planet. With that picture, you just wanted to say, “Here's my money. I'll preorder now. Sign me up for that game.”

That picture ended up being McCree from Overwatch. We redid it. That's where McCree actually came from.

That was the StarCraft Frontiers idea. We went all in on the design. We had a world design and class design—how the classes would work and what progression might look like. You also have to think, when you're trying to design an MMO, about what expansions and live content could be like.

We put together a really good pitch. We all knew there was no way you could make this game. Even though it was more focused than Titan, it was five years on Blizzard's best day, with nothing going wrong, in a perfect scenario—five years to make that game, probably with 150 to 200 people. These 40 people were not making that game in two years.

So, again, that was an idea, not a vision, because it lacked the path to reality.

Because that's a legit large-scale MMO in a world that you haven't quite developed in the way that an MMO needs, one that was really crafted for the RTS, or real-time strategy, format of StarCraft. And it's in space. It would take—I mean, it would be incredible, but it would be a five-year project, and realistically even more.

An endless thing that you'd spin on with that team. You're making the StarCraft game. How do you get from planet to planet? Is it a cutscene? No one's going to want a cutscene, but we should probably make it a cutscene because that's easy. But we have to have spaceflight. You're adding three years just by saying, “We have to have spaceflight.”

You are. Yeah.

And then how do you make a space game without spaceflight? We've all played them. We know those games.

So are you essentially, when you're brainstorming like that—and by the way, it's such an incredible thing—for two weeks, you're really falling in love with the game altogether and trying to figure out if it's actually possible. If you're developing that, are you constantly trying to say, “What's the simplest possible thing we can do that's a complete world?” Are you constantly trying to simplify, or are you allowing yourself to go big?

When you're brainstorming and you're with the team and you're the creative leader, it's, “Guys, what's fucking amazing? What's big? What do players need?”

There's a Blizzard design value called “What is the fantasy?” What is the fantasy? You want to be in space. You want to be in the StarCraft universe. Then your job as the game director—and if you have a great creative director, art director, and tech director—is to scope it back into reality.

The mistake I see on a lot of game teams is that scope becomes a production problem. You give it to the project managers, executives, or producers to say, “No, there's not enough time,” or, “You guys should hire more,” because—

Right.

What do executives—what do those types have at their disposal? They can hit you with meetings in Outlook and tell you that you can hire more people. That's not really how you get the game made.

That's why they get paid the big bucks.

The best-case scenario is when your tech director, art director, and game director are doing the scoping, because then you know, “This part we have to spend big bucks on. There's no getting around it. This part we can cheat.”

If you have a giant team and one person's job is just to make props—crates and chairs—that's a triple-A awesome developer who's going to put his heart and soul into it. If you let him, he'll take six weeks to make a crate. You have to have that moment where you're like, “I need 200 crates, so just spend a couple of hours on that one.” That's a hard thing to say to somebody.

You're doing this kind of scope carving while also talking about what the fantasy is. There's a tension there that you're constantly dancing with. You're allowing yourself to think big, but then scoping it down. And you're doing that on what, a scale of days in this case?

Yeah. We had two weeks, and I don't think we were working on weekends, but we weren't getting the group together. So it was about 10 working days.

And then you shut it off and go to idea number two?

Yeah. Idea number two was Crossworlds. That was a Metzen vision for a universe, and I'm glad Metzen's back at Blizzard. I hope they make this game someday.

The way Chris described it was, there's a planet on the edge of the universe that's like the Mos Eisley spaceport, with all these freakish aliens and people from all walks of life. It's seedy and criminal. There are traders, smugglers, and diplomats. This one planet is sort of the planet that they've agreed to meet on. This is the neutral place, and the game was going to take place on that planet.

This is awesome.

That was more of a world-IP-driven one that was really inspired by Chris.

That allows you to play with different characters, different... I like that idea a lot, because it's the meeting place of different worlds. Then you can allow your imagination to drive what the worlds they came from are like. You don't have to design those worlds.

No, you don't have to design them, but then they're yours. If the players really are reacting to the Green People planet—or whatever—and someday you're like, “Hey, what expansion should we make?”

“I don't know. Green People planet.”

Green People, yeah.

“Let's do it.”

I like it.

Actually, it was Crossworlds. We were working on Crossworlds, and for StarCraft: Frontiers, we were having the class meetings—how class progression worked, the game-designery stuff.

On Crossworlds, we were having a class meeting about a big decision in RPG-type games: Are you doing skill-based or class-based? It's usually some combination of those, but with class-based, you're choosing, “I'm going to be a warrior. Therefore, I use sword and shield, and I do these things.” With more of a skill-based system, everybody's kind of an avatar, and then the skills that you pick define you. So I might take knowing how to use swords.

So you're kind of making those decisions, and with all things game design, there's no right or wrong. It's all trade-offs. So the trade-off decision we were making was, “I think we want to be class-based with this Crossworlds thing.” We were in a design meeting, and one of my favorite designers of all time is a guy named Geoff Goodman. He was one of the original World of Warcraft encounter designers; he designed Onyxia and all the big raid bosses. If someone has a favorite raid boss, Geoff probably designed it.

He just, off the cuff, said in this meeting, “I wish instead of making 6 classes, I wish we could make 50 classes. And I wish instead of having 100 abilities on the classes, the 50 classes all just had 1 or 2 things that were really interesting about them.” Then the class meeting ended. We designed our 6 classes in that meeting, and then the meeting ended.

I was back at my desk, and it just stuck with me what Geoff had said about the way he wished he could design the classes. We had this directory of all the amazing Titan art, and I started pulling up Arnold Tsang's characters. Arnold's vision and his art are second to none. 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, rewind time, and come back. The Jumper used dual-wield pistols, which were, at the time, designed after my dual G18s from Modern Warfare 2. It was my favorite loadout. I was just cribbing Infinity Ward. That's where Tracer's guns came from.

We had all these different guns, some that bloomed and some that had this really crazy recoil, and we had other types of guns. I took every version of the Titan Jumper, and I distilled it into what I thought was the best version of the Jumper: the dual-wield pistols, the blink, the recall, and time bomb. Then I took Arnold Tsang's art and went to Arnold. I said, “What if this wasn't a class? Who is this as a person, not a class?” And Arnold said, “What if she's British, and her name's Tracer?” That was the origin of Overwatch.

Some of the pragmatic part of that was I knew Geoff Goodman was going to be on this team, and I knew Arnold Tsang was going to be on this team. It's a play-to-your-strengths moment. What could we make in 2 years with the talent we have, and what is realistic? What could we realistically make? So then I sat there and went through a bunch of Titan classes with a guy named The Gunjack, who became Reaper. Actually, the Ranger got split out and became Soldier: 76 and Bastion, of all things.

You're describing the game of Overwatch, where exactly that vision from that meeting—

Yes.

—came to life for you. As opposed to having a small number of classes with a large number of skills, you have a large number of heroes, each with their distinct look and distinct set of skills.

Yeah, and personality was a big part of it, capturing the idea that this isn't some generic Jumper—it's this person, Lena Oxton. She has a life, and we're going to make you interested in her.

Yeah, there's a deep backstory. And that's also what's interesting about Overwatch: the backstory is not revealed in a direct way. It sort of seeps in indirectly throughout the game. So the backstory is implied, almost.

Yeah.

And it's told not directly. So there are a lot of ideas like this. So this is the thing that the team converged to.

Yeah. Well, it was funny because we were having these Crossworlds meetings. People were writing design docs and doing concept art for Crossworlds. We'd have some brainstorm meetings every day, and I put together a 7-page Overwatch deck. It was called Monetized Shooter at the time.

Yeah.

It just said, “Monetized Shooter.” The first slide was the League of Legends plus Team Fortress 2 logos. Then I had 6 heroes, sloppily designed.

