Jeff Kaplan

So-

… my first, like, what online gaming, what defined online gaming for me was Quake and Doom and Duke Nukem. You know, it started with Doom and they had a… You could basically LAN. You could network with your friends or you could connect with a modem and hook up with somebody. And that was like a 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, like, that 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. Like, that’s where everybody knew what they were doing. The systems were more refined. And this Quake community formed with all of these, you know, great websites, mods. The community was divided into … There were two castes of players. The low ping bastards, the LPBs … and then the rest of us, you know. And I remember rolling into Quake matches, you know, on a dial-up modem with a 300 ping connection, and I thought it was the greatest thing ever. And just, just connecting with people. Like I said, the, the websites.

To this day, the only gaming website I read- I don’t read any of the news sites anymore, but I read Blue’s News. Which was like, like … Someone actually teased me recently. I linked him a story. I’m like, “Oh, did you hear this new thing’s coming out?” And I sent the link, and they’re like, “Dude, this is from Blue’s News. Like, what time machine did you just step out of?” And a guy named Stephen Heaslip… I’m probably pronouncing his name wrong. I apologize, but it was actually through that site that I learned about EverQuest.

They had those programmer .plan updates, the .plan files. And guys like Carmack would … You know, they’d post about what code they were writing or how they had optimized something, or just their personal life. Like, you know, the Ferrari talk would always happen … once they had achieved success. And there was an id 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.” And I was like, “How does anybody leave id, the greatest institution in all of gaming ever, to work on any other game?” I’m like, “This guy must be crazy. Or whatever this EverQuest thing is, I need to see it. I need to know what’s going on.” And if he hadn’t have 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 … Like, 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 Wolf 3D, that was the first … I remember playing Wolfenstein when it was a 2D game. You’d run around. You’d dress up as a German. You’d throw a grenade.

To see it in 3D… And it’s funny. You look back at the screenshots or videos of it now, and it seems almost childish. Like, “Oh, why were you so excited about that?” And you were transported. There… It was the intimacy of first person. You know, putting the hands in front of you, holding the gun, being transported to Nazi Germany, but you’re the hero fighting the Nazis. And then the evolution. Like, when Doom came out, I’m a huge Army of Darkness fan. Like, one of my favorite movies of all time. And I was like, “This is Army of Darkness, the video game.” You know? Like, “Give me the boom stick. Here we go.” And the graphical advances… But it wasn’t just how the game looked, it was how it played.

The smoothness kept getting better. The responsiveness, the sharpness of the gameplay. You have to credit id in those days and Carmack and Romero. I … As somebody who worked on an FPS, I … That wouldn’t have existed without them. Credit where credit’s due.

And by the way, we should say you’re … As a gamer, your range is incredible. You are a legit first-person shooter gamer, but you also obviously love the more MMO world, rich, exploratory kinda game. So it’s fascinating. But yeah, there is … On the technology stack that brought something like Quake or Wolfenstein 3D to life, there’s a threshold which you pass of realism where you can immerse yourself into that world. I had the same exact experience with Wolfenstein 2D taking a step to 3D, and it was like tears in my eyes. Like, “This is incredible.” Like, my memories of Wolfenstein 3D is it was like ultra realistic. It’s silly to say now. Writing career

It was the feeling like you were there. Yeah, what an incredible age. And some of that, the 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, 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?

Well, it started with being a fan first and being inspired and reading, and it’s the, not only being transported to a different world or into a different person, but also, you know, the way that stories can touch emotions in you and trigger feelings sometimes you didn’t even know you had. And that was very appealing for me. And the big challenge with it is, 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, you know, 1984 or Green Hills of Stranglethorn, and I think it’s amazing. And now I’m gonna try to write something that somebody is gonna read.”

That’s a giant leap of faith. You know, that’s a moment of putting yourself out there completely, and there’s gotta be some part of that that’s ego. There’s some part of it that’s masochistic. And I think for people who want to create and build stuff, they can’t help but to do it. You don’t really have an option. That’s just how you’re wired, and you’re gonna do it anyway. And, you know, I admire people like Dickinson who can just write all the poems and leave them in a drawer to be discovered by somebody else. You know, that’s one way to go about it.

Yeah, Franz Kafka, you know, a lot of the stories he wrote, never published, and he asked for all of them to be destroyed. And then it’s only because of his friend that ignored his request that we even have many of his stories. It’s like to be that kinda… I mean, 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, 19 declared that he’s going to be the greatest writer of the 20th century. And he turned out in many, in the eyes of many to be one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. But there’s, like, millions of kids just like James Joyce, writers, they’re declaring exactly that, that turn out not to be.

But that is in some cases, in many cases, maybe most cases, you have to have that ego- … to say, “I’m gonna…” Yeah, right. “I read 1984,” “and I’m going to write the next 1984.”

Yeah. And 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, I mean, in a dumpster. I used to keep copious notes, like journals, my writing journals, everything I ever read, every story idea. I probably had 20 volumes of just handwritten notes. And then I also kept personal journals of just, you know, to keep the writing habit up of just, you know, what happened in my day, how I was feeling, all of that. And 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 just put it in a dumpster?

Yeah. It was—I think it was necessary. It was necessary. This is like rationalizing it after the fact, you know, which is easy to do. You know? But at the time, I think I was so broken and so defeated with failure that I needed the moment. It was like throwing in the towel for a boxer, you know? It’s that moment of like, “I’m not gonna win this fight, and you need to move on from it.” And if there was any element of that 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 one year when submitting your stories. So there’s a lot of rejection. So it was a long chain of rejection. And then 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 and just, “Who do you give the story to?” You know, you don’t wanna give it to your mom or dad, you know. You kinda wanna give it to somebody who’s gonna really punch you in the nose and tell you what’s wrong with it. And I had left that writing circle to move back to California.

Did you take a bunch of drugs, take your typewriter and drove across, uh-

No.

… acro- Across the United States and then wrote a book about it? Or just to take Kerouac as an example. Anyway, sorry. You went just-

I might have been more successful had- … I done that.

So sorry. So you went back.

So I moved back to California, and I did it for a girl. And I think within two months of moving back, we were broken up. So… And I knew it when I was standing in my studio apartment when it was empty in New York and I was about to close the door for the last time. I had that, like, you know, little me on the shoulder saying, “Dude, what are you doing?”

“This… You’re making one of those epic life mistakes that is gonna come back to haunt you.” And I ended up alone in California, and I think it was a good three years that I structured my life where I was gonna write for eight hours a day, because it’s that writer’s habit. Like, 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 gonna write for eight 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. So I was calling up, generating name lists for a recruiting company, and I would take… Whenever there was East Coast assignments, I would take those so I could start at like 5:00 in the morning.

And I created all this space for me to write, and I just… I had a dog named Jack- … who was… He was a Jack Russell Terrier. And so everybody’s like, “You’re a writer, you named your Jack Russell Terrier Jack.” I’m like, “Because I named him after Jack Kerouac.” “It’s poetic and epic,” and-

Yeah, of course.

… I just looked like a dumbass, but- … it was just me and this dog. And I was writing, you know, all that time intensely. And this was mid to late ’90s, so even though the internet existed, email was very primitive and you had to send a manuscript off, like printed paper- … to all… Like, I was trying to get short stories published in literary magazines, and you had to send an envelope with a return self-addressed stamp. So it was expensive, too. Like if you didn’t have money, you were just… There was a cost to it- … to every single one of them.

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

Yeah. And the, like, big thing that you were hoping for was that the editor would write you a note with the rejection letter. Like, um-

Keep going.

Yeah. And you’d like cling onto this. Like, it was like, “Oh, Glimmer Train said, you know, showing promise.” You know, and you just hang onto that for like a week, you know, pretending like that was… But it was just soul-crushing. And I really stuck… And I became more and more isolated. Part of that was leaving that group of writing friends in New York. I’m prone to just introversion anyway. The type of person I am. Breaking up with the girlfriend at the time. I just sort of fell into that world of, like, all I was doing was writing. And it broke me. Like, I went into very deep and heavy depression. I drank too much. I really had a problem with alcohol. And all those things compounded into just deep, deep depression. And I don’t… There wasn’t like a magic rejection that broke me.

That would have been epic if like- … someone out there is like, “The dude who…” “I’m the dude who broke Jeff that one day.” But I just had a moment where I said, “This is gonna destroy me.” And… Like, I don’t want to be discouraging to anybody, because I really do believe, like you hear it so much, like, “You have to work for your dreams, never give up.” Like, we’re trained this way. Like, “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, like I wasn’t cut out for it. And I stopped.

Sometimes, you know, closing a door is required for another door to open.

Yes.

That’s one of the hardest things to do, is to walk away.

Yeah. And I think, rightly so, our parents, our coaches, our mentors train us not to give up. And I think a lot of us take pride in that, “I’m never gonna give up. I’m gonna do this come hell or high water.” And sometimes there’s that reality, especially when you’re now in your mid-20s, where you have that moment of like, “Am I really gonna be this? Like, am I ever gonna sort of find the light here?” And, maybe, and it’s so hard, it’s so hard to have this moment, “Maybe this isn’t my calling in life,” especially when you don’t know what the next calling is gonna be.

That’s so painful. It’s ’cause you’ve invested so much of yourself, of who you are, of the dreams you’ve had, of this just whole conception of yourself, and you’re watching yourself slide down in terms of becoming isolated, suffering more and more. And then you just have to somehow figure out how to get out of that. And it is true. In that situation, the way to get out is the dumpster. Is to cut it off. Is there advice you can extract from that? There’s a lot of young folks who are in that same situation.

Yeah. I, this is one of those hindsight things where, you know, having gone through it and ended up okay on the other side, which you don’t know at the time, you know? When you’re a young person in your late teens or early 20s, there’s so much pressure on you. And I really think adults don’t help. You know? Every time you run into the younger nephew or whoever and you start to say things like, “Oh, what’s your major? What are you gonna do with that?” “What do you wanna be?” It’s such bullshit to do to a human being. You know?

You’re so lost in the world. I mean, most of us are lost our entire lives, but especially in your 20s, you know, like, you’re lost. So the questions like, yeah, “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 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. And there are really, I mean, that is a real hero’s journey of searching as a young person. That’s a real, like, you know, all the adults, with their wisdom, they’ve stopped searching often. They’ve done the lazy, the comfortable thing. They found their thing.

And so now they look back, they don’t remember how much suffering and how much uncertainty that young people have to deal with.

It’s, there’s confusion, there’s pressure. Like, the pressure we exert on younger people for having it figured out is insane. So the advice that I always give, and it sounds so stupid, like this sounds really trite, but focus on what you wanna do, not what you wanna be. The pressure that society kind of puts on us is, you know, “Oh, do you wanna be an astronaut? Do you wanna be a firefighter? Do you wanna be a writer? Do you wanna be a game maker?” And I think we get lost in the trappings of, like a vision of what that role is- … and how to perform as a fake actor in that role. Versus when you’re off the clock and no one’s asking you any questions-

… you, you know, you’re not at Thanksgiving dinner and your uncle’s pressuring you into, you know, what your future’s gonna be for the rest of your life. When you go home, how do you spend your time? Like, what makes you happy? What brings you fulfillment? And through those paths, you’re gonna find out what you’re gonna become, not what you wanna be. It’s, “What do you wanna do?”

What do you wanna do? The thing that brings you joy on a moment by moment basis. Yeah. That’s brilliantly put. And speaking of which, that’s where you took the pivot. You switched to video games. How did that happen? Gradually? Suddenly? EverQuest obsession

Gradually and suddenly. So when I had that fateful moment where I just sort of gave up with writing, I had these days where I’d structure eight-hour chunks of just, this was writing time, you know? I’d sit solitary typing. All that was gone. And, you know, I could still support myself, which was nice. And then I had this free time and I wasn’t spending it with anybody, I was just alone. Me and the dog, Jack. And I just poured it all into EverQuest. You know, I, it was 1999 when that game came out. And I had a friend, Victor, like kind of a lifelong friend. One of the few friends I had who played computer games, ’cause there was a stigma to that.

You know? It wasn’t, you didn’t walk around telling people you played games. They thought you wasted your time. And my friend, Vic, had bought EverQuest. I’m like, “That’s that game that that guy Brian Hook went to work on. Is it good?” And he’s like, “Yeah, you gotta play it.” And the moment I logged in, I was just transported. It was the world of Norrath. And it wasn’t just the world itself and how it looked, I thought the game was gorgeous, it was the mechanics, you know, that I was this halfling rogue that, you know, had to go out and adventure in the world, and when I killed stuff, I got experience, and I needed better loot to kill more stuff to get more experience. And the sort of draw of progression in the game was amazing.