As everybody was working on Crossworlds, there were 2 co-leaders of that team: Chris Metzen and Ray Gresko. I remember Ray coming over. Ray is a phenomenal game developer of all time. He wrote the Dark Forces engine and was the production director on Diablo III. He and I killed Titan.

Then he's at my desk, looking over my shoulder, and he says, “What are you working on? Is this the Crossworlds pitch?” I said, “No, this is another idea that I'm just working on the side.” I showed him the 7 slides, and he just looked at me and said, “Go show Metzen this. This is what we should make instead.”

Then I went and showed Metzen: “Hey, this is just an idea.” Metzen said, “Yes. This is what we should make.” I showed Arnold, and it was Arnold's art.

Then Ray told me that every morning we'd get the team together because we were in dire straits, and we were midway through at that point. Ray and a producer named Matt Hawley said, “Tomorrow morning at the meeting, you're going to pitch this Monetized Shooter idea.”

It was called Monetized Shooter because originally, when I pitched it, it was free-to-play and you had to buy the heroes, which is fucking terrible, but at the time I actually thought that was a good idea. I was walking down the hall with Matt Hawley to pitch this to this group. We were supposed to be working on Crossworlds, and they said, “You have to pitch this idea to them.”

Matt Hawley stopped me in the hall and said, “You, Jeff, you cannot go into that meeting. I refuse to put up a deck in front of the team where the first slide says ‘Monetized Shooter.’ They'll hate that, and that's not the spirit of who we are as creative developers.”

I said, “Yeah, you're right. No one was supposed to see this deck anyway. You guys are all looking over my shoulder.” He said, “You need to put a name on it.” I said, “It's Overwatch.” Right on the spot, I said the name was Overwatch.

Where that had come from was when we were working on Titan. I was really angry about this. Another leader on the team—not me—did this fake thing where we were going to put up whiteboards and everyone would vote for their favorite name for Titan. But the person who did it already had a name in mind for the game and just kept pushing toward that name. The thing that got the most votes was Overwatch.

Overwatch in Titan was essentially a police group. But somebody had written Overwatch on that board, and it got the most votes. So I basically named the game Overwatch to high-five my team and kind of give the middle finger: “Don't act like it's a democracy when it's not.”

So it's a middle finger. So Overwatch, and then the rest is history. In that slide deck, did you already have a kind of crawl, walk, run idea of the way this would be developed?

My deck was terrible. People actually call it the Jeff Deck: it's always gray with black writing and the default PowerPoint blue shapes, because I just don't bother making it look good, apart from dragging Arnold Tsang's art—desecrating it—into my deck.

We had this amazing game designer on the Overwatch team, a guy named Jeremy Craig, who's now actually game-directing a game over at Bonfire. Jeremy was not only a great game designer, but he also had the ability to sell things better than anybody else, visually. So Jeremy took my shitty deck, and we had lots more creative brainstorms and thought through the game of Overwatch a lot more. Then he made this gorgeous pitch deck that we pitched.

We first had to go through the Blizzard production and game directors for them to approve it and give it their thumbs-up. Then we had to go through the Blizzard executives, and then we had to go through Activision.

In that deck, because we had to speak to schedule, we had to speak to 2 things that were tough to speak to. First, we had to speak to schedule, and we came up with this concept of crawl, walk, run. We had identified the reason Titan failed: we just tried to run. We tried to come up with the next World of Warcraft.

But if you think about World of Warcraft, it had Warcraft I, II, and III to build upon to even get to the point where people gave a shit enough about that world to want to live in the world of Warcraft. So the idea was that instead of trying to cut right to World of Warcraft, let's try to honor Warcraft I, essentially.

This first game is just to establish that there's a universe you might give a shit about. We also knew that, in the 2-year timeframe we were given, there was no way to create a compelling PvE experience. So we just randomly put dates in a crawl, walk, run slide, thinking it was aspirational, but really we were just trying to save ourselves: “Don't cancel us. This team can make something great.”

The other part that we had to talk to, too, was a mobile strategy. At that time, everything had to also be on mobile, which I think is the dumbest thing ever. Literally what we did was—and this was Jeremy's brilliant part—we had a picture with all the boxes, and one of them was a tablet with just a fucking Photoshop of Arnold's art on it. We were like, “And also—”

Mobile.

“...it'll be on mobile.”

Brilliant. But I think this crawl, walk, run idea is really nice.

So the initial idea is you would have basically a shooter with all these different characters, all these heroes, and then the walk would be the PvE version of that, co-op. And then if people really fall in love with the world, you build a big MMO around it.

And we should also say that there's a whole world that was built around Overwatch. One of the ideas was that Warcraft is a very particular kind of world, StarCraft is a particular kind of world, and Diablo is a particular kind of world. You wanted to bring Overwatch to Earth and make it positive.

You gave this talk where there was a lot of respect paid to the dark, gritty, post-apocalyptic games on Earth. You also gave a lot of respect to the ultra-realistic first-person shooter games like Call of Duty. And you wanted to create something more that paints a vision of a near-term, hopeful future—fun and more surreal, versus ultra-real.

So it's interesting to talk through how a world comes to life: how you think about that world, how you create the tone of the game, how you craft this vision. And not just different characters like Tracer and so on, and what their personalities are, but bringing the world to life in which they will be. What was that process like?

The process was a blast. The goal was that bright, hopeful future. The other phrase we used all the time on the team was, “A future worth fighting for.”

Mm-hmm, yes.

If there's going to be all this fighting, it kind of has to be worth it for something. Picking the locations in the world was the funnest thing. There was just a group of us who would sit around and be like, “Where do you want to go?” Santorini looks amazing. You’re looking at pictures and thinking, “Let's make that place.”

In a video game, people are going to spend hours and hours in a location. Resist the urge to do the common—I call them the cargo-container mazes—that you see in every game. I know why they exist: they're easy to make. But we wanted Overwatch to be this world tour of great places that you'd want to go to.

In the case of Oasis, it's like, okay, maybe Iraq, back when we were making this game, wasn't at the top of people's list. But what is the bright, hopeful version of what that could look like? So we really tried to sell this idea of aspirational locations—one, just to get people thinking about different places on Planet Earth and how awesome they all are, but also, from a pure game-design standpoint, you're going to spend a lot of time in the environment, so the environment should be pleasing and not oppressive.

Can you go through some of the heroes that you ended up putting in the game? Maybe a good way to do it is: which are your favorites, and what are the favorites, to the best of your knowledge, on the internet?

I have a couple of favorite heroes. Obviously, Tracer.

She's the OG.

The OG, the cornerstone. We put her on the front of the box. She was that moment of, “We should just take the best of the best.” We knew this gameplay was good and solid, and it was so simple. The mechanics are very easy to explain to somebody, and very easy to pick up.

The first time anybody hits Recall for the first time, they try to wrap their mind around, “Wait, does that mean if I...?” They start mapping out the possibilities.

And, by the way, we should say that it's a PvP game with 6 versus 6 at first, where there are 3 distinct roles that people take on as a team. Those roles, at first, I guess were not required. You could reallocate those roles as you wanted, and then, to maximize the fun, you added a little bit of structure. You enforced 2 per role, with the roles being tank, support, and damage.

There are all kinds of heroes associated with the different roles, and people pick them, and there's lore. Some people are probably hardcore about just 1 particular hero. There's a lot of personality, story, and community that builds around each of the heroes. But at the end of the day, it is just a fun shooter.

Our goal was to pay homage to the shooters before us that we loved. There's no way you can talk about Overwatch without talking about Team Fortress 2. Team Fortress started as a Quake mod, which was brilliant, and I played tons of it. Then there was Team Fortress Classic, which came out with Half-Life 1. And then Team Fortress 2—I think everything about it blew everybody away when it came out in 2007. There's obviously a huge influence there.

The shooter mechanics of Overwatch hearken back to what people call the arcade or arena-shooter genre, which pains me because, back in the day, I didn't think of Quake as an arcade shooter. It was almost an insulting way of saying it. But there's fast movement and really epic, over-the-top weapons.