I, and I just lived my life of, “I can’t wait ’til the next time I log in.” There was a lot of escapism going. 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 it was like 272 played days in three years. So you start to do the math on like, how much time- … in those three years I was living in that world. It was… it was kind of insane.

Well, that’s over 6,000 hours- … of gameplay. Wow. So here going to Perplexity, EverQuest is a long-running 3D fantasy, massively multiplayer online role-playing game, 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. There’s… It’s all humans and they group up- … and they raid together in the game.

Yep. In the context of EverQuest, raiding is usually around 30 people or more getting together to conquer something that you couldn’t beat otherwise. And to do successful raiding, you usually needed to join what in EverQuest everyone referred to as an Uber Guild. So I had this great pride in my EverQuest journey that I… Most of the time leveling up I was unguilded or I was in like a role-playing guild with rogues only. And it was when I got to Level 50 in EverQuest, which was the top level, I got invited into this guild called Legacy of Steel, which on our server was the top. Every server had a top guild.

And I was on a server called The Nameless Server, and the top guild was Legacy of Steel. And that, the thrill of getting 30 people together to go see if you could beat, you know, 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. Like, you would literally scream out. You’re alone in your room at home- … but you felt like you were there with these people and you would audibly cheer out when you won, and you’d feel depressed when you lost, and it was a game of high highs and low lows, and it did everything right. It was amazing.

So 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. So organizing people in an online game like EverQuest is like herding cats- … ’cause, you know, everyone has their own will. Some people are loot motivated, some people want the guild to do well, some people are just lonely and want people to hang out with. And there was also a lot of depression in the EverQuest community. It was something I suffered with, but a lot of people, you know, anytime you’re feeling sad or down, you’re looking for escape. And one of the great things video games brings us is escapism. And 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. And what’s weird is you enter the cycle where being with other people gives you comradery and relief and makes you feel like you’re not doing so bad in life, but you can quickly enter a cycle of… But then you’re withdrawing from life and it makes you feel that way more to where you can only get the fix from the game at that point. So it’s… Psychologically, there’s a lot going on there.

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

In the late ’90s, everyone was talking shit. You know what I mean? Like, 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. And to coordinate these people, like you just had to repeat everything like 200 times. Like, “Okay, we’re gonna port from North Ro. Everybody get to North Ro.” And then you’d have to repeat that for like six hours-

… to have any chance of like 20% of the people showing up in North Ro. And I sort of like… At first I joined the guild, I was just like the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed. Like, I was like one of the few rogues in the guild. I just wanted to be helpful. I really admired the people running the guild. Like, we had a great guild leader. And it was just a really fun experience. And, you know, the guild leader one day just disappeared. Like, he quit and he was going through, you know, his own thing, and that’s what would happen in EverQuest. Like, people would just kinda disappear all of a sudden. There wasn’t a, “Hey, in about a month, I’m gonna stop playing because I’m starting this new job.”

People had to quit in some dramatic way, where they just disappear, and basically, our guild leader stopped playing.

Did you miss them when they disappeared? Like, we, we should say that most of the people, maybe all of them, were anonymous. So you just- …have a username, and you don’t really say who you are in real life.

Absolutely. In those days, there was a great stigma to mentioning your, any real-life info. You just kind of 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.

And then it was a surprise if they were actually female. Like 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. The funny part for me with EverQuest is, you know, you play a game as much as I played EverQuest, and people are like, “You threw years of your life away.” Like, “You can’t win a game like that.” And I’m like, “I don’t know, like, 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. Like, 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, like, 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, you know, it used to be, and still is somewhat the case, that books do that same kind of thing. They- …they take you on a journey. But video games, for a long time, you’re right, they had a stigma. Like, I couldn’t tell people. I felt like I was doing, like, heroin or something. Like, I felt like I was doing this secret, dark thing. It usually is in the dark. There’s just a secretive nature to it, like I’m doing something really dark and shady.

It wasn’t mainstream.

It wasn’t.

It wasn’t accept-… There was a stigma to it. And one of the weirdest parts of that is, you know, I mentioned, like, you could type in the /played in EverQuest. Well, if you did the /played on how much TV people watch, what would that look like? It would blow- …6,000 hours out of the water, easily. Well, it… 20 years ago it would have, you know? Not today.

Now it’s the phone, yeah. Yeah. But then, 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. And there were times where you try to quit.

Oh, you took a break sometimes?

Yeah. You think you’re quitting for good. You’d have those moments of, like, “I’m doing this too much. I need to move on in life. I’m gonna put it down and walk away, and hopefully not come back.” And there were times where 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. Like, the one before that was called Scars of Velious, which was an amazing expansion. And I had gotten the job at Blizzard, and I guess I’m just an obsessive person. So all the time and energy that I had put into EverQuest, the second, you know, the second, my first minute started at Blizzard, that was my new obsession. Getting hired at Blizzard

So 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. Username, Tigole. You gave a lot of edgy feedback to the devs, telling them in now famous… There’s several rants. There’s a famous one where you tell many of them 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.

And it’s funny, because, like, you look back to those messages, it’s inspiring to me. It should be informative and inspiring to a lot of people, because you’re really, legit, full-time talking shit. And now, and you always have been, like, 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?

So when the first guild leader left, Legacy of Steel, the founder… He, he was a guy named… His online name was Dread. That was his name. He left, and our guild was kind of in this listless spin for a while. And eventually, somebody stepped up and took his position as guild leader, and that person’s name was Ariel-

… who was this blonde wood elf warrior female, who always refused to wear a helmet because she thought their character was so pretty, wanted to show their face all the time. So Ariel was a great guild leader for us, and made me like an assistant guild leader, raid leader, officer type in the guild. And over time, Ariel got busier and busier, and, you know, would send me messages like, “Hey, I’m not gonna be online, you know, tomorrow,” or, “I’m not gonna be online tonight. Can you run the raid? Can you run the raid?” And running the raids was very natural for me. And it was my first experience with leadership in my life, of like how do you motivate people? Like, what does motivation look like? What does discipline look like? How do you inspire people?

When do you force people versus encourage them, you know? So it was a learning experience for me on the fly, and I had the safety net of the real guild leader would log in eventually.

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

At- at least EverQuest guild leader, that’s- that’s as much-

Uber guilded-

… as I could say.

Uber guild leader.

Uber guild leader. Best guild on the Nameless server. So as time went on, Ariel became busier and busier, and then one day, they contacted me and we were having this like whisper back and forth, and they said, “You’re gonna 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 … Like around this time Half-Life 1 had come out, and with both Duke Nukem and Half-Life 1, one of the incredible things that those companies did back in the day was when they shipped the game, they shipped the editor on the CD.

And if you were curious enough, you could like fire up that editor and fool around with it. So I made a- a Duke Nukem level, and you’d send it off to like those UK programming magazines, and you know, you’d get excited because your level was in, you know, some random magazine. And then I started making like Half-Life levels. And Ariel had stepped down as guild leader. I had become guild leader.

And then at one point, Ariel contacts me and says, “Hey, you know, you were talking about those Half-Life levels you made. I want to see those.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s cool.” Like, “I didn’t know you played Half-Life.” Like, “Yeah, maybe we can get a server up and I can play them.” And Ariel tells me, “No, mail them to this address in Irvine.” And- because I- again, to rewind in the time machine for a second, to send something like a Half-Life level over the internet would have- … taken like 12 hours. So you actually like burned it onto a CD and stuck it in the mail. So I put my Half-Life levels, I sent them to Ariel, and he says, “You know, my name’s Rob. I’m a designer at Blizzard Entertainment.”

“I hear you’re in Pasadena ’cause you mentioned it.” You know, I would write about, you know, the Rose Parade and all these things on our website. You know, I kind of … It was blogging before blogging existed, so he knew I lived in Pasadena, and he’s like, “Irvine’s only an hour away. Why don’t you come down, see Blizzard, and you can also meet …” and he names like four people in the guild. And I’m like, “They all work at Blizzard too?” He’s like, “Yeah, we’re all Blizzard.” And it was so weird because during that era, I didn’t have a lot of money. It was not like … Kind of nowadays it feels like everybody plays every game, but you had to be selective. So like I never bought StarCraft or Diablo or Warcraft.

I was much more of the Half-Life, Quake, Quake III guy around that time, and I’d never played a Blizzard game, and I just got invited to go to Blizzard Entertainment.

Was Blizzard already legendary, you know, with the Warcraft and StarCraft? Is there … Was it building this like great legend of this game company that seemingly doesn’t miss?

It was very much on its way to enshrining itself as being one of the legendary game … Like, it was beloved- … by gamers, but there were still ignorant people like me who hadn’t played, you know, War II or Diablo II or StarCraft, which was shocking to people.

So you weren’t like freaking out, freaking out?

No, I was freaking out in a different sense. I’m like, “Am I gonna get mugged when I-” Like, “Who are … Is this a scam?” Because you didn’t meet people off the internet. So I drove down there. I ended up … There was Rob Pardo- … who at that time was the lead designer on Warcraft III, and he was Ariel. You know, so okay, it wasn’t a woman after all. It wasn’t this blonde wood elf. You know, I don’t know what you expect at that point.

It was Rob Pardo. To this day, a great friend of mine named Scott Mercer was the enchanter in our EverQuest guild, a guy named Dalomin. There was a guy named Roman Kenney who was like this totally psychotic wizard who played in our guild. And I had lunch with these guys, you know, we just went out to Irvine to like a restaurant. And, you know, forgive me for the misuse of the phrase, but it was like my coming out moment. And we talked about games having that stigma and being embarrassed about who you are and what you like. Like I, up until that point, I would never tell friends, family, like, “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.

And I’m out to lunch with these guys in Irvine, and we’re talking about dragons and swords and, you know, raid tactics and talking shit on all the people in the guild. And I literally had this moment where I felt like myself for the first time. I just felt so comfortable, and that was an eye-opening moment. And after that, after that lunch happened, he invited me for a couple more lunches down, you know, just… I just saw it as like, “Oh, now, I’m…” You know, I made friends with these people online. Now we know each other in real life, and they happen to work for this game company. And at another one of the lunches, they invite this troll warrior to have lunch with us, whose name in the game was Barfa, the Troll Warrior.

And Barfa wasn’t somebody who played with us all the time, but kind of like Ariel got into the guild kind of on the side. You know, it was one of those like inside invites of like, “Who’s Barfa?” “I don’t know, but Barfa is in the guild now.” And there was at the time, it was a new dungeon called The Hole, and we had never done it before. And we jumped down in this hole, and we’re doing this whole dungeon, and everything goes wrong, as it’s prone to do in EverQuest. And the whole guild escapes except for Barfa, whose troll character’s so big, he can’t jump out of the exit.

And I hand the potion to Barfa, and I say, “Here, use this. It’ll teleport you out.” And I’m a rogue, I can just stealth and get out of the dungeon on my own. So I saved Barfa, not really knowing who Barfa was, and I did it with a very expensive potion. Mm-hmm. Having lunch, Rob introduced me, “This is Allen Adham. He plays Barfa.” Mm-hmm. I’m like, “Oh, Barfa!” And we, you know, he has a… “You saved me in The Hole that time.” Well, it turns out Allen was the founder of Blizzard, and he was the head… He was sort of the head of everything at that time. It was Allen, Mike Morhaime, and Frank Pearce. And what I didn’t realize what these lunches were, like I just loved them because I felt like I was myself.

I felt true happiness being surrounded by these, you know, people who were talkin’ about video games and I felt comfortable around. And one day, Rob logs into EverQuest. He wasn’t playing much at the time, and he said, “I want you tomorrow to check the Blizzard job site.” Mm-hmm. I’m like, “Okay, like, I’ll check the Blizzard job site.” And they had announced World of Warcraft, and posted on the job site—mm-hmm—was the job for an associate quest designer. And the funniest part of it was, I forget if it was a requirement or a plus in the job description, but they’re like, “We really want somebody with a creative writing degree.” Hmm. And I’m like, “You guys set this up for me.” Like, they were just looking…

And it was that hindsight moment of like, actually, these guys were just interviewing me for six months. And they were actually friends, and they were really cool about it too. And I just had the fuck it moment like that, that job opened up. I applied with all my heart, you know? Like, they had a bunch of quest writing on it. And then I went through like a pretty hardcore six-month recruiting process because they never hired designers from out of the company. Traditionally, designers were promoted from within Blizzard. Either they would like transfer out of other disciplines, or they would come from quality assurance, tech support. So hiring somebody off the street was kind of a big deal for them, and they really put me through a grilling.