You have a low time to kill, or TTK, as players call it, meaning you're very survivable and can take a few hits. In a game like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike, if you get shot in the head, you're just dead right away. So it was supposed to be this explosive, larger-than-life, fun, arcade-y shooter with a lot of teamwork involved.

And so you said Tracer up there—she's the OG. Who else?

McCree. McCree is another one. I'm somebody who's attracted to simplicity in design. I did not design McCree's six-shooter, but the way that gun feels is phenomenal. To capture the spirit of that, we had a designer named Mike Heiberg design the High Noon ultimate.

Then there was just all the care and love the team put in. When he does the ultimate, we roll a tumbleweed across the screen every time. He's a very simple hero, but the simplicity is what I like best in design.

I'm not a fan of when somebody starts explaining, in any of these games, whether they're MOBAs or hero shooters, “This guy throws orbs, and he throws 3 orbs, and then he runs out of his orb bank, and then he can call the orbs back, or he can catch the orbs.” My head is spinning, and I'm like, “Just give me a fucking good gun.” And I'm done.

Simplicity is everything. What about Reinhardt, the tank?

Reinhardt was actually my main, so I played the most of Reinhardt. That was another amazing Geoff Goodman design: this guy who just has a shield. As soon as you give somebody a shield, they know what to do. They go into protector mode.

The shield was designed to shoot through. The shield has since been copied by almost every hero shooter, and even by non-hero shooters. Then he just has a giant Rocket Hammer, and he does a charge ability.

It's really interesting where the charge ability came from. I was playing a ton of Left 4 Dead 2, and there you could play in versus mode, where you could be the enemy zombie guys. There was an enemy boss zombie called the Charger who had that charge ability.

I thought the reason that ability was so cool is because it's a commit. Once you press the button, you're a runaway train. Watching Reinhardts charge to their deaths is kind of hilarious, and it's what separates a great Rein from a shitty one.

You've explained that the Overwatch matchmaking process is designed to keep players at a 50% win rate. I think it's a fascinating topic. Not to get too philosophical, but you can't have the up without the down, hence the 50%. Can you speak to the complexity of what makes a good matchmaker?

The matchmaking systems are some of the most complex design and engineering tasks you're ever going to tackle. And they're thankless. It's very hard, too, because I think most people—and they're not being disingenuous—if you ask a gamer, “What do you want?” they're like, “I just want a fair match. Just make it even.”

The reality is that what they want is a match where they're slightly better than the other guy. They want it to feel like it was close, but then win. You can't architect that. It's a zero-sum situation, so there have to be winners and there have to be losers.

The other really core problem, which we would study all the time when people would complain, was that you'd see a Reddit post where somebody would say, “I had a 6-game losing streak. This is so fucked. It's the worst matchmaker ever.”

Mm-hmm. Oh, Reddit.

Yeah, right? I love Reddit. But we would look up that person's account. I would do that all the time. I love looking up people's accounts and seeing what would happen. It's like, yeah, he had the 6-game losing streak, but he had an 8-game winning streak before that. There was no post about, “How awesome is this?”

Human psychology doesn't allow for that.

One of my hindsight regrets about Overwatch—and I think we did the right thing in the moment, so I wouldn't go back and redo it—is that if I was making a hero shooter from scratch today, I would make it less team-focused. We put all of our eggs in you noticing whether the team won or lost, and we downplayed your individual contribution as much as possible.

There wasn't a scoreboard. We had a medal system, but the medal system was, in my opinion, not good, because the losing team got medals and the winning team got medals. On the losing team, they would use that—they would weaponize it against their teammate. “Well, I'm top in kills, and all you guys are making us lose.” And it's like, “Okay, you're top in kills by, like, 1, and you guys still lost.”

If I was to redo it today—or for any aspiring hero-shooter makers out there—I would actually downplay the team factor and try to put more focus on individual contribution.

Because that's just how people play. They're selfish. I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just human nature; they can't help it.

And in terms of how they experience the game, in terms of how they derive joy from it, or how they see the challenge of the game, it's individual. Even when you're on a team, you're still feeling—it's an individual, fundamentally individual experience.

Let me, as a small aside, before I forget: since we mentioned first-person shooters so much, outside of Overwatch, what are some of the great shooters of all time that you've played?

Quake is the greatest.

Quake is GOAT.

Yeah. Quake is GOAT. There's a lot of contenders up there.

What have you logged the most hours in outside of the games?

Rust.

Okay. A lot of folks have written to me that I need to play Rust, the video game. I have not even looked into it. Somebody on Reddit said it has a steep learning curve. I would like to give it a chance because you have, to me, spoken so highly of it. Can you explain Rust?

Yeah. Rust is an open-world game. It's a procedural map, so that means every time it's different. You're always on an island, and it resets every month.

Is it PvP?

It's all PvP. In fact, Rust is the most PvP thing in all of PvP.

Well, I don't know what that means, but—

Rust players know what that means.

Everybody who plays Rust and loves it sounds to me like they're in a cult. With all due respect, please don't write me letters.

They're too busy playing Rust. They're too busy checking on their base, making sure it's not raided, to write you letters.

Oh, good.

It's basically open-world. You can do whatever you want. There's not really any directed gameplay to it, but at any time, any other player can kill you and take anything that's on you.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, and then you build what Rust players call bases, and you upgrade the base, and you try to make the base as safe as possible to store your stuff. Then you can make explosives and blow up other people's walls to get into their base, where they're keeping all their best stuff, and take all their shit.

Permanently?

Permanently.

Oh, I see.

It would be like PvPing in WoW. Imagine in World of Warcraft if somebody could not only kill you, but take everything that's in your bank and make you level 1 the next time you log in.

Wow. That's very stressful.

The beauty of Rust, and why it's so good, is you can't have the high highs without the low lows.

Like, real low lows.

Real low lows.

Wow. All right.

Debilitating, “Am I ever gonna play this game?” lows.

Right.

You spend a week building the world's most perfect base and getting tons of loot, and then there's what's called online raiding and offline raiding. Online raiding means that I can see my enemy is in their base right now, and I'm gonna try to attack them while they're in their base. With offlining, all Rust players will say you're the scum of the Earth if you offline someone, and then all Rust players also offline people all the time.

Ah.

Yeah. It's—

Yes.

Gamer etiquette.

Yes.

Offlining is when you think, “Hey, I think my neighbor logged off for the night. They just played 6 hours. I've been watching them, and now there's no activity in their base, so I'm gonna blow up their walls and take all their stuff when they're not here.”

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So Rust, because real life is not hard enough, is what it sounds like.

That'd be a great tag.

If I want more stress in my life, I'll play Rust. I can't wait. So that's one. That sounds like a unique experience and a great joy. So, quick number one, Rust is up there.

Call of Duty.

Call of Duty just has its own—

There are a lot of haters. Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 were the pinnacle of Call of Duty, with Black Ops being a very respectable third. But you're never gonna get a better gun feel from a game than you get from Call of Duty. Just study the visual effects, the animation, the modeling, the sounds. Every aspect of shooting a gun in Call of Duty is so masterfully done.

And then the maps—the flow of the multiplayer is just great. There's a map called Crash from Call of Duty 4 that Erin Keller and I studied. Aaron's now the game director on Overwatch. We just sat and studied that map, or Terminal from Modern Warfare 2. We just studied the maps and thought, “This map design is off the hook.” So Call of Duty is definitely up there.

So even though you were not thinking about it, Overwatch ended up being a gigantic success. Did you start thinking about, in this framework of crawl, walk, run, the walk—the PvE piece?

Yes. The PvE piece was what Overwatch 2 was supposed to be. I don't know if people know this or not, but we started working on Overwatch 2 in 2015. Overwatch 1 didn't ship until 2016.