I met with… It was the first time I met Chris Metzen who is maybe the most inspirational, creative person on the planet. And you instantly… They paired me… They did this interview pairing. There were these two guys. It was Kevin Jordan who was one of the original designers on WoW. Really, he doesn’t get enough credit for his contributions. He was one of the earliest class designers, PvP designers. But he’s a really quiet guy. And they paired him with Chris, and Chris just owns the room, you know? Chris, you could just sit and listen to him. He’s so creative. He’s so passionate. And the way he articulates things, like you just instantly become a fan of Chris when you’re around Chris.

And Chris, Kevin, and I go to lunch at this Italian place that was across the street from Blizzard, and I remember… Chris made a stop to buy cigarettes, you know, on the way to the interview. And then every other word out of Chris’s mouth was like, “Fuck,” and, “Shit.” And I’d come from this whole, like, corporate culture from my dad’s recruiting business, where I’d never imagined somebody would curse in an interview, or stop to buy smokes. And again, it was like, “I’m around my people.” Like, I never smoked, but just, you know, being around people who didn’t care about-

… what the corporate norms were was so inspiring. And then my last interview was with Allen and Rob, and a great programmer named Bob Fitch. Like, I think he’s one of the first five developers at Blizzard. And they took me to an ARCO station that had a Jack in the Box. You know, how, like- … sometimes they’ll combo? It was like ARCO Jack in the Box. And that was my final interview at Blizzard, was at the ARCO Jack in the Box. And 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.” Like, this is… “These are my people.” “This is where I belong.” Like, it was the greatest thing ever. And so, yeah, that’s my crazy journey to Blizzard. Lowest point in Jeff’s life

Started at the bottom and end up at the top in a Jack in the Box. Can you speak to… ‘Cause you mentioned some of the low points in the… in depression. Through that journey, how did you find your way out? So, can you just… 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, finding your people?

There were a lot of really low points. I started drinking a lot, and alcohol was something that I really wrestled with until my early 30s. And one of the things I’m most proud of today is sobriety and having been sober for such a long time now. And I remember I would like buy a bottle of Old Grand-Dad and- … like, drink the whole thing by myself, and then watch the Oscars. I remember I was … Of all things, I’m watching the Oscars, which is just such a fake, bullshit environment.

But I was like… You know, I was really drunk and all those people seemed so together and successful and polished, and I just… It made me… It was that contrast that made me feel like such a failure. And it all seems so stupid and unimportant to me now. Um, I became… You know, I got in that constant struggle of try not to drink, but drink to make it feel better. I was lucky my parents were very supportive of me, even in my 20s, even after I, you know, quote-unquote left the house. I went into therapy and that was very helpful. You know, extremely helpful. And one thing I learned is that you have to find the right therapist for you.

It’s not just checking a checkbox of, “I went to therapy.” It’s about finding somebody who sort of helps you get out of whatever rut you’re in, in a way that’s healthy for you. And I tried antidepressants, but I hated… I just hated taking pills and feeling like something was in me, and making me feel different. I- I never responded to it. And then the hardest thing, you know, which I’ve never mentioned to anyone, and is- is hard for me to talk about, but eventually I went through ECT, which is electroconvulsive therapy, shock therapy. And that broke me out. And I would never endorse that as a miracle. That was… I was at such a low point that people were very worried about me and my wellbeing-

… and what was gonna happen, and that was sort of an extreme pull-the-rip-cord, like there’s-nothing-else-to-lose moment. And I think that was the difference maker. That, and starting at Blizzard.

To find… I mean, there is a- there is a deep loneliness there when before you met those guys at lunch, you’re alone, like in a really deep fundamental way. Like, in the way you weren’t in New York with the writing- with the writer’s group, right? And so tha- that must’ve been an incredible experience just to see the guild.

Yes. It was everything I… 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. And we don’t always know how to engage-

… in the right, healthy ways, and how to find people and how to connect with people. And it was- it was great. One… The thing that had attracted me to creative writing was the solitude of it, and the fact that you didn’t have to collaborate, and you could just write what you wanted to write and it was all you. You would succeed on your own or you would fail on your own, and that was very attractive to me. And the thought of creative collaboration was actually off-putting. I’d spent all four years of undergrad interning at Universal Pictures, ’cause I thought I wanted to be in film, and it was such an unhealthy creative collaboration in the film industry.

It’s a very, you know, I look up unhealthily to the film industry and admire it and, you know, grew up with all these legends who had come from there. But it’s like a caste system. And I was on the bottom of the caste system as an intern, and I was seeing how the other people who were low caste in the film industry were treated, and it was just horrible, you know. But games was different. Games was very flat. It didn’t matter if you were the CEO or the boss, like, the way Mike and Allen carried themselves with, you know, me, who was an associate game designer, you felt like an equal. And I think it… Not just the camaraderie, but the part that shouldn’t be overlooked is the work itself and the work ethic. That’s what really pulled me out. One of Us

Hard work on a thing you love. I have to, if you may allow me, read the prophetic “one of us” quote, “one of us” post you made on April 18th, 2002. Because in some deep sense, you, I think, remained one of us. The… I apologize to bring up Justinian the emperor, but remained a kind of peasant gamer, a true, true gamer, who happens to be also be designing the games. And so 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. Title of the post, “If you want something done right.” He wrote, “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 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.” And 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-

Now-

… it’s gonna be, like, one of the greatest games of all time played by millions of human beings, just where those millions of human beings are 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. No. My boss was Allen. And Allen was very understanding and he… they kind of knew what they were getting into- … when they hired me. And that post actually embarrasses me when I hear it now. There’s so much ego in it- … and I think that’s… it’s got that 20 year old- … you know, “I don’t know what I don’t know.”

“I know exactly how to fix this video game and all video games and-” But there’s brilliance behind that. There’s a passion behind that. Like, 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, how many trade-offs there are. How your designs, when they actually are brought to the world and are experienced by thousands of people, millions of people, they are different from the vision you had for it. So all those elements you don’t know, but you have to have that ego in the beginning, right? Early Blizzard culture

Do you even have the guts to try? Do you have the guts to put in all that work? So what were the… what was it like? What were the vibes of early Blizzard like? They’ve… at this point, Warcraft I and II, Warcraft III is in production. StarCraft. These are legendary games. I don’t… I spent probably over 1,000 hours in these games combined. I played Warcraft I, II, III. I played StarCraft I and II. I played WoW, of course. Diablo I, II, III, IV. I played Diablo II with “Stay a while and listen,” with Deckard Cain.

“Stay a while and listen.”

I mean, some of these characters, some of these experiences just, they’ll stay with me forever. Anyway, so big thank you to those early Blizzard folks. What was it like? What was the team like? What were the developers like? What was 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 have this research and development park where, if you’re like a tech company, you can get office space there, and Blizzard took up… When I joined, it was three-fourths of the building was Blizzard, and there were… There was like a building right next to it that had like Cisco and, you know, it was like all kind of techy places.

And it was so funny because you drive up and, like, everything was very serious and corporate, and then outside of the Blizzard offices, it’s everybody is wearing black T-shirt and shorts and throwing frisbees and playing Hacky Sack and on scooters and skateboards, and you’re like, “Okay, that’s where, that’s where Blizzard is.” So it was that environment. I remember walking in the door and thinking like, “It feels like I’m walking into a dorm room-“

“… ’cause it was just posters on the wall.” And there were actually, like people would have futons because they’d be sleeping because we would work so much back then. But the vibe was… It was very small. Like Blizzard, the day I joined in May of 2002, was fewer than 200 people, and that included… There was a whole group up in San Mateo called Blizzard North. So Blizzard South, the Irvine group, was responsible for StarCraft and Warcraft, and there were two development teams at Blizzard. It was called Team One and Team Two at Blizzard South. Team One was revered. These are the RTS guys. They made, you know, StarCraft, Warcraft II, and they were, at that time, they were working on Warcraft III.

Team Two was kind of the red-headed stepchild. Like apparently, before I joined, they had tried to spin off a second team multiple times and failed, and then they finally decided they were gonna 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 steered the team towards World of Warcraft. And there’s an amazing designer named Eric Dodds. He’d go on later in his career to be the game director of Hearthstone. Him and Ben Brode basically were the core designers behind that. But Eric and Kevin Jordan were these two key designers working on World of Warcraft for Team Two, and then you had this tech group that was headed up by John Cash.

And John Cash, the, 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?”

And you know, John Cash has a skin. You could be John Cash in Quake III. So, and then he saw me, and he was a huge EverQuest player, and 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. And it was just… The vibe was so cool there. Like, there were very few producers. So a game team, there are five 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 like 3D modeling, characters, environments, to also animation, tech art, you know, making it all work.

You’ve got game design, which some companies don’t have design. 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 so at Blizzard, game designers are sort of the creating the game experience people, you know, 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, part of it is like how you move through the game world.

Yes. So game designers, there’s a spectrum, like same with art, same with engineering, of roles within game design. Some are more heavy on the systems side. So like any game that you’ve played where loot drops- … you know, Diablo IV, World of Warcraft, you know, 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 like a systems designer. A content designer is somebody who’s gonna make quests or write storylines, or there might even be a narrative designer, which is even more focused on a story. But designers, you know, run the gamut, and then you’ve got these jack-of-all-trade designers that can do it all.

So that’s the design group. There’s production, which is project management, and production is different at every game company you go to. So 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. And then one of my favorite disciplines on a game team that’s often overlooked is sound and-

… you know, audio, which is comprised of the sound designers and composers. And there are two things, I think there are two things that no one realizes how much they bring to a game until they’re missing, and that’s audio and lighting. Because most of the time, we’re playing without these things, and it just feels a little off and wrong. And when you have a great lighting artist or you have a great composer or sound designer, like, it… the experience. You’re just tapping into these senses that you wouldn’t otherwise. But that’s who comprises the game team.

Is the lighting, you know, all the different kinds of graphics, would that be under the art team?

Yeah. Lighting, you’re gonna have lighting under the art team, but they’re gonna be best friends with the graphics programmer. And, you know, like I mentioned with design, there’s this wide spectrum on the engineering team. You have some guys who are like architectural geniuses who are coming up with, you know, the server client model or the networking or whatever. Others are more, like, gameplay focus. On Overwatch, we had an audio programmer just doing nothing but audio hooks for the audio team. And on every game team, you’re gonna have graphics programmers who will work with people like the lighting artists or the environmental artists, character artists on shaders, and basically any way to make the game. 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 should the world look like, and they’ll be the ones who say, “I know how to write code that will let you do that.” So you partner a great graphics programmer with a great lighting artist, and that’s… That’s actually the creative tension behind games and what makes game teams so unique, is if we were to line them up on some crazy spectrum on one end, you’re gonna have the artists who… They’re creative, dare I say emotional- … you know, they are artistes on that end. And on the other end, you have the most logical, brilliant programmers who their minds just work very differently from the most creative art-

Like artists could be sitting, you have a meeting with them and they’ll just sit illustrating. If there’s any piece of paper, they’re drawing on it. And programmers, you know, they’re just so brilliant and organized in their thinking and everything is so logical. And then 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, but aiming them at that shared goal or that shared vision of the game that, like, really makes something special.

And there, I mean, you showed me the size of the team for World of Warcraft, but you also are 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 a lot… there’s that creative tension? Is it because a small team avoids maybe the compartmentalization, like the modular where the artists now have their own wing building where they never talk to the engineers, that kind of thing?

Absolutely. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. The bigger the team, the more you become a cog in the machine. And on a small team, the way I like to describe it is you get to have a loud voice. If we’re a small team, let’s say we’re gonna make a game and it’s at sort of the incubation period of a game and there’s only 10 of us, all 10 of us are in the room for every decision. You know, I’m not a server networking guy, but I’m in the room for that discussion. I’m not an illustrator, but I’m gonna 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. And there’s a weird thing that happens that’s just kind of a human nature thing. The less you interact with somebody, the more you sort of 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. And I find 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, 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.” And when you back up and you think about the statement that you just said, it’s like… such an asshole statement. Like, really, all the artists don’t get it? Like, that’s… A, that’s not true. B, that’s sort of demeaning to them. Like, they signed up for the… This is their life’s work, too. This game is gonna 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. Most other folks don’t, and you have nothing to learn from them, really, and they’re deluded in some kind of way. That’s so powerful.

Fast-forwarding a little bit, when we formed Team 4 and… 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. And really, like, 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. And if you sort of 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 gonna show up on our doorstep, so 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. So, when that person speaks up and says, “I think…” Like, with Overwatch, for example, “I think we should do this.” You know, “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, have 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 kinda thought framework or thought experiment. Whenever I’m talking to a new person, especially if I feel, myself, a little bit tinge of that feeling. Usually, it happens with, like, a really young person, like an undergraduate student or someone like this. I pretend that they are the smartest person in the world in my head, and then not… Like, it puts me in the mode of, like, assuming I have a lot to learn from them, and it helps. You actually, like, really listen. I literally think they’re the smartest, wisest human on Earth. It helps me.

I had that, like, I think… You know, I’m no expert. I’m a game designer, so, like, as much psychology as I know is how to manipulate people into having fun, hopefully. Like, I don’t know, I don’t have an important job.

Yeah, right.

But psychologically speaking-

That’s fun.

… I think a lot about is ego, and I think about insecurity. And insecurity, we all have. Like, all of us as human beings have insecurity. It just manifests itself in different ways.

And as we kind of go through our life journey, the insecurity also changes. So, like, 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 first was made a lead on, like, World of Warcraft, where I felt it was very important to be right and to, you know, be shepherding the correct idea. And I actually got pulled aside. Like, Pardo and I had a meeting with a couple people who weren’t game designers, and it’s always tricky as a game designer because constantly everybody is throwing ideas out on a game team. Like, there’s no shortage of ideas ever.

And we were in some meeting about something, and these people kind of threw out these ideas. And I wasn’t mean to them, but I very kind of systematically, like an insecure, you know, ego-driven new lead would do, I kind of, “Let me tell you why that’s wrong, and let me tell you what we’re gonna do instead.” And after the meeting, you know, Pardo pulled me aside, and he 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.” And I just…

Over and over, I was like, “Okay, anytime an idea comes my way, let’s try to make it work.” And it went from this kind of thing that I didn’t believe into to actually, like, a core part of who I am today as a leader, as a game designer, as a game director. And some of the best ideas have come from developing other peoples’ ideas-

… where your first reaction is like, “No, that’s wrong,” and then just kind of sticking with it and going, “But how could we make it work?” And the most gratifying part when it succeeds is they get all the credit, and you’ve sort of elevated this person whose idea wouldn’t have been championed, whose idea by the insecure, egotistical lead of, you know, early 2000s would have just said no. Now their idea is the thing everybody in World of Warcraft or Overwatch is just loving, and they get all the credit.

I should give context to the listener who don’t know about the great Jeffrey Kaplan that you’re one of the most humble and always give credit to the team for everything and anything. And so everything we talk about today, I know you’re probably resisting constantly giving credit to the team on everything. So you’re the famous, “Hi, I’m Jeff from the Overwatch team,” right? So just as a small aside, thank you for your humility through 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 was like. Maybe we should talk about what World of Warcraft, WoW is, going to Perplexity here. Building World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online RPG where you create a character, level it up 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. And there’s all kinds of characters and roles and classes. You pick a race, appearance, starting zone, small racial bonuses. In a class, how you fight, what your role is in groups. Can you continue, fill in some of the gaps, what is World of Warcraft?

World of Warcraft, first of all, more than anything, is a world. Like, it’s a world that you can live in with real other people, and everybody’s kinda living out their fantasy. Chris Metzen, who was the creative director on World of Warcraft, and really, like, Allen Adham, who’s one of the founders of Blizzard, calls Chris “the heart and soul of Blizzard.” And it’s almost like when you’re making a Blizzard game, you’re making Chris’ imagination at some point. And Chris famously said, “The lead character of World of Warcraft is the world.” And I always believed that. So you’re trying to create this place that’s exciting and dangerous, but comfortable, but uncomfortable and gorgeous, and, you know it should feel massive, and it really is.

It’s, you know, can take a 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 two warring factions. There’s the Horde and the Alliance, and that was a very important, very controversial decision that was made by Allen Adham, was the champion of the Horde and Alliance.

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

Strong division.

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

Yeah, and you get it tattooed in real life on you. Like, the amount of people who walk up to me and show me their Horde tattoo.

That’s awesome.

Like, it’s epic. It’s like it’s become who they are. Like, if you were to say, like, “Hey, Lex, come play World of Warcraft with me. We’re Alliance on Tichondrius,” you’d be like- … “Dude-“

Lose my number.

“… 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. And Pardo and I came from EverQuest, where we felt like this was a horrible decision Allen was making. And we argued—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. And we would fight over the Horde-Alliance split, if it was a good idea or not. And Allen had… He came from more of the Dark Age of Camelot community, which was another massively multiplayer online game that was more PvP based.

And he said the magic of that game was they had three factions, and he liked the fact that you were instantly on a team. You weren’t a loner in the world. And whether you liked it or not, you had people on your side. And Rob and I just argued and argued against it, and then sometime before beta, Allen retired. He went on to run a hedge fund, of all things. Like, got super into poker, got super into finance, left, and retires, like, I think it was nine months to a year before WoW shipped, which is kinda nuts. And Rob takes 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 speaking about earlier, he said, “Allen’s a smart guy. The fact that he was fighting so hard for-“

“… Horde Alliance, we gotta do it.” And Rob and I sort of changed our point of view and got on board with Horde Alliance and went all in. And so, you know, the early days of WoW was… It was a great team. It was a mix of these veterans that we all looked up to. You know, we had Mark Kern running the team. Shane Dabiri was, you know, a legendary Blizzard developer. Bill Petras was the art director, and then we had Metzen, who was sort of like… Metzen was the cool big brother we all, you know, aspired to be.

I’m older than Metzen, but I looked up to him like a big brother. And then there were a lot of us who had never done it before, or they had also pulled a lot of people from other teams and other game types. Like, for example, the guys building the dungeons, they hired out of the Quake community. And because they didn’t have any hardcore MMO designer on the staff at that time, it was, you know, Kevin and Eric and Alan were sort of the only designers, they started building Quake dungeons- … as, like, Quake levels as the dungeons. At one point, WoW was even made in QeRadiant, which was the Quake engine. And then they later, you know, retooled to where they were using a proprietary engine. So we were like this hodgepodge, like the Bad News Bears-

… is how I would describe the WoW team, of this mix of veterans and then people like me. Like, I’m just some fucking idiot, you know- … who played a lot of EverQuest. And I end up at Blizzard.

Designing quests.

Yeah. Like, okay, we’re gonna design World of Warcraft now. And I’ve said this later with hindsight, I think a huge part of WoW’s success, especially with the early WoW team, Team Two in its earliest formation, was that we didn’t know what we were doing. You kind of… Like, it’s that… Titan was the example for me. Titan was the attempt at making an MMO after World of Warcraft at Blizzard. And we failed horribly, and we had the best of the best on that team. And it’s because everybody was too much of an expert on how to make a groundbreaking phenomenon MMO. World of Warcraft was a bunch of people, like a very successful, sure-of-itself company who had made StarCraft, Diablo, Warcraft, with a bunch of yayhoos basically- … Who was like, “Yeah, we can compete with Sony Online.”

At the time, they were making EverQuest II. Like, if we go back in the time machine, EverQuest II had been announced. And EverQuest fans, we were just drooling for EverQuest II. It wasn’t, “Oh, cool, World of Warcraft.” It was EQ2 was gonna take, you know, 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, and he’s just a really smart game designer. If you ever watch one of his lectures, like, he lectured a lot at GDC, and, you know, we’re like, “Oh my God, they’re- they’re making EverQuest II and Star Wars Galaxies, and they have the Star Wars intellectual property.” “We’re fucked.”

Like, “How are we gonna compete?” And everybody had seen the success of EQ, EverQuest, and everybody was gonna make an MMO, and it was just a question of who was gonna win.

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

Yeah. The games industry has a terrible reputation for insane amounts of overtime. It’s just called crunch. Like, do you crunch or not? These days, crunch is not allowed, not permitted, heavily frowned upon. If we were to work overtime, somebody’d write an article about it next week and say how horrible we are for working overtime. Back then, we worked insane, 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 War III shipped on July 3rd, 2002, so this would have been, like, late June, early July. Probably late June. And I had nothing to do with War III.

I should just say that. Like, in the credits, I’m additional help or additional testing or something like that. When I showed up in May of 2002, it was all-hands-on-deck World of Warcraft for E3. We got through E3, and then all hands on deck, the whole company, get War III out the door.

For shipping Warcraft III.

For shipping Warcraft III, and because I had not been involved with the game at all, and I was a brand new wet-behind-the-ears game designer, they’re like, “You’re just gonna help test whatever we tell you to test.” So we’re trying to gold master, and there’s a crash that happens rarely. If you run one of the cinematics, like you have to be watching the cinematic after one of the levels, and then there was a crash that happened. And so a programmer put in some logging to catch it, and then they needed somebody to just over and over again, “I need the crash to happen so I can fix the bug.” And I sat there for 30 hours and just watched the cinematic for 30 hours-

… straight. And it was the funniest thing, like it was almost surreal watching everybody leave at the… which was a trickle out. Like, everybody kind of trickles out, like, at- … different hours, you know? The family guys go much earlier than the single guys. And then watching everybody show up again in… the next morning, and they’re all, like, dressed different, and they look all refreshed. And I’m just like in the same position. You know, like eyes are beet red.

To the soundtrack of the cinematic and yeah.

Yeah. But we crunched World of Warcraft, we crunched… The date slipped, so you do this thing. I remember Mark Kern standing the team up and saying, “We’re gonna crunch early so we don’t have to crunch later in the project.” And I really believe he wasn’t manipulating us. Like, I really genuinely believe that he believed in that. But with games, anything can happen, and they’re just… We slip uncontrollably all the time. And we slipped, and it sort of created just this death march, endless death march that… Like to this day, members of the WoW team will remember, like, Newport Rib. If I say that, they’ll have, like, twitches because, like, they would cater the dinner. They’d bring it in at, like, 6:00 or 7:00 at night.

And they’d… Everybody was eating Newport Rib or Panda Express. It was like the worst diet ever. I actually like Newport Rib, no shade- … on them. But you can only eat so much of it. And the carpets are stained and, like, dudes are falling asleep on the couches. And it was an unhealthy work environment. It gets pinned on… ‘Cause at a lot of places it is executive driven. And it is mandated from the top, but the hours that I worked, I never blamed on anyone but myself. I just wanted to. I remember, you know, coming in on Memorial Day, like, with sand from the beach on my feet because I really wanted to get some work done that day, and working through Christmas, and those were things I wanted to do. I never felt like somebody, you know, held my feet to the coals.

Yeah, it’s such a complicated thing because yeah, okay, you could say that’s unhealthy, but I know a large number of people, especially in their 20s, but actually throughout their career, that have been at companies that do crunch for a thing they believe in, for a thing they love, and it’s some of the most fulfilling years of their life, months and years of their life. And they also… it’s not just fulfilling, they grow from it, they learn from it, and it… You know, and when they… Especially when they talk back about it, about that time, they can see how incredible it was. Of course, when you’re going through it, sometimes it’s extremely difficult, you don’t know.

And then the crunch, like you mentioned, it’s supposed to be a month or two, and then it, it turns out to be a half a year, and then maybe it turns out to be something like a Titan type game where you never actually ship it, and it’s heartbreaking and the pain, it’s all… But then you look back and you realize how incredible that journey was.

I think, like, my reflections on it many years later, and having gone through, like, pretty crazy levels of crunch to more controlled, I think where crunch is problematic and people are good to be vocal about being opposed to it, is when it’s forced and unnecessary. There’s a lot of like, “Hey, if anybody on the team stays, we all stay”-

… kind of, which I think is not necessary. 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 find myself, I don’t think I’ve ever worked less than 10 hours in a day. Like that… 10 hours is like a normal-ish day to me.