It wasn't work in earnest; it was pitching the game. I remember spending a lot of time with Chris Metzen and Michael Chu brainstorming a framework for what a campaign could look like. We had this idea of a cooperative PvE shooter, and we actually pitched it to the team before we launched because we were trying to put a bunch of runway in front of us.

That worked against us, and it's one of the biggest mistakes I've made as a creative leader in my career: Overwatch 2. There were 2 points of failure for me. The first was that I had people on the game team who didn't like PvP or competitive shooters. They really loved the Overwatch universe and wanted to play these characters and heroes, but they wanted to do it on their own terms in a PvE setting.

So even though Overwatch was this runaway success and everybody was talking about it, they felt like they couldn't really engage with it. People on the dev team were like, “Okay, thank God we shipped that PvP thing. When do we start work on this other thing?” That came from a genuine place of excitement.

The other point of pressure was from the executive team, both the Blizzard and, more so, the Activision executive teams. They started really putting the heat on: “You said Overwatch 2 was gonna be out in 2019.” They were referring back to these slides that had just crazy dates.

You never want to put a PowerPoint deck in front of a corporate executive. You might as well etch it in stone and come down from the mountain on it.

So you just threw some dates because the layout looked good.

Yeah. This is just all bullshit. In the same way we put Overwatch on a tablet—put Tracer on a tablet—and say we have a mobile strategy.

The executives started getting really angry at us because Overwatch 2 was slipping. When Overwatch 1 took off, I remember, very early on, we were in May of 2016, and that year the Olympics were gonna be in Rio, I think. I always like to pay respects to when a big event is happening. I'm like, “Hey, we should do an event for the Olympics.”

You can't call it the Olympics, or else they sue you. Even though you're advertising for them to a bunch of kids who want to play video games and not watch the Olympics.

But we also had 2 developers, Mike Heiberg and Dave Adams, who worked on this quirky thing—they made soccer in Overwatch. We called it Lúcioball. They made a map and they made these mechanics. We were like, “Yeah, let's do an event called the Summer Games.” And we did a live patch that's the Summer Games. It was extremely successful.

After that, we were like, “Yeah, let's do it. Halloween's coming up. Let's do a Halloween event. How cool will that be?” Our fans just loved these events, but there were 2 groups that were struggling with it.

One was that group I told you about on the dev team who was like, “Oh my God, you guys are over-scoping the patches. Why are we doing this Halloween event? We should start work on Overwatch 2. We shouldn't be this focused on the live game.” That was fucking nuts. That was just crazy.

There's this phrase: catch the wave, ride the wave. Most games fall off the back of the wave. They don't catch the wave. No one plays it, or they play it for 2 weeks. If you're lucky enough to have caught the wave, ride it till the end. My instincts at that point were, “Let's just keep going. How many more of these live events can we do?”

So now there's this wave in the live game and events, but the pressure on creating Overwatch 2 was building.

Yeah. We had a coalition on the team that really wanted Overwatch 2 built instead of the live events. Then the executive pressure became monumental. What would have been correct was to do more world events, to keep it going, but the major derail was Overwatch League.

The weirdest part about Overwatch League is that I believe in it. I helped pitch it along with some other people. We thought it was the future of esports: regional-based teams, ensuring minimum player salaries and player protections. There was a lot that was very good about Overwatch League.

And there would be teams associated with particular cities.

Yes.

And it would be international. It would be real competition. So the dream, the ambition was really huge there.

Yeah. The teams part of the dream was more like regional-based teams, player protection, trying to make esports more of a first-class citizen, because there were all these stories about shady teams screwing their players over. There was a lot that was very good about Overwatch League.

Where it got away from us was that there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League—too much so—and then it got overmarketed to the people buying the teams.

They went on this road show where they had a deck, basically, and you could put anything in a deck and sell anything. They were pretty much selling the Brooklyn Bridge—that Overwatch League was going to be more popular than the NFL. We got a bunch of billionaire investors in these teams.

When 2018 started, for example, the day I got back, they said, “We signed this huge deal with Twitch for streaming of Overwatch League,” like a media rights deal. That meant that here were all these commitments we had made for Overwatch League, like in-game stuff that had to exist. A lot of it was integration with Twitch, camera control, and that kind of stuff.

The other part of it was a bunch of skins and uniforms for all the teams, which was not just getting the art in the game. There were huge technical challenges to how all that worked, how it was efficient, how it hit the right memory footprint, and all of that kind of stuff. All of your plans at that point kind of go out the window. You’re not going to work on new world events. You’re not even really focused on Overwatch 2; you’re just treading water.

There was a lot of talk: “Oh God, the deal didn’t go well, and we’ve got to do make-goods to make the deal better for them.” I’m like, “Just give them some money back. If the deal isn’t what people wanted, don’t put it on us, the Overwatch team, to support this beast.” It was a great idea, but the wrong instincts—and I don’t know how to phrase this in a way that’s not damning—there was too much focus on, “Let’s make lots of money really fast.”

A lot of people got dragged into it. While Overwatch League was great for Overwatch in terms of the players that it brought in, the Overwatch League players were awesome. I love them. The Overwatch League staff at Blizzard were some of the nicest, most motivated, creative people. All of these organizations got built, and they were all great, but it was a house of cards waiting to fall.

And when it became more about the money versus the quality of the experience of the different teams playing together and actually building this ecosystem of esports?

The financial reality kicked in. We didn’t just have executives at Activision and Blizzard who cared about the bottom line of Overwatch; we had all these people who had basically invested in the game, and then they started to express their opinions.

Originally, the business model was going to be that they were going to do in-person events, and there were going to be big ticket sales and merch, and all of that. Really quickly, everybody learned, “Yeah, we can’t do in-game events when you have a London team and a Shanghai team. How does this work?” So that fell apart super quickly.

The merch was good, but it wasn’t going to be making NFL-level money, whatever insanity anybody thought that was going to be. So everybody quickly defaulted back to, “Hey, didn’t Overwatch make like $500 million just in the live game last year? What can we sell, and what can you give us?”

That pressure came onto the team, and then there was the pressure to ship Overwatch 2. All the care and love that we had for the live game and the live server—“Let’s just make events and new heroes and new maps”—we were losing all these resources.

By the time of my exit from Blizzard, I believed in Overwatch 2. I think we could have made a great game. I have a lot of hindsight about how I would have designed that game differently with what I know now versus what we ultimately didn’t ship. There is an Overwatch 2 out now, but it’s not the Overwatch 2 that we planned and announced.

So when you’re referring to Overwatch 2 in this conversation, you’re referring to the PvE version?

The PvE version.

Which, by the way, I would have loved to play. I’m one of the people who thought Overwatch was great, but it was PvP, and I would have loved to play the PvE version.

I think everybody would have loved to have played it. There’s a misconception online that all I cared about was PvE and that I didn’t care about PvP. All of the Overwatch 2 PvP maps were something that I said to the team over and over: “We have a PvP audience. If we get anything right, it has to be the PvP.”

We would be lucky to welcome these PvE players, but that’s not guaranteed. So it was never a PvE-only focus.

It’s just almost expanding it to also the E.

Yeah. What eventually broke me was that in 2016 and 2017, I felt very in control of the Overwatch team and the direction of the game as a game director. Working with Ray Gresko as the production director, it felt like we were running Overwatch. We were very, very successful and doing a good job, and I think the fans were happy.

Then, as we transitioned, Overwatch League was the best of intentions. My parents always say, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” That was the Overwatch League, and it ended up being an albatross. Overwatch 2 was the same thing.

What it boiled down to for me—what ultimately broke me in my Blizzard career—was that I got called into the CFO’s office. He sat me down and gave me a date, which at the time was 2020 and was going to slip to 2021, but at the time it was 2020. He said, “Overwatch has to make in 2020, and then every year after that, it needs a recurring revenue of .” Then he said to me, “If it doesn't do dollars, we're gonna lay off a thousand people, and that’s going to be on you.”

That was just the biggest “fuck you” moment I had in my career. It felt surreal to be in that condition. As somebody who’s worked on a lot of games and made a lot of games, you get in these meetings where they’re like, “Fortnite has 1,400 people working on it. If you just hire 1,400 people and make it free-to-play, we’ll make that money, right?”

I had believed I would never work any place but Blizzard. I loved it. It was a part of who I was, and I felt I was a part of it. I literally thought I would retire from the place. I never thought the day would come, and that was it. I was like, “We’re done here.” Luckily for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there.

Blizzard is one of the greatest companies in the history of Earth. They’ve created so many incredible video games. It’s so difficult to create so many hits, and they were done not by chasing money. They were done by small, incredible teams—the hodgepodge that you describe—taking big risks, falling in love with the thing they do, and then just chasing it and working extremely hard.

Just because you figured out a way to make a lot of money doesn’t mean that, at its core, it isn’t this incredible creative journey that’s incredibly difficult to pull off. Just because you got a bunch of really smart, creative people who have somehow figured out how to pull it off multiple times in a row doesn’t mean you can just treat it like a machine.

Every single time, it’s this beautiful journey of a hodgepodge of weirdos working together, and weirdos have to run that thing. If you ever have a chance to create something special, you have to have weirdos at the helm.

To the degree that you don’t have weirdos at the helm—creative minds at the helm—and you have a businessperson at the helm, get out of their way, right? You cannot have the meetings like you’re describing. I don’t just speak about this particular company; it’s the entire industry.

There’s so much joy to be had if we keep creating great games, and I just hope we get to see those great games.

I think there’s a message to creative people out there and people who make stuff. We’re generally so focused on the love of the craft that we get lost in it. We love doing it, and we’re not cutthroat; we don’t have that kind of ambition. We have a different kind of ambition.

But there’s this whole world, especially as soon as you’re lucky enough to have success, that is very cutthroat and very ambitious. For whatever reason, we keep giving ourselves to them, and we need to stop giving ourselves to them.

When we made World of Warcraft, there was no CFO at Blizzard. You don’t need a CFO to make World of Warcraft. You need artists, engineers, designers, producers, and an audio team.

You don’t need to bring in—just because you’re making a lot of money doesn’t mean you need to start adulting by bringing in a CFO. You can figure it out.

There are great finance guys. I’ve worked with finance guys who get it, get out of the way, and respect the process. They’re gamers, and they understand. I wish developers would understand their own value more and stop handing the golden goose to people who don’t deserve it.

How painful was it to say goodbye?

It broke me. I think after you’ve been at a place like Blizzard—which I love Blizzard—to this day, I have nothing but warm, fond memories. There are moments where you’re like, “I wish that hadn’t happened,” but on the whole, that place is the mecca for game development.

Everything I have is due to Blizzard. They provided for me and my family and made me the person I am, so separating from Blizzard was one of the most painful things. I was very sad when I resigned, and I didn’t realize how broken I was until recently—the mourning and grieving I had gone through.

I think I’m a little fucked in the head for not being there anymore. How could I give that up? How could I not be there anymore? It was really, really painful leaving.

Can we just speak to—I don’t know, I don’t think we can give enough love to Blizzard. It’s a legendary company. For me personally, for everybody, for millions of people, it created some of the greatest games ever: Warcraft, the StarCraft universe, Diablo, WoW, and Overwatch.

What made it such a legendary game company, just looking back at the whole of it?

The start is Mike Morhaime, Allen Adham, and Frank Pearce. It was run by 3 gamers. All 3 of them were programmers. They made the games before they just ran the company, so they knew what each of us as developers beneath them were going through, and they protected us. They shielded us from all of the nonsense. Even when they would align with a businessperson, they had a COO in the early days named Paul Sams, and Paul protected us.

They found great people who got it. The company, when I joined, was about 95% developers and 5% operations. When I left, it was 50/50, and that was a 4,500-person company. That love of the games and the respect and good treatment for game developers really turned it into the place that it was: the commitment to excellence, the high-quality bar, and finding passionate people like Chris Metzen, Sam Didier, and Allen Adham.

They were the visionaries of early Blizzard, creating these worlds that we're still making and playing in today. It was infectious and inspirational, and you wore the Blizzard blue with an esprit de corps. You felt proud to be part of it, and you felt like you had made it to be there. Everything you did, you did wanting to respect and honor those who had come before you.

I know that sounds almost cheesy saying it that way, but it really had that sense of reverence. You knew you were part of something special. You didn't take it for granted.

Yeah. That's the sense I got reading everything. Everybody there was part of something that truly, truly, truly honored that time. Just to take a small slice of it, what were some of the brainstorming sessions with Chris Metzen like? I would love to do a podcast with him at some point. What were those brainstorming sessions like? They seem pretty awesome.

They were the best. You could walk into a room. The way I would work with Chris, early on when I was more junior, was just getting creative direction from him.

“Hey, Chris, I'm about to work on this zone called Westfall. What are your ideas? How could I capture them in gameplay?”

“Well, that won't quite work. How about this?”

It was more like that. Later on, I still remember the first discussion I ever had with Chris about Wrath of the Lich King. I went up to his office and said, “Hey, we're finally doing it. We're doing the Northrend expansion. What excites you about Northrend?”

That's all you had to say. He would draw a map and start pulling up old Warcraft II and Warcraft III manuals, showing you pictures he and Sam had drawn, maps, and all of it. He would just go on for an hour, and then I would digest it. I'd listen, taking constant notes. I was photographing his whiteboards all the time, and then I'd go back and start putting those into the design flow: What's a zone? What's a dungeon? What could be cool? What should come first? What should come last?

With Wrath of the Lich King, for example, we wanted to try a very specific design to counter a problem we had in The Burning Crusade: everybody entered through the Dark Portal through Hellfire Peninsula. All the server programmers hated us because everybody loaded into the same zone at the same time. In Wrath of the Lich King, we split them up for better player flow. Plus, it's more interesting the more choice you have. Sid Meier says, “Games are a series of interesting choices,” so we gave them 2 starting zones. That was the flow with Chris.

So often, in that first meeting, Chris had put a zone called Grizzly Hills on the board. I didn't know anything about Grizzly Hills.

“Hey, Chris, talk about Grizzly Hills.”

If you didn't interrupt him, he'd just go for an hour. You had no idea how much of it he had thought through in advance or had existed in previous lore, and how much of it he was just making up on the spot. He's just that charismatic and captivating.

Creating these worlds and being able to brainstorm through them together—that is what you're doing. As a consumer of those worlds, you take it for granted that they're incredible, but you're crafting them. You're looking at a blank sheet of paper and then, together, coming up with...

My job, as I saw it working with Chris on World of Warcraft specifically, was to be the translator into gameplay of what Chris wanted—how to get it to play the way Chris wanted.

My favorite story is that we're working on The Burning Crusade, and we're in this meeting. Chris is the gentlest, sweetest guy, but because he carries himself with such confidence and everybody's in awe of him, the junior developers get kind of intimidated by him.

We're in this meeting and we're talking about Silvermoon City because we're introducing the blood elves. Chris says, “And Silvermoon City's got the tallest fucking tower in all of Azeroth. I mean, it is the tallest thing. It's mind-blowing, the awe of it. Only the blood elves could build it.”

Fast-forward about 2 weeks later. I'm walking through the hall, and I see a bunch of level designers and artists all crowded around a screen. On the screen, they've dragged in Blackrock Mountain, Karazhan, and the Stormwind Cathedral.

“What the fuck are you guys doing?”

“Well, Chris said that the Silvermoon Tower had to be the tallest thing in World of Warcraft, and so we're measuring how tall all of these other things are so we can make the tower taller.”

“Guys, Chris doesn't know how tall the Burning Steppes and the cathedral in Stormwind are. What Chris means is just make the tower really fucking tall. You don't need to measure it.”

“Oh, okay. That's okay?”

“Are you willing to take the heat if he—”

“I'm willing to take the heat on this one, guys.”