And I enjoy lots of weekends working because I enjoy it. It brings me pleasure and fulfillment. And 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 it’s what makes me who I am, that work ethic. I enjoy it. I actually… Some of my fondest memories are from those WoW crunches.

And then looking back and reading some of these stories, it’s pretty cool because me, 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, but first, quick bathroom break if it’s okay.

Quick 30-second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. We got Fin for customer service AI agents, Blitzy for code generation in large code bases, BetterHelp for mental health, Shopify for selling stuff online, CodeRabbit for AI-powered code review, and Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, back to my conversation with Jeff Kaplan. Okay, we’re back. So I think it’s fair to say that before WoW, MMO leveling, like in EverQuest, consisted of, maybe that’s simplifying it a bit, but standing in one spot and killing monsters for hours. How WoW changed video games

You helped develop with WoW, I would say a revolutionary idea of 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. So the leveling is both fun and is the engine that drives the story that then also immerses you into the world and pulls you in more and more and more and more. So take me through this process of developing that idea of quest driven design.

Sure. Yeah, there were actually a lot of people involved in it, and they all kind of contributed in their own unique ways. Alan Adham was the lead designer on WoW. When we first sort of decided we were gonna have a quest-based game, we used to joke that, like, EverQuest barely had any quests in it.

It did have quests, they just… They weren’t really in front of the player in an obvious way. You kind of had to seek them out on a website. And Alan 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. And on the same day, he hired a guy named Pat Nagle, which was hilarious to me, because Pat was the… He had this funny title of HR and Facilities at Blizzard, because it was such a small company. So, like, if you sent an application in, Pat would deal with the application, or if the toilet overflowed, Pat would have to deal with it.

And so the whole time I was applying at Blizzard, I was going through Pat, and then on my first day, they put Pat and I in an office together, and he’s like, “Yeah, they hired me also as the quest designer.” And so Pat… And he was the most wonderful guy. We had so much fun. So Pat and I kind of designed the quest system. It was Alan’s idea to have it in the first place. And then there was that great designer I mentioned, Eric Dodds, who helped a lot with the interface of it all. And the idea was… At first, we actually on a whiteboard in Alan’s office, we estimated how many quests we thought EverQuest had to date.

And EverQuest had had, you know, I think four or three expansions at that point in time, and we’re like, “Wow, we have to make all of these quests like EverQuest has.” It’s gonna be a lot of quests, and it’s kind of up to me and Pat to do it all. And we believed all we had to do was match that EverQuest number. And Pat and I started working on, like, the design of the system and how it would interact, and Eric Dodds was really involved in how the interface… You know, like how you were going to interact with the NPCs and all of that. And we split up the world into like two zones. He was gonna take Elwynn Forest, which was the starting area for the humans, and I was gonna take Westfall, which was the sophomore zone after Elwynn for the humans.

Pat and I would meet with Chris Metzen, and those were the funnest meetings ever because Chris just has stories in his head and visions. Chris is, like, artist, storyteller, world builder extraordinaire, and he sort of described what he wanted going on in those zones. You know, 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, like, a team play test. And our assumption was because the way EverQuest worked, players just wanted to level up. It was a level based game.

You go out. You kill a creature. You get experience points. You level up a little bit. And so the way people played EverQuest is they’d find these areas where there were lots of creatures, and you’d usually find the best experience efficiency cycle you could find, so, like, fast respawn kind of easy things to kill, and that’s how you would progress through EverQuest. And I remember Alan kind of telling us, like, “Hey, the quests… When Pat and Jeff write quests, they’ll aim us to where the creatures are.” You’ll do a quest, and then you’ll spend a few hours killing creatures in that area afterwards, and that’s how he imagined it would work. So we kind of set up the world that way. You know, 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 play test. And we had a bunch of people on the team who never played MMOs, like guys with shooter background, you know, StarCraft fans, et cetera. And they’d play World of Warcraft. I think we played for, like, an hour or two, and we only did Elwynn Forest. And the overwhelming feedback from our team… And these are people who really didn’t play EverQuest, they’re like—My God, Pat, that was horrible. I ran out of quests, like, right away. And we’re like, wait a second. You expect to just have quests just keep going? And they’re like, yeah, we expect to have quests just keep going the whole way.

And we kinda had an oh shit moment right after that Elwynn Forest play test, where we realized, like, we had vastly underestimated the number of quests we were gonna need. And we changed, we developed this philosophy that’s kind of a shared philosophy across Blizzard games in general at this point. And I’ve heard it outside of Blizzard, other people in the industry, which is you design along the path of least resistance. So, basically what that means, like, in EverQuest, the path of least resistance if you wanted your character to hit max level is to find the easiest creatures and kill them over and over again in place, which to some people think is very boring. To me, I would do that for eight hours ’cause I think that’s fun.

But we decided in World of Warcraft, we said, why don’t we make the path of least resistance, so in this case, the way to get the best experience the fastest not to be killing creatures in one place, but will 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 sort of did a lot for the game, and I think it was like a fundamental change in the genre. Like, if you look at the things that… EverQuest was very popular and very successful, and it was hitting like hundreds of thousands of players. And WoW blew the doors open and was tens of millions of players.

And I think the fundamental difference there was that WoW allowed you to play as a single player. And what makes an MMO, 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. And the fact that people could come into WoW and just kind of the game design, the game design way of des- describing it is directed gameplay.

And some games have extremely tight directed gameplay. Like, for example, if you were to play a single player game like Last of Us, you know, you’ll have those moments where they’ll be like, you’ll come up to a log and then press triangle to duck or else, or whatever the duck button is-

… left stick to duck to go under. And that’s like the ultimate in directed gameplay. Like, 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.” Like, “You drop me in this world. I’m supposed to dig or something.” And that’s the type of player that needs directed gameplay or they’re gonna cycle out. Not all players need it. And what WoW did, that it doesn’t seem like an innovation, it doesn’t seem like revolutionary, but it sort of created this directed gameplay that felt optional, but really wasn’t.

I mean, I think it’s absolutely revolutionary. It basically changed gaming. It changed the way we see games. And 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. I mean, it’s kind of a, like, obviously… It’s one of those… 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 gonna be the reason that most people play.” But it is true that… I’m with you on… I both like the quests and Cow Level.

I guess you have to design for everybody. That’s the tricky thing. Like, how do you fine-tune this? If you think of it as a loop of like accept quest, kill 10 rats, turn in quest, ding, level up—that loop. Like, how do you fine-tune that so it’s maximum fun or fun for the maximum number of people? Is it… How- how difficult is that?

It’s extremely difficult. And not everybody’s good at doing that. We all, to some degree, lack the self-awareness of how we tick. So 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 on a deep level. And the weirdest part about it is you’re not just looking for the greatest hits. You learn just as much from a shitty game that you do from an amazing game. And also—like, 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, like, thinking about what makes this fun, I’m thinking about what makes this not fun. But I’m also watching everyone around me. My wife plays games, my kids play games.

And understanding, like, well, what do they do and how are they different to me? Why are they finding enjoyment in this? Why are they not? What’s frustrating? What did they miss?

And being raw honest with exactly what you’re saying. I mean, if I were to analyze the kind of gamer I am, why do I enjoy Cow Level? And why, above that, why do I enjoy loot? Why is loot so fun? Like, what is it about opening a chest and getting a bunch of stuff? I mean, that might be like 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. You know? We can motivate you to do some weird things. The two driving motivators are extrinsic and intrinsic. And all of us, at different times in our lives, in our gaming careers, whatever, we can shift from being intrinsically motivated to being extrinsically motivated. Obviously, loot is a big extrinsic motivation, but even saying that is too simplistic. Like, for example, on the loot boxes of Overwatch, there’s a masterfully designed system that was designed by a game designer, not by a businessperson or whatever. Like, not a commercial person. But beyond that, we also had a really good team who said the visceral opening of the box, the sound it makes-

… the graphics, like the way things spill out and animate, all of that is as satisfying as well. And you’re trying to… Like, there’s the lizard brain part of it. Of like, how does it… Like, I see chest. I know I’m gonna… It’s gonna feel good. It’s gonna feel good. And then there’s the spreadsheety part of it. Of, what does it have? Is it an upgrade? And I think great game designers know how to tap into both of those things.

You know, tap into the intrinsic and extrinsic. There’s… Like, when I was studying writing, you would study the elements of fiction. And, you know, these are just like basic things like plot and character development and setting and theme and whatever. And there’s no, like, textbook that exists for game design, at least none that has been introduced to me yet. But I think about, like, elements of fun.

What are the things that create fun for players? And they’re not the same. Like, it really… Every human being is different. Like, progression is fun. Sense of progression that I’m investing. I’m putting an investment into this game, and then the game is recognizing my investment. That things like leveling, things like the amount of gold you have, those are all investment based. There’s mastery. There’s just pure raw skill. Creativity is one. And hand-in-hand with creativity is customization. And some of those can be aesthetic. Like, look at my customized character, and 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 gonna 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. Like, 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. And 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.

Or if I’m having trouble defeating a boss, I might have to go back and look at the skills and abilities that my character’s using, and I have to go into creativity mode. “Oh, he has that one AE where he…” Area of effect. “…where he puts a curse on me.” And, you know, “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. Single-player vs Multi-player

And ultimately enjoying and discovering what the world gives you. Has to offer to you. And you’re… 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? And 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. Off the cuff, flippant comment would be clicking heads, you know? I’m just trying to click heads.

Okay.

There’s an intimacy also to the first person camera. And now, not all shooters are first person. There is a large trend these days to third person. I really think PUBG and Fortnite sort of opened that third person shooter door. And you’re seeing games like ARC Raiders are third person. But to me, nothing is as pure as first person. Like 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 of, “Can you click on the thing fast enough?” And when it’s PvP based, you know that’s coming at you.

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

Absolutely.

… multiplayer, massively online multiplayer?

So PvP is player versus player. So that means a combative, you know… 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 anytime 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 PvP and PvE, the P might be multiple players. It could be five versus five, six versus six for PvP. And for PvE, it could be, like, raids where it’s multiple people, large groups of people going against the AI.

Yep. So single player, that’s a game that you play totally by yourself. Like, 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. You know, 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 are very difficult, or they can be very difficult and expensive in terms of production to create. Like, if you think of a game, like Uncharted or Last of Us that’s made by Naughty Dog, like, those are kind of the preeminent best 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. And these terms become interchangeable, so I’m using some semantics here. But co-op is any cooperative experience that we can play together, but we’re sharing an exact same experience very intentionally. And it’s me sharing that experience only with other people that I know. So a great example of a cooperative game, maybe one of the best of all time, was Left 4 Dead, which is a game where you and three other people go in and you fight, like, hordes of zombies, and you try to progress through to the end safe room. It’s a very cooperative experience. A game like Diablo IV, you can play cooperatively with other people.

Now, one up from that is multiplayer, and that’s when you’re engaging with strangers who are in the same world that you might not have the same cooperative goals as. 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 the MMO online sort of stands for, massively multiplayer online game, that’s when you’re breaking into thousands of players. And the worlds become really, really big at that point.

By the way, we should say that the co-op could be remote connection, but there’s also, what would you call it, couch co-op where you have two people. Some games are really designed well for the experience of two 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… It’s a really fulfilling experience. Like, with a friend, with a loved one, you can, like, 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. Like, two people can play Diablo sitting together and there’s a real intimate experience in that.

Yeah, couch co-op—it’s funny, ’cause it actually, like, predates the couch even. Some of those old arcade games- … like, would have two joysticks on them and then you could play- … with somebody else. Or there’s, you know, the famous game Gauntlet—

… had four joysticks and four people playing together. And then anybody who grew up in that early console era, like, you know, NES, Sega Genesis was a legendary one. We would sit and we’d play NHL 93- … on the couch. And anybody who lost, you’d lose the controller. And you could play that with up to four people playing, or we… I remember one of the big games that came out was Mortal Kombat. And we would play Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis, and it was the house rules were, you know, whoever lost, so whether you were in your college dorm or just some buddy’s apartment and there’s five people there, you’re constantly cycling everybody in and out. But there’s just a magic to multiplayer, of engaging and sharing in the experience-

… with other people. That’s why I’ve always… I’ve never made a single-player game. Uh, I have great admiration for them. I don’t know if I could do it. The challenge… The reason I love multiplayer so much, the way I describe being a game director or game designer on a multiplayer game, it’s like imagine if you were gonna be a movie director, and you were gonna have all these actors and set designers and props and, you know, writers and scripts and all of this stuff, and your goal was to get a certain movie made. But we’re gonna ask you, the director, to just… You’re gonna 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.