Yeah. It's just a feeling. It's a vibe.

It's a vibe.

Yeah. I also have to personally give all the love in the world to the current Diablo IV team. Of the Blizzard games, I've most recently spent a huge amount of time in Diablo, and they've created a wonderful experience. It's not just the loot. It's the whole experience—the art, everything together.

The seasons they've created have made it a really wonderful world. I can see and feel how much effort goes into that.

They're crushing it. I think Diablo IV, in modern times, is one of the best worlds that they've built. They understand Diablo players. That community is so hardcore and so demanding, and that team is amazing.

Yeah, there's a lot of richness. I don't know how often you get that, but it's really the perfect Diablo game. They've really evolved and grown a lot. There's this whole mathematical component of so many numbers everywhere, and it's all balanced really masterfully.

Then, of course, you have to come up with new content with the seasons, and they figure out ways to do that at a crazy pace and still make it super fun.

They're a great live team, yeah.

For me personally, like I said, the couch co-op experience has been really great. That aspect of it is really great—just all of it. It's one of the greatest games in recent history.

One of the things I wanted to mention, because this is a powerful speech, is that instead of doing some kind of corporate goodbye as you were leaving Blizzard, you allegedly shared with your team a video of David Bowie giving advice. People should go watch this clip, but if I may read it, Bowie says:

“Never play to the gallery. Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that, if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people's expectations. I think they generally produce their worst work when they do that.

“And the other thing I would say is that, if you feel safe in the area that you're working in, you're not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting.”

Speaking of which, you are just about in a place to do something exciting. After leaving Blizzard, you told me that you tried to take some time off. How did that work out for you?

Not so well. My wife, who is wonderful, told me I needed to take at least a year off. I'd been going really hard. I'd gone 19 years barely taking vacation, and I let Blizzard consume me. I was crushed by leaving because I loved the place, and I didn't know what to do with myself. I was pulling weeds in the backyard.

Literally. Gardening.

Yeah. Well, she won't let me garden in the garden because that's hers, but I'm allowed to pull the weeds. So I got very good at that. I was very proficient.

Then, of all things, I cracked out on Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and unlocked Dark Matter Ultra, which is a crazy achievement to get in that game. So I did that, and then I just couldn't help it. It's how I'm programmed.

At this point, it was late spring, early summer, and I was just sitting in the backyard. I started writing in Notepad: “Here's a game I want to make.” It was so terrifying because, for 19 years, I had worked with the greatest developers, I thought, in the industry.

There would be moments where it was like, “Okay, I want to do a game world map.” I’d say, “Hey, Erin, you’re amazing at making game world maps. You do that.” And I’d be like, “I need some story hooks. Hey, Chris, what do you think would be cool here?” It’s so collaborative, and I was surrounded by the best of the best. There I was by myself.

I was out there again, and I loved it. It brought all the joy of game making. I thought games were no longer fun to make because it was only about business, and somebody was asking me for unreasonable amounts of money and unreasonable amounts of time. I had forgotten the pure joy of the craft of making games.

I was designing and watching YouTube videos to learn Unreal, Adobe Illustrator, and all these things to help me make games—whatever, Blender. I had no right to be doing any of that, and it just felt so amazing to do it. I came to 2 realizations. One, I never want to work for someone else again. I never want to create something and then have somebody take my baby away from me. That’s really hard when that happens, and it’s happened a few times now, where you have to just let something go that you created.

I wanted it all to be focused on the craft of making games—the art, programming, design, audio—not about the bullshit of the games industry. I’m not interested in the games industry. I’m not interested in the business of games. I’m not interested in the entertainment industry. It’s just game jamming, making stuff that we’re going to play together.

Around that time, my—I call him my development soulmate—there’s a programmer named Tim Ford. He reached out and said, “Hey, man…” He was an associate tech director on Overwatch at the time. He said, “Yeah, I don’t think I can do this anymore. It’s just not like it was. I just handed in my notice.” I said, “Whoa. Well, if you want to do something together, fuck it. Let’s take a stab and just see what happens.”

Tim came over to my house. Before that, he said, “My last day’s on Friday. My exit interview’s at 1:00. I’m going to be over to your house at 2:00 that afternoon.” I said, “Well, don’t you think you should take some time off, Tim, before whatever’s next for you? Take a month off. Meg, your wife, will appreciate it. Just go pull weeds in the garden for a while.” He said, “I’m a programmer. All I’m going to do is program for a month if I take a month off. I might as well start programming our game.”

Brilliant.

It was so awesome when he said that.

Brilliant.

He came over and I pitched him this idea for a game. I pitched him, “Let’s start a company.” And that was it. That was the birth of us making a studio.

Meanwhile, as far as the outside world is concerned, you’ve disappeared off the face of the Earth, but you were actually working on a game.

Yeah, I needed to be away from the world. I wanted to not get attention from anyone. I needed to not read my name on Reddit or any internet site. I wanted to not come up, to let some other Jeff Kaplan bubble to the top of the Google search list.

You know our man Dinoflask is going to be all over this conversation, right?

Oh, God. This one’s going to set him back some time. But, yeah, I needed—

You know what to do.

I needed none of that to happen. I just needed to be able to mourn the loss of Blizzard and create on my own, so it was great.

At that time, as soon as it was announced that I was leaving Blizzard, I had about 60 people reach out to me. This was April of 2021, and investment money was nuts. Both the VC money and the strategic money were crazy, especially the Chinese companies, because apparently they weren’t getting publishing numbers in China or something. The whole economy was crazy, and everybody was trying to throw money at me, which was a very good position to be in to start a company.

What Tim and I did was say, “We’re not doing this for money, but here’s the game we want to make. It’s going to take this many developers, and we think it’s going to take this length of time, and that means the budget is this. For any of these people who want to invest in us, we need to hit that number, but after that, we’re not going to go for more money. It’s not an auction to raise as high as we can go. We’re going to optimize for control.”

I don’t know if this is something that you can talk about, but I got a chance to see the game for a few hours, and I have to say it’s incredible, Jeff. It’s incredible. I almost immediately fell in love with the world and everything I saw. I’m tempted to say some of the things I saw, but it’s just an incredible game.

How much can you talk about it? Do you know what it’s going to be called? Can you talk about that? Do you know about the company? Are you allowed to say any of that?

Sure. This is the most unconventional way to talk about this stuff for the first time. Our company name is Kintsugiyama, which most people will struggle to pronounce.

Nice.

The company name has a deep meaning to me, which I’m happy to explain later if you’re interested. The game we’re working on is called The Legend of California, and it’s an open-world game. People are going to call it a survival-crafting game. People like to compartmentalize these. I think it’s an action game. It’s a game that takes place on a mythical island of California.

Mm-hmm. In the 1800s.

In the gold rush.

If you’re trying to nail the most important time in California history, it’s got to be that gold rush.

So, it’s this beautiful, almost ultra-realistic version of California, but it’s in an alternate history, an alternate version of California—

—where it’s an island, almost like an Atlantis-type of ethereal island, but still very realistic to what the California terrain is—

—and that time period. So, it’s this weird amalgamation of the ultra-realistic and the surreal.

The theme of the game is very weird. We’re not trying to make a historical game. There’s no historical accuracy to this. In fact, the island, when first discovered, is uninhabited. That’s already not true. As we know, there were lots of people in California. It’s an island, which we know is not true.

We want it to feel authentic to that time period because we think that time period is cool: prospectors, cowboys. It’s a really fun thing for us to explore—all of those themes, people in mines. We want to build mines, and we just want to create a world that you can live in.

I love creating worlds. Everything that I’ve worked on before, from World of Warcraft to Overwatch, it’s always been, how do you create this place for players to escape to?

It’s an online multiplayer game. I should say, the experience of it is just gorgeous, and the music is wonderful.

I’m glad you like it.