And now you need the actors to have an experience, and it’s just kind of the wildest, funnest experiment. Like-

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

I struggle because sometimes people call me the anti-story guy in games, and that really hurts me because, like, I actually love story in games, and I counter that I’m the anti-shitty story guy. And what I mean by that is like, A, the most magical stories that I’ve ever heard come out of video games are player stories about, you know, the time I gave Barfa a potion and then I met him in real life. Like, that’s better than any video game writing that I’ve heard in a long while. The player story is so much more interesting. You know? “Lex, why do you like the cow level so much?” “Tell me about some goofy time-” “… like a loot goblin drew you into the most danger.”

“And… But there was another player there, and then…” You know, like, 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 story. You know, I’ve mentioned Naughty Dog, like they’re kind of on another level. But Valve has amazing writing. The writing behind Half-Life 2, Marc Laidlaw; the writing behind Portal- … and Portal 2. I think it was Erik Wolpaw, who is hilarious, just amazing, and Rockstar.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, and 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. Like, I remember… ‘Cause the controls are a little awkward in Red Dead for a PC player who’s playing on console. Like, I always get confused about, like, taking out my gun and putting it away, and what’s, you know, the L1 and L2.

Like, as a PC gamer, I’m just like, “Let me bind this stuff to where I want it.” And so like, you know, a guy in town rides by and he’s like, “Howdy, partner.” And I go to, like, give him the Arthur Morgan, you know, “Hey, what’s up?” back, and I just whip out my sawed-off shotgun and, like, blow his fucking head off. And then the whole town is like… Suddenly I’m, like, under… I’m wanted and I’m being chased, and then there’s a train that, like, takes out the posse, and-

Yes.

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

And that’s the combination. And then Rockstar does a really good job with, you know, even in Grand Theft Auto with the radio. It can be kind of a side aspect to the game; that great writing there can create—help create the world— … with humor, with color, with depth, with heartbreak, all that kind of stuff.

There was a moment in Red Dead where it… There’s the Daniel Lanois song— …”That’s the Way It Is”. I just… I love Daniel Lanois, so the fact that somehow Rockstar landed him and like, was able to get that song out of him. And there’s this moment where you’re, like, riding back and they start that song, and- Everything up to then had been gorgeous, like, more of a score. There’s Woody Jackson, who’s, like, a really amazing game composer. He had done the score for that, and so nothing had been, like, lyrical with words. And then they play the Daniel Lanois song, and there’s, like, the quotes are coming back—

… from, like, Dutch and Arthur Morgan, and I’m just like, “Goddam, this is, like… This is art.” You know, this is like—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’s certain games where, you know… 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 into this world, into these characters, and it’s a beautiful thing. I have to ask you about this, 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 kinda talk through how, like, this world is built. Take me to that time when you were designing this, before anyone else got a chance to play it.

All WoW stuff. It would start from that inspiration of Chris and the world. And, you know, it was so fun hanging out with Chris because we had whiteboards all over the place, and, you know, “Hey, Chris, we should make Eastern Kingdoms. What do you think it should be?” And he would just tell you the story of each of these as he’s just drawing. And Chris is a really talented artist, so the map would be gorgeous. I have lots of, like, photographs of Chris maps that he would just kind of whiteboard up. He’s like, you know, “Here’s the Dwarven Lands, there’s Wetlands with Khaz Modan up there, and that’s where this, you know, tribe of dwarves were from.” And then they, you know, humans are going to be down with Elwynn Forest.

And then Westfall, there’s, you know, this group called the Defias Brotherhood and they have a place called Deadmines.” So I would talk to Chris because you want to capture the spirit, like, as a game designer, you want to capture the experience that’s in people’s heads. So, like, take Burning Steppes, for example. Supposed to be one of the scariest places with lava and dragons and, you know, all this kind of stuff. That doesn’t feel like where you want to start. It feels like where you want to end, so you kind of work the world flow in a way that puts that at the end. But there was also kind of some magic to the original starting areas, where we gave the dwarves and the humans a free flight path between… The dwarf hometown was called Ironforge, the human hometown was called Stormwind.

And we allowed you to fly for free. So, like, these little newbies who were, you know, level five or something, if you played a dwarf and I played a human, I’m like, “Oh, Lex, don’t worry, I’ll come. You know, 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.” And it plants that seed of things to come.

So you’ve designed some incredible quests. Is there any that stand out that you’re proud of or ashamed of? I mean, you famously have 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, or… Green Hills of Stranglethorn, maybe, can you 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 amongst 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, like, 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, his name is Hemet Nesingwary, which is just me rearranging the letters of Hemingway. There’s another quest giver there that’s Kerouac’s name also mixed up. And then it was the typical hubris of a junior game designer who thinks he’s clever but is actually a dipshit. That’s- That’s the Green Hills of Stranglethorn, like, summed up.

So, like, I wrote the story over, like, it was, I think, winter break, like, everybody was gone and I just was so happy to be in the office, you know, I’m at Blizzard by myself writing late at night. And the whole idea, and this is, this is very much what I call ant farm designer, which is bad. Which is, you know, 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 gonna do, which is 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’s three types of fun. Fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer.

And we catch ourselves, we’re like, you know, we gotta be really care… It has to be fun for the player, not fun for us. So this Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest was like an ant farm design of, I’m gonna 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 I divided it up into all of these different pages. And the quest giver, Hemet Nesingwary, wants you to put together, like, the story’s like, he wrote this book, but then the pages got scattered across Stranglethorn Vale. And some… When you’re doing quest design, you’re really thinking about the player flow and you’re directing them from quest giver hubs out until 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. And so the pages of Green Hills of Stranglethorn could be looted off of any creature anywhere in Stranglethorn Vale, and it was kind of like that McDonald’s Monopoly game where you have to have all the pieces or else you’re not gonna win. But where I really went south, I don’t think the idea in a vacuum is horrible, but where this really fell apart was the interface of World of Warcraft wasn’t set up. Like the pages didn’t stack, there wasn’t a dedicated container to put all the pages in, so players had very limited bag space. And as they’re fighting in Stranglethorn Vale, I’m just shitting up their inventory with all of these pages and they only needed so many.

Like you might get unlucky and you have like three page fives that are just junk in your inventory, and I might have like eight page sixes. And then everybody… And this was the goal, like the, the designer trying to puppeteer everybody. Everybody in Stranglethorn chat is like, “Hey, I’m looking for a page six. Anyone got a page three?” And that was like my fantasy as a designer of like, and then they’re gonna be social and meet each other, and players are gonna be appreciative for each other, but really all everybody did was just no… Eventually, no one did the quest. They just were super annoyed, or they went to the Auction House. So the quest is famous in that it was so aggravating and annoying and it just became a way…

It not only became a way for me to learn from my mistakes, but because I was very open with 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. Like 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.” And then it sort of challenged people to make better versions of it. How Blizzard made great video games

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 play it, revenue, and critical acclaim. And then you rose to become a game director of WoW helping release Wrath of the Lich King, which by many is considered to be the greatest expansion. I mean, there’s a million questions I can ask here, but maybe this is also a good place to ask about the famous Blizzard polish. So Blizzard as a company has historically, and you were certainly a big part of that, delivered these games.

They were just, got so many pieces right and well-functioning and well-coordinated, and just feel finished in a way that a lot of other games don’t get right. So what does it take to take this gigantic game, this game played by millions of people, loved by millions of people, and deliver it in a way where it’s like it all just works?

To have a level of polish is like a studio wide culture that has to be instilled in everybody, like no one can be satisfied with a bug. Every game is gonna have bugs, and Blizzard games have bugs. It’s a question of, how quickly do you fix them and with what urgency? And as players ourselves, if we’re playing as much as anybody else, we’re gonna 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. Like the people who come and do QA at Blizzard, they 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.

And the relationship we tried to develop between us on the development teams and QA was extremely tight. And whenever possible, we also tried to sit as many QA members up with the development team as possible, depending on the logistics of… You know, 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 then developing that relationship. You know, in the early days there, there were these fears of like, “Well, QA can’t talk to the developers,” and trying to shatter that-

… of, because some of our QA members knew the game so inside out, you would just say to ’em like, “Hey, dude. Just message me anytime. Here’s my home number. Like, 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. Like, we gotta fix this thing.” So QA was amazing.

I mean, so can you speak to QA, quality assurance? At the peak of the craft, what does it entail? Like 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 just, “Oh, these guys just get to play games all day and then, like, 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 of, like, 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. Like, 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 Wild West, let’s play the game.

And then as a developer interacting with QA, you would find that there were certain specialists whether like, like for example, on Overwatch, there were a couple of players that… Like, we all were shooter players when we were making Overwatch, but I’m not like esports level shooter player. I’m like, you know, Gen Xer, “Remember Doom, how good I was”- … type of shooter player. But we had, you know, a couple of these QA specialists who, like, they could just snipe from 100 meters out and hit the shot every time and tell us if there was a frame of input delay, you know? And 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 devs trust QA. Or just even on, like World of Warcraft, they had a great relationship with QA in that they built out a full raid team to do the raids. And then you’re not only, like, looking for bugs, like, “Hey, the dragon was supposed to fly and instead it just, like, sunk through the world and the game crashed,” which would happen. But, like, if you really value QA, you’re asking them, “What do you… Dude, what do you think? You’re…” You know? Like, “10 million people are gonna see this. Your opinion, multiply it, you know? It matters. What do you think? You know? Are you having fun? Oh, yeah, this is cool. This isn’t cool.” So QA was important.

The other thing that was important is the Blizzard engineering, which you have to architect your game to be hotfixable.

And what a hotfix is, games, there’s a couple ways to fix ’em. The way most of us know, ’cause all the software we have gets a patch, you know? You have to update it. You have to download a new version of it. Windows, you know, you get that annoying message, like, “There’s a new version of Windows.” And it takes, you know, a few minutes and you update it. You know, 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. And 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’s emergency issues like something’s crashing. Like, the worst case scenario is anytime the server’s crashing. Or in Overwatch, like, a really catastrophic bug would be something where you have to disable a hero. Like, 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 a half an hour, 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 to just even settle stuff to do that.

Yeah. Players feel it. Like, they… That’s where there’s this idea of, like, the love and the craftsmanship of the developer that you can feel. Like, any product, you know your iPhone or Android or, like, 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. And games have that as well, where you can feel the heart and soul of the developer in the thing. And some of that’s, like, the joy and delight of, like, that there’s a Cow Level, right? That that’s… You know, you can feel the humanity of the development team-

… through that. But another part of that is, like, do they clean up their fucking yard, you know? Does this game work? Is it… And it’s not just the bugs and the crashes. It’s, like, when balance gets wacky and stupid and, you know, suddenly everybody’s a Barbarian and whirlwinding and no one else will play anything else. You’re like, “We should probably fix that,” you know?

Oh, those were the days. I sadly was the Barbarian Whirlwind guy.

One-handed.

It was… Yeah, it brought so much joy. So a lot of people modern day 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. Just, you know, looking back, what wisdom can you draw from that time when you got to experience this era of gaming that changed gaming forever, where it’s millions of people playing this video game?

It was my 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 35K a year.

You know, that’s what I was making. And very shortly after WoW shipped, you know, Allen left as lead before the beta, or like right around the beta, and then Rob took over as the lead designer, and then he left the team very shortly after WoW shipped to go start StarCraft II. And he put myself and Tom Chilton in charge. Tom is a designer who… He was a great partner of mine and a great leader and he actually came from Ultima Online. And so I always looked up to Tom because he had a lot more experience than I did. And this is like early 2005, the world was on fire, the servers were barely running… WoW was just, had taken off like gangbusters, and they basically put me and Tom in charge of WoW. And at the time they promoted me, my title…

I didn’t even have a lead title, my title was Senior Game Designer. And 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 then me and my wife would log in and play WoW, you know, for four hours, and then I’d go in the next day and I’d work… And it was just this… My whole life was World of Warcraft. And I loved it.

Like I loved everything from, you know, the creative meetings with Chris Metzen and just what an inspiration and muse he was, down to the simplest, dumbest design stuff that like we as game designers, like, you wanna talk about why a button is in the lower-left versus lower-right and what does that mean? That’s like two hours of discussion. And is there a better way? Like the 10,000 minutiae problems were thrilling to me. And then also the big disasters. Like the big… I had in the early days of WoW, we didn’t really have all the processes in place for, like, how to deal with being a successful online game, and I literally had GMs, like game masters, these are customer support guys, calling my home phone at 3:00 in the morning.

Like, I remember this one time there was some faction token in Stranglethorn Vale and they figured out a way to exploit it, and this GM calls me panicked, it’s 3:00 in the morning. He’s like, “I’m just spawning…” Uh, what, what did we call ’em? 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, like off in the distance of places players weren’t supposed to get in case they cheated their way there. And this GM is just spawning them all over Stranglethorn Vale because he’s worried because the players are exploiting. Yeah. It’s like 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 ’cause it was actually like before the cell phone days when I actually had a landline. But that’s just how… And I loved it. I loved the thrill of those big moments, the minutiae. And I felt like through the running WoW Live, which was me and Tom together with an amazing team, we kind of learned how to be the WoW team. And putting WoW in a box and shipping it was like only chapter one in a 12-chapter book essentially. And that first how to run the game, how to patch it, what type of content, how to deal with emergencies, what should our customer support be like. I mean, we would debate should we have a launcher or not. You know, in the early days, the only reason the launcher existed in WoW was to run anti-cheat on your machine.

And we had a moment where we figured out how to put that into the game and out of the launcher. And it was the first time I ever really had an in-depth conversation with Mike Morhaime. He’s like, “You gotta bring the launcher back, guys.” We’re like, “Why?” He’s like, “There’s no better way for us to talk to our players.” Um, and I remember trying to hide the launcher. And to this day, Mike was right. Like, that launcher turned out to be the best thing we ever had. That’s essentially what Battle.net has morphed into these days. But all those decisions and when it came time to make Burning Crusade, you know, at that point, Tom and I were leads. We were full, they had actually promoted us.

There was, there were two big exoduses of groups that quit Blizzard; they were disenfranchised if you can believe it. Like we just shipped World of Warcraft and this whole group just walked out the door. I was actually sitting, my desk faced Morhaime’s office, and I watched them all go in and quit, and they were the group that formed Carbine… which made the game WildStar. Ended up taking them 10 years to make, and they were just really unhappy with World of Warcraft, and they were unhappy with… 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. Like, what, what is it? Just because they put their heart and soul into the game and they maybe get exhausted in a certain kind of way?

Yeah, and I don’t want to… It’s not fair of me to speak on their behalf. I think they were promised some compensation that they didn’t immediately see. I don’t know if the game… Like, here’s the weird part when you make a game. When you come up with the idea and you start pitching it to people, that’s the best the game is ever gonna be, and then you work on it. Like, you know, games I worked on take five years, you know? Overwatch was two and a half, three years. Every day you get close to ship, the imagination of the ideal game gets farther and farther from the reality, and you’re always shipping this, like, greatly sacrificed thing that nowhere near matches the imagination- … of the inception of the idea, so you become disenfranchised 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 and less, saying no and no, and cutting, and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it’s difficult, psychologically difficult, but nevertheless, the result when you zoom out, it’s one of the greatest games of all time that millions of people played for thousands of hours. It’s just… Did you ever have an experience, a realization how huge WoW was in terms of not, like, statistics on the server and so on, but the cultural impact it had?

The first time was the first BlizzCon, which was in 2005. So 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 did way more successful than we expected it to do and the server load was just nuts. Like, we were just… We were doing our best to hire database programmers, you know, ’cause we just didn’t know how to deal with the sheer scope of the game. But when you’re an individual like… And at that time, like I mentioned, there were multiple exoduses of people who quit Blizzard. They went and formed a couple notable studios. One was Carbine, the other was Red 5.

And we lost, like, kind of our core people. Like, when Red 5 started, that was our team leader, that was Mark Kern, and our art director, Bill Petris, they quit. When Carbine started, it was, I think, all of our animators and some of our best programmers and… Like, it’s really demoralizing when you lose team members like that, but then we were also underwater. Like, the servers aren’t running, we’re not able to keep up with demand, and we had to start putting patches out, and now we’re making patches like… For a while we had one animator who stuck around, and then eventually he left also, but you’re doing like, 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 and the morale was just in the shitter. Like, everybody felt very down on Team Two, the WoW team was called Team Two, and that we had somehow failed. And during that time, there was this idea to do BlizzCon, and the way that started was EverQuest had done these, like, meetups because they knew it was, like, a big guild social game, and people would get together at like some hotel ballroom and you’d sit with your guild at like a banquet room table.

And 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.” And at the time, we had a game called StarCraft: Ghost was in development, and that was getting ready to show, and there was Frozen Throne, which was the expansion to Warcraft III, but, like, we knew we were gonna make StarCraft II. And then there was a lot of motion happening with Blizzard North, which is a whole separate story, but there was like, hey, we could really do a cool show-

… that’s this BlizzCon thing. And at first, we kind of announced it and it just was crickets. You know when you’re, like, excited about something, you’re like, “Man, everybody’s gonna love. Like, we’re doing BlizzCon,” and everybody’s kinda like, “Crickets. What’s BlizzCon? Who cares?” And we’re, we’re idiots, we’re reading the forums, and the forums are just flaming us all the time, like, “There’s lag on this server and can’t log into that server.” And that was our perspective of what was happening. And then, like I said, give Mike Morhaime credit where credit’s due. He kept us committed to that launcher, and they put the BlizzCon tickets on the launcher, which they hadn’t done before. It was on the website.

And so everybody who logged into World of Warcraft suddenly got this like, “Hey, we’re doing BlizzCon in Anaheim, do you wanna come?” Sold out instant. Like, instantly sold out. And when I showed up at that show, it… One of the most emotional things in my life. It was nothing but an outpouring of love. And up until that point, your perception was, because you’re just reading online and it was… The perception is such hatred, because people who are passionate online, they express themselves in the harshest ways ’cause it gets attention. You know, that’s the lesson I should’ve learned from my early days. And it’s such an unfortunate thing, because then you met these people in person and they loved World of Warcraft.

And all they wanted to do was talk about World of Warcraft and hear about what was coming next and be around other people who loved World of Warcraft, and-

It’s incredible. It’s a fascinating theme, to me, about human nature, and it’s absolutely true, and I wish there was a thing that could be solved. But then again, maybe not. Maybe that’s just the way it is. But in person, all of the people that are passionate about a particular topic, and whatever that topic is, it could be games, it could be at conferences, technical conferences, they are all mostly full of love. And just the way they talk about stuff, they nerd out. Even the disagreements are drenched in this respect and appreciation and love for the game, for the topic. And online, you’re right, I don’t know if it’s because of popularity or clicks or so on, but it’s just the way of speaking on the internet is more mockery and-

Cynical.

If you say, “I love this thing. Here’s an apple. I love apples,” or, “I love bananas. I love fruit…” Like, “I love X,” whatever. You just get made fun of. You get… And then so what the lesson you learn from that is, “Well, I’m just not going to speak up when I love something. I’m going to instead speak up when I, maybe how much I hate another thing that’s similar to it.” Or maybe join in when we’re making fun of a particular quirky thing, about, “Don’t you hate it when bananas are too ripe or too…” Versus like not saying the, calling out the elephant in the room is, “We’re all gathered here today ’cause we love the thing.”

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

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. You know, I ran a… I actually had this reputation for being edgier than I really was. There were a couple 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. And unfortunately, social media in general is designed in such a way where the maximum hyperbole works, and that’s how you get the most points is by being max hyperbolic.

And usually, unfortunately, it’s more in the negative direction than the positive direction. You know, if I say, “That’s, 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, this thing’s a crime against humanity- … in some way. And it’s very self-reinforcing and everybody sort of feeds into it and-

Especially when you’re young. I got to see this kinda interesting thing. So I was at I spent, that’s what we’re talking about, you’re from Pasadena, so I’ve been spending a lot of time in Caltech and working on robots, and we get to see students come in from high school. Undergraduates come in and, like a tour, hang out with the robots. And middle school also. And the interesting thing you see, the younger that they are, the more prevalent this effect, which is all of them are kind of afraid to show that they think a thing is awesome. They’re all… You could just feel they’re checking, “Is it okay?”

So they’re kinda like the default mode is whatever, this, everything is stupid, this is stupid. You know, ’cause 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.” Like, I’m gonna, if I think this is awesome, I’m gonna be the nerd, I’m gonna take the risk and be made fun of for saying, “I love this,” in that case, it’s, “I love this robot.” So that’s an actual psychological effect that also young people are dealing with, in-person also. So I think, I just wanna say, for young people listening to this, be vulnerable, be courageous and say you love a thing if you love a thing. And do more of that on the internet, I think.

I think people make up the internet, people build the internet, and 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. You know, 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, you know? And it doesn’t matter, you get 100 compliments, it’s the one, you know, you’re… And you’re supposed to read it and supposed to be fine with it and have it not affect you. It’ll stay with you for years, you know? I have those. And I think of it, like the cheesy, the cheesy way I think about it is like, is there some kind of social Darwinism going on? And my big worry is that there are creators… Like, now being a creator of anything, writer, musician, you know, make online videos, whatever creator means to you, make games.

Now part of the skillset is being able to weather like a fire hose of criticism like the world has never seen. And I make up these scenarios in my head of like, would Van Gogh have existed if, you know, Reddit and all these things were out there commenting on… Like, how many people were able to communicate with Beethoven in his lifetime, or in a week? Like, how many influences could comment on his music directly to him? Versus like if I want to insult Brad Pitt right now, I can just go on 10 different devices and do it. And it’s like that level of access is very dangerous, and I worry that there is a whole group of people who’s receding from us that will never see the brilliance, and they’re being shut out by the negativity.

There- there’s a very real example, was Jay Wilson, who I think is one of the great design minds, who was the game director of Diablo III. And he took so much heat, it just affected him to the point where he essentially retired from making games. Went and, you know, wrote novels. I was very happy for him because, you know, I’m glad he found his place, and I think he’s getting back into making games now. But we lost, we essentially… Like, think how many people loved Diablo III and played the shit out of Diablo III. And Jay is one of the people you have to thank for that. And yet that community basically removed him from making games for like 10, 15 years, and it feels criminal to me.

Yeah, absolutely. They… So this is a call to action, again. People out there, support, support, especially young creators, support them. They need it. Like you think negativity has no cost, but it does. You’re robbing the world of some of the great creations. And also, allow creators to suck and to improve. Because that’s what the process of creation is like, is to take risks. To take risks meaning being vulnerable, being cringe.

To doing the thing that like, the embarrassing failure where you’re standing there in a silly clown outfit, on stage, dancing, and nobody’s laughing. And it’s a… Comedians go through this all the time, when… They talk about this all the time, when they bomb, right? They, the act just doesn’t work, and you have to go through that. And you have to, you have to support the creators through that journey. In order to have great things, we need to support those folks. So, after shipping WoW, Wrath of the Lich King, again, many consider it to be one of the great expansions for WoW, you stepped down as WoW’s game director and switched to developing Titan. Why Titan failed

This epic huge game that promised to be the, sort of the MMO to end all MMOs. I mean, it’s kind of a legendary vision for a game, right? It’s gigantic. With a lot of, like you said, a brilliant team, a team that’s now hardened and knows how to do a great game. But it was canceled after seven years in development. So, tell me, what was the vision of the game and what happened?

Sure. So, as we were experiencing success with World of Warcraft, there was this concept in the studio that WoW wasn’t gonna last forever.

WoW would be maybe successful for five years, and eventually kind of age out. And the studio would be in real trouble if we didn’t have another massively multiplayer online game sort of waiting in the wings. So starting around, I wanna 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 sort of Titan development. We didn’t even really have a team then. And I remember being embroiled in Burning Crusade and going to Titan meetings, and Rob pulled a group from kind of across the company, and we started talking about what this next MMO could be and when it would get going. And eventually, it started in earnest, like real development, around 2007.

The first team members joined, and it was a real ambitious project, including like 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, and the engine which ultimately failed for Titan ended up becoming the engine for Overwatch, which is a great success story for him. And the idea behind the game, it was gonna take place in future Earth, and the players played as secret agents. And by day, they all had day jobs, and by night, they went off and did cool secret agent stuff. And the secret agent stuff was very first-person shooter, but over-the-top abilities like you would see in Overwatch, because that’s where they came from. And the by day stuff, we were gonna let you run businesses.