One of my favorite things is just going down to the mine and digging. That’s done extremely well. As you described, the whole world is voxels, so it’s generated. Can you explain how that works?

Yeah. As a world, we handcrafted the world. The shape of California is always the familiar shape of California, except it’s an island. There’s no Nevada on the eastern side. We handcrafted all of that. It looks gorgeous, and places like Yosemite are where you would expect Yosemite to be.

All of those familiar landmarks are there, but then we have dozens of points of interest, and those move around the map depending on the map seed. The map is also tiered in terms of difficulty. We don’t really have levels in this game. We have tiers, and there are only 4 tiers right now. Maybe that will change.

The way that the map tiers itself changes with every world seed. Any server that you join will have a different seed in terms of how the tiers play out. Mojave might be the easiest newbie area on your server, but on my server it’s an endgame, tier-4 area.

All of our notable points of interest also move around. We have a really amazing point of interest that we call Dread Rock, which is inspired by Alcatraz. Sometimes it’s in San Francisco, but sometimes it can be sitting in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

It integrates it into the environment, to where it makes sense to be in that environment. As you said, so much of what makes a world is sound and lighting, and that’s definitely a thing that I’ve noticed. It’s probably the most beautiful sunset and sunrise I’ve seen in a game.

We have a great lighting artist, this amazing guy named Mike Marra. There are a lot of inspirations for this game, but there’s a painter named Albert Bierstadt, whom I discovered while researching California. He painted these epic landscape pieces of Yosemite and a lot of the other gorgeous parts of California.

Yeah, we’re looking at one photo of his.

Yeah, it’s just amazing, and his paintings were huge, too. I’d love to see one in person.

You see a painting like that and you’re saying, “We want to create that world.”

Yeah. When I see that painting, this is what video games bring to the table. Every art form that evolves after another gets to incorporate previous art forms. Movies got to take sound and fine art. We get to take everything, including movies.

It’s Katamari Damacy, the art form. I see a Bierstadt painting, and I want to walk around that world. I want to see what’s around the corner. Our lighting artist, Mike, sees these pictures, and he’s like, “Okay.”

Yeah. Hold my beer. “I’ll make it look like that.” We are all blown away by how much impact just the lighting has. I’m not an artist, so I don’t think about things like color theory, the lights, the clouds, and what all of that is bringing to this. I just know I want to live in that world, and these are the types of worlds that we want to make.

So, what do you want the tone of the game to be? What do you want the feeling of the game to be?

This is really different. It’s been hard for people. When people were talking to us about it, they knew me and Tim, and they were like, “Oh, the Blizzard guys, the Overwatch guys. You’re making a bright, aspirational, future team-based hero shooter, right?” And I’m like, “Why would I want to do that?”

First of all, respect to Blizzard, but I don’t want to try to crib Blizzard and make a pseudo-Blizzard game. This is—I want to make a Kintsugi Yama game. Me and Tim and this crack team—we’re only 34 people. We want to define what a Kintsugi Yama game is, and this world seemed so inspiring to us.

The setting is really interesting. I think California can be a game world. I think we can make it beautiful and interesting. We don’t have to follow history or geography. We can do a spin where it feels authentic. We can have guns that feel like they’re from that time period, but we’re not spaceships and aliens and steampunk. That’s what we would have done at Blizzard. We’re going to be a little different here.

The tone of this game—Metzen would describe Blizzard as the hero factory. We make heroes, and what he means by that is not only are we making heroes, but we make the players into heroes. This game is going to have an edgier tone. You’re going to enter this world, and it’s going to feel lonelier. It’s going to feel mysterious, larger than you. You’re going to feel small until you earn the right to feel big.

It’s going to feel really dangerous. You’re going to want to see what’s over that next hill, but if the sun is setting, get to shelter. You’re going to think, “I can’t wait to get back to my ranch and turn on my cozy fireplace and wait till morning.” We want more of that vibe.

It’s more solitary, almost scary, but beautiful. That mix, that tension. I hate to ask this question, but given our previous discussion about a timeline slide, what do you think a timeline looks like? When do you think it’s possible for somebody in the world to be able to play this game?

This is the beauty of me and Tim getting to run the show, and why we’re excited about it. We can do whatever we want—

Within reason.

Within reason. We’re just going to quietly put it up on Steam and see what happens.

Nice.

No big corporate marketing group would ever think to do that in a million years without some $10 million announcement or whatever. We’ll just put it on Steam, and it would be cool if people wishlisted it. There’s my plug.

I think we are shooting to have some sort of public-ish alpha in March. Then our plan—and something I’m really excited about, because I’ve never gotten to do this before—is that we want to put the game in early access.

Some people hate early access and won’t touch it, and I understand that. Then some people are like, “I want to be in on the ground floor and see the thing from day one and watch it evolve.” So, we’ll put it into early access, and we’ll just run that until who knows when.

Is it scary to you to have a game with some rough edges out there in the wild, where people are interacting with it through the alpha—through the beta?

Yes, and this game has more rough edges. The most rough edges we would have at Blizzard would be showing it at BlizzCon, which was heavily polished and controlled. This is going to be more in development than anything else I’ve ever worked on.

I love it.

That’s part of the excitement too. This is how the sausage gets made. You’re going to see it front row.

I’m going to try to get myself into the alpha somehow. Anybody who is listening to this, I highly recommend this game. You will not be disappointed. The world itself is just beautiful. So, whoever’s behind it—you and Tim and the team—are doing an incredible job.

Thank you for putting out rough versions of it so we don’t have to wait forever for the perfect thing. You feel like you’re a part of it if you get the imperfect thing. I’m one of the people who like the imperfect. We get to see the rough versions develop and get to be a part of it developing.

I saw the logo. It’s a mountain. Can you explain the meaning behind the name?

Kintsugi is a Japanese craft of repairing broken pottery. There’s a lot of philosophy that goes into it as well. I want to do a good job of explaining it, but basically, you take a broken piece of pottery, and then they would use golden joinery—golden lacquer—to put the piece back together.

The thought was that rather than hiding the scars, you make them more beautiful. The philosophical parts that appealed to me are that there’s a lot of me and Tim in that. We’re so appreciative of our time at Blizzard, but we didn’t come away unscarred.

There’s also a philosophy in kintsugi that nothing’s ever perfect, and the pursuit of perfection is actually a mistake, and that there’s beauty in imperfection. I relate that to myself personally. That’s how I feel in an aspirational way. I’m not saying I’ve achieved it, but in an aspirational way, I want to be that way.

I think it’s also an analogy for the making of games. Making games is a constant pursuit of imperfection. A game is never going to be perfect. Just ask the players. They’re very vocal about it. There’s beauty in the imperfections and strength in something that’s been broken and can be stronger.

You had a heck of a difficult couple of years here, and so in some sense, it represents that beauty in imperfection. Everybody listening to this, I hope you do have it out on Steam. Go check out Legend of California. It’s truly a beautiful world. I’m so glad you’re actually creating this, quietly creating this beautiful, incredible world.

Ridiculous question, but can we talk about some of the greatest games of all time? I know this is a bit of a nerding-out kind of thing, and outside of the games you’ve been part of creating, I think Blizzard has created some of the greatest games of all time. Outside of those, what do you think are on the list?

There’s one that’s the best: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Then there’s this list of greatest games—Zork, Ultima—

So Breath of the Wild is the best, yeah?

The greatest game ever made.

What makes it the greatest game ever made for you?

Every aspect is so thoughtful and so well designed. The art matches the design and the tech, even integrating with the Switch in the way it does. How do you keep making Zelda better? How can The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time exist and somebody make an even better Zelda game?

The way you can chop down a tree and float in a river—the world is a toy, and everything works as you wished and hoped it would work. There’s a narrative aspect to it, really fun combat and action, and itemization. There are so many things that that game gets right that other games are lucky if they get one of those things right and become best in their genre just for getting that one thing right. Breath of the Wild does them all right, and does them all the best.