We took a lot of influence from games like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, 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. And so we had this vision that there was gonna be all this like daytime business house stuff. You could build a house. You could live in a neighborhood. And beyond that, there was also a vision on the technical side, game design and technical side, that unlike World of Warcraft, which the modern day term for it is that it’s sharded. Mm-hmm. So meaning people play on different realms or servers.

In a WoW server, I don’t, 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 is that everybody would play on one server. It was a one server, one world game, and the world was massive. It was gonna take place in future Earth, and we were literally building like, we had what we called Bay City, which was San Francisco. We had, you know, Hollywood, and then we had to build all of California between that, and we also wanted to build like Cairo and London. And there’s this realization of like, how do we connect all of these? The game had driving in it, like full-blown, like GTA-style driving.

It was such a gargantuan, huge undertaking with a, with a brand new engine, a brand new team, a brand new IP, intellectual property, you know, setting, which we really wrestled over. Like, the amount that the IP just, you know, trying to figure out, like, are there aliens or not aliens, you know? Like, all that sounds kinda dumb and fun, but when you’re building a game, like you, especially world-building, you have to have rules. That’s what makes world-building work, is that like, this exists in this world, and this doesn’t, and you know, why? It’s like, ’cause someone said so, and just the way it needs to be. But that development started in 2007, kind of as ideation, brainstorming, early work.

Really got going in late 2007, and then I had to ship Wrath of the Lich King and it was… We had the like, we always did like a champagne toast. I still remember it because it was Election Day. I think it was like Election Day and my birthday, and the day Obama got elected, and then I left the WoW team on that day. It was like memorable in all those ways. And then I joined the Titan team, and that game, we went on, like the fast-forward part of that is we shut it down in 2013.

That was one of the most painful development processes that I’ve ever been a part of, and probably, probably deep into 2009, I knew that the game in its current form could never ship and would never exist, and by 2010—like after numerous times trying to convince the powers that be that, like this game is not gonna happen, it’s in trouble. I remember going to Mike Morhaime in 2010, and, like, you’re going to the CEO of… You know, 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? So like from my understanding, there was a few issues. So 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 is great. I empathize with the dream. I would love to play that game. But one of the issues, as I understand, was it was unclear what, like, the quest flow is. Like what are you supposed to really do in this game? What’s the thing that connects all of the pieces together?

So it was a multifaceted failure for many reasons. Ultimately, the failure of Titan lies with leadership, team leadership, myself included. Like, there’s just no getting around that. And then on top of that, like, a lot of games you can point to as being like an engineering failure, like the, you know, the servers didn’t work— … or like an art failure, like no one responded to the look of the game, or a design failure, like the… 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.

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

Correct. As, like, 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, you know, I can have 10 in 10 seconds. You know, let’s make a 2D platformer about a mouse, you know, whatever. Like, you can… I want to… A secret agent by day is, you know, doing all this cool shooting stuff, by night is running a flower shop. You know, ideas are just infinite. At least on creative teams, you know, 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. And then 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. And Titan kind of was like that was the hubris of Blizzard in that era at its height of, you know, we were over being hurt about, you know, World of Warcraft. I don’t know if people are gonna like it. And we were now in the era of, like, we made World of Warcraft. We can do no wrong. This next thing is gonna be the best ever. And there was also a lot of what I call anticipatory hiring-

… or, like, there’s opportunity hiring and then there’s also anticipatory hiring. I have the exact opposite hiring philosophy. I won’t hire anybody on any team until, like, we’re feeling like we gotta work overtime or, like, we might not ship if we don’t get, you know, somebody else in here. And Titan kinda had that hubris of like, 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.

And, like, in one year, we would hire, like, 70 environmental artists from all over the world. You know, we’re getting visas and, like, the top tier talent ’cause at the height of World of Warcraft and nobody knew the team that they were coming on. It was Blizzard’s next MMO top secret and they, you know, their first day at work, like some, you know, 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? Is that…” And they’re like, “No, dude. Let me show you it.” And he’s like, “What is this game?” You know? 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 cliche of “idle hands is the devil’s work,” or whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

You have these, like, brilliant team, huge, and we don’t have a road map for what we’re making or how we’re gonna make it. And now you’re having to deal with all these people. Like, they’re coming into your office, you know, 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? And 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?” And you’re just making up busy work. The engine didn’t work.

When we would run play tests 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, and I remember in, like, the last days, we asked him, because he was a very active user—Titan editor was called Titan Edit or TED which is, to this day, TED is the proprietary tool for Overwatch, since Overwatch came from the Titan engine—

… which was Tank. And we said to Dylan, “I want you to log your uptime in the editor, in TED.” And in a 40-hour week, he was only able to work for 20 hours. And you can imagine, you’re building a team of the best and the—like, the best in the industry, and they can’t work. So not only are you just burning cash faster than anybody on the planet, it’s also, like, imagine having fighter pilots, but we don’t let them fly. Like, the creative frustration and the way that that manifested itself, and how demoralized the team got, it was a disaster.

And 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 with a clear vision. I read that sort of if you—if you were to compare Overwatch and Titan, sort of the defining characteristic for the Titan team, they said yes to everything, and the Overwatch team said no to everything. Meaning focus, like deep, deep focus on the execution of a very clear vision. And maybe that’s the process of designing games, like you said, is, you know on a team that’s full of incredible ideas because it’s creative minds, it’s constantly saying no. It’s a really painful process, but perhaps it—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, like, elevating the vision enough, that’s when you’re pushing them. Like, “Come on guys,” you know, “don’t worry about the schedule. We got—” you know, “capture hearts and minds, inspire people.” And when they’re going a little crazy and they… Endless source of great ideas and really fun development, that’s when you gotta pull and say, “Guys, we need to ship this. The best feature we can add for the player is shipping.” That was a common phrase that we had. Overwatch in six weeks

So when Titan was canceled, I mean that must’ve been a gigantic heartbreak for everybody. And 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, and Mike Morhaime gave you six weeks to come up with a pitch for a new game. And you’ve talked about this process, and you’ve mentioned that there were three possible ideas, 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 six weeks?

Yeah, the six weeks, it’s… It was supposed to be the greatest time ever if you think about it. Because you’re a game developer at Blizzard, and you get to come up with a new idea. So that sounds awesome, like, 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, you know? 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. And so it was like a really serious, kind of dire environment that this was happening in. And we were given two criteria that we had to hit for these pitches. The first one was that we had to ship within two 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. And then the second… Okay, the second is even more ambitious and crazy, was 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 one game that had World of Warcraft-like revenue, which was World of Warcraft, so… Immediately, I just threw out the revenue thing ’cause it’s all fucking Monopoly money to me. Like, 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. So most of our team, the Titan team, was 140-some people. Most of that team got moved to go work on Heroes of the Storm, the D3 expansion, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone. So immediately, a large number of the team was gone. Then we had a bunch of, like, what we called temp loans-

… people that someday were gonna come back to us, but we loaned off for, like, 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 exists somewhere at Blizzard at that point. And they were also deconstructing the engine because they knew it didn’t work anymore, and to make a new game, it had to be way reconsidered to 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 given six weeks. And we just sort of arbitrarily decided, like, let’s spend two weeks on each pitch. The ground rules that I sort of led with is you have to be all in for the two weeks on the pitch. So if we’re…

You know, pitch one was a StarCraft MMO, and we have to live and breathe and want it more than anything. And I kind of warned everybody. I said, “At the end of this two weeks, you’re going to think this is the only game idea, and you’re not going to be invested in the next, but we’re going to throw it out as soon as we finish it and do the next one.” And the StarCraft MMO, I actually really loved that pitch. It was called StarCraft Frontiers. And the concept was, like, less of you’re playing, like, space marine. Like, it was less armies. StarCraft the RTS is always about the three races and the giant armies.

And kind of what made WoW wow and separate from the Warcraft RTS series was that instead of being, like, a footman in the army in World of Warcraft, you were like a lone adventurer, you know, make your mark on the world. So we had this idea, it was this old Chris Metzen drawing of a space prospector. And I love that idea that, like, somewhere out in, like, where all the giant StarCraft battles were happening, you know, thousands of Zerg and Protoss and Terran, there’s, like, this, like, lone prospector on some planet, like, going through, like, a mysterious dungeon- … you know, looking for minerals but finding monsters. Like, it was that kind of spirit of-

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.

Yeah, I-

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

You want to be on the ground f- Like, what’s it like on the ground floor? And I don’t want to be a minion in a giant army. I want to be Indiana Jones in space, you know?

Nice.

So then there was this Metzen picture of the prospector, and then two of the most amazing artists, Arnold Tsang and Peter Lee. Arnold’s the great character artist. Peter Lee’s the great environment artist. They did this concept art for Frontiers that was Metzen’s space prospector. He’s smoking a cigar-… and he’s got his foot on a Hydralisk skull.

Nice.

And then there’s, like, a Medivac in the background, and they’re on this, like, big alien planet. And, like, that picture, you just wanted to like, “Here’s my money. I’ll pre-order now. Like, sign me up for that game.” That picture ended up being McCree from Overwatch. We redid it.

Nice.

But, but yeah, that’s, that was where McCree actually came from. So that was the StarCraft Frontiers idea. We kind of, we, we went all in on the design. We had a world design. We had class design, like how, how the classes would work, what progression might look like. And you also have to think when you’re trying to design an MMO, like, what could expansions and live content be like? And we put together a really good pitch. We all knew there’s no way you can make this game. Like, this, even though it was more focused than Titan, it’s five years on Blizzard’s best day with nothing going wrong, in a perfect scenario, five years to make that game probably with, you know, 150 to 200 people.

Like, these 40 people are not making that game in two years. So as much as I… Like, again, that was an idea, not a vision, ’cause it lacked, it lacked the path to reality, you know? There-

‘Cause that’s a legit large-scale MMO in a, in a world that you haven’t quite developed in the way that an MMO needs that was really crafted for the arts or the real-time strategy formulation of StarCraft. And it’s in space. It’s-

Yeah.

It’s… It would, it would take… I mean, it would be incredible, but it would be a five-year and realistically even more.

Like, an endless thing that you’d spin on on that team. You’re making the StarCraft game. How do you get from planet to planet?

Yeah.

Is it a cut scene? No one’s going to want a cut scene, but we should probably make it a cut scene because that’s easy. But well, we gotta have space flight. That… You’re adding, like, three years just by saying, “We gotta have space flight.”

You are. Yeah.

And then how do you make a space game without space flight? We’ve all played them. We know, we know those games, so.

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

So 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, and then your job as the game director, and if you have a great creative director, art director, tech director, the director should be scoping it back into reality. The mistake I see on a lot of game teams is scope becomes a production problem. You give it to the project managers or the executives or the producers to say, “No, there’s not enough time.” Or, “You guys should hire more,” ’cause-

Right.

Like, what do executives, what do those types have at their disposal that 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 scoping, your best-case scenario is when your tech director, art director, and game director are doing the scoping. Because then you know, like, this part we gotta spend big bucks on. There’s no getting around it. This part we can cheat. If you have a giant team and one guy’s job is just to make props, you know, crates and chairs, that guy’s going to make the… You know, that’s a AAA awesome developer who’s going to put his heart and soul into it. If you let him, he’ll take, you know, six weeks to make a crate. You have to have that moment where you’re like, “I kind of need 200 crates. So just spend, like, a couple hours on that one.” And that’s a hard thing to say to somebody.

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

Yeah. We had two weeks, so, and I don’t think we were… I was working on weekends, but we weren’t getting the group together. So it’s, you know, like 10 working days.

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

Yeah. Idea number two was CrossWorlds. That was a Metzen vision for a universe, and, like, I’m glad Metzen’s back at Blizzard, and 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 space port with all these, you know, freakish aliens and people from all walks of life-

Nice.

… and it’s kind of seedy and criminal. And there’s traders and smugglers and diplomats and… But this one planet is sort of the planet that they’ve agreed to like meet on, and this is like the neutral place, and then the game was going to take place on that planet, so-

This is awesome.

Yeah. So that was more of like a world IP driven one that was really inspired by Chris.

And that allows you to play with different characters, different… I like that, I like that idea a lot, because it’s the meeting place of different worlds, and then you can allow your imagination to drive what the worlds from which they came from are like. So you don’t have to design those worlds