There’s a certain kind of lightness to the way the world feels, the openness of the world. That’s unlike any other game, right? That’s uniquely that company, uniquely that—

Yeah. No one else—

Because nobody else creates that. You’re right. Under the pressure of having created a bunch of Zeldas that are really great games, to be able to deliver once again—

Nintendo is like the Mecca. They’re the best. That’s all there is to it.

Do you understand how that company works?

No.

They’re not—

I don’t at all.

Because they’ve been around for a long time and still are able to deliver.

I kind of rationally or irrationally just worship them. If it’s from Nintendo, it’s going to be great. Even if my first impression is, “Wow, they’re doing what weird thing with the controller this time?” then you get your hands on it and you’re like, “God.”

My son and I both played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and he makes games too. We had this moment where he said, “I’m so sad after I played it.” He said, “I know I’ll never make anything like this.” It’s that weird thing where you honor it so much and think it’s so great.

Red Dead was like that for me. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game I put on a shrine. Not just because of how brilliant the game itself is, but as a game maker—as a craftsperson who makes games—how the hell do you make that? Only Rockstar, with all the years of making those types of games. No one else can come in at entry level and compete with that.

Purely single-player, narrative-driven. So you also respect that kind of pure—

Yeah. I don’t give anyone a pass. I feel like a lot of gamers and game developers, if it has writing, they’re like, “The story’s so good.” I’m like, actually, very few games have a great story.

But Red Dead has a great story. It has great character development, a good plot, and the dialogue is Tarantino-level, high-quality dialogue. Red Dead’s up there. I have my other games that make the list for me, and these are—I would never tell you to play them. EverQuest and Rust are 2 of the most defining games to me, my career, and my life.

And Rust, I would never recommend somebody go and play it. Rust will come calling to you if you are up to play it.

It is a cult. It’s 100% a cult. When you are ready, it will come down. The sky will part. Okay.

It will come down. It will let you know.

In Rust, you are considered a complete noob that doesn’t know what he’s doing if you don’t have 1,000 hours. Even at 1,000 hours, people would be like, “Oh, you only have 1,000 hours in that game.”

But Rust, and a lot of inspiration for me in the game I’m working on now—it’s not like Rust in that it’s not a PvP-centric game, but it will have PvP.

What aspect of Rust do you draw inspiration from?

I love the resetting world. It’s a great game mechanic, and it’s one that I want to evolve and work upon.

How often do you think the world will reset in Legend of California?

I don’t know yet. Probably every month. We want it to be fast enough that you’re not too attached, but we want to make it rewarding. The trick is coming up with not “Why am I upset that the world resets?” but “Why am I excited that the world resets?”

We know players can get very angry about resetting worlds, but anybody who’s played 5,000 hours of Rust—like some of us—the resetting world is the magic. It’s “I can’t wait for the next reset because the adventure starts all over again.”

If you want to play for the first time with me—if we want to play World of Warcraft, and I’m level 80 and you’re level 1, there’s no meaningful experience we can have together. But in Rust, we just wait for a reset, and we’re both naked on the beach from minute 1.

What about the experience of Rust where you can have everything taken away from you? That part that you—

We’re not doing that.

Great, great, because that feels awfully stressful.

See, I just lost the entire Rust audience when I said we’re not doing that, because if you’re a Rust player, you’re not thinking you’re going to lose everything you have. You’re thinking, “I’m going to take everything somebody else has.”

My perception of the Rust audience is there are 3 people, and they’re in a castle somewhere. It’s a very exclusive group.

They are highly skilled, highly passionate, highly knowledgeable. But, yeah, it’s an inspiration for me. That and EverQuest were defining games for me. The amount of hours I’ve logged in both those games is insane.

What do you think has more hours from Jeff Kaplan: EverQuest or Rust?

Well, you said I was at 6,000 on EQ, so that puts me at—I’m at 5,000 in Rust.

And also in that collection is Zork.

Zork just brings me back to that old IBM PC with my mom and my brother, trying to figure out how to keep the lights on or else the grue’s going to eat us.

Yeah. Certain games just capture your heart, and they stay with you forever.

What do you think is the future of video games? There are a lot of conversations about AI helping expand the storytelling aspects and the world-creation aspects, becoming a tool that people can use more. Maybe creating more believable NPCs, that kind of thing.

But also, as we’ve talked about, the video game industry is changing and evolving and trying to figure out whether the indie game makers will have more power, or whether these larger game makers will have more power. What do you think the future of games looks like?

With AI in mind in particular, I think the current state of AI, trying to integrate it into development, is mostly a hot mess. But I do think that games are a technology-driven art form. Somebody much smarter than me once described it—and I’m paraphrasing—as making a game is like making a movie if you had to invent the camera every time, because you’re inventing the technology of your specific game. I think AI can play a role in that, and it would be silly not to look at it as an option.

The problem with AI right now is that it’s overconfident in what it tries to deliver. Everybody messes around with ChatGPT and Gemini, and you fool around with some of the art generation. It’s fun for non-artists to fool around on Midjourney, but it’s mostly weird and shitty.

Even when trying to have AI answer something for me—I don’t normally make UI in a game, so I’m trying to figure out UMG and Unreal Engine, and I’m asking ChatGPT how to fix a simple problem, like how to make the chat wrap. It overconfidently gives me the wrong answer, and it’s right 1 time out of 10. Its hit rate has to be a lot better.

I think there are a lot of moral concerns around AI when it comes to creative pursuits as well. No one’s creative work should ever be used by AI without their permission. Voice actors and artists—AI can’t be lifting from them without their permission. That’s just immoral. It’s no different from stealing, so that’s wrong.

I’m curious, especially as somebody who runs a small studio with 34 people, about the points of tedium that AI could help with—things that I don’t want to do and I’m not going to hire someone to do. I have a really dumb example: I’m making a bunch of images, I sized them all incorrectly because I’m dumb and I’m not an artist, and I did it all in Photoshop. I had 2,000 images that were the wrong size. I can have ChatGPT resize those and zip them into a file for me, and it literally takes about a minute to do that.

I wasn’t going to hire an intern to do it. I was just going to work an hour or 2 hours later that night to do it. It made my life easier; it didn’t take a job. That seems okay.

As long as that ethical line stays in place, what I don’t worry about is that no matter how good AI gets, it’s never going to draw a picture like Arnold Tsang. It’s never going to tell a story like Chris Metzen. That human spirit is irreplaceable.

Yeah, it’s hard to put into words what that magic is that humans produce, but they do. Truly great creative minds and truly great creative teams create something special.

It’s hard to really articulate exactly what’s missing with AI, what people call AI slop. It creates really beautiful imagery and beautiful stories and very believable text, but it’s not quite—it doesn’t have that edge that’s human. Maybe it’s the imperfections.

Yeah, I think so. AI, to me, right now, is like an interesting fever dream.

Yeah.

That’s the point I’m at with it.

And a useful tool for the mundane tasks, like you said. But do you think small studios have hope for the future of gaming?

Small studios are the future of gaming. The big studios basically acquire the small studios for new IP and ideas, and the small studios grow. The really compelling, new, innovative ideas are going to come out of small studios.

What advice would you give to video game creators and small teams if they want to create a truly special game?

They know how to do it. If they’re doing it, they know how to do it.

To video game developers in general: own the craft. Own our art form. Stop giving it to these fucking corporate jackals. You are the golden goose. Keep your eggs.

Jeff, formerly from the Overwatch team, I have to say from the bottom of my heart—and I think I speak for millions of people—thank you for everything you’ve created in this world.

Now that I’ve gotten the chance to see the new game, I can’t tell you how excited I am to try it. Thank you for everything you’ve created. Thank you for everything you represent. Thank you for remaining and fighting for us as one of us.

Thank you, and thank you for talking today.

Thank you, Lex.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeff Kaplan. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from Franz Kafka, "Don't bend. Don't water it down. Don't try to make it logical. Don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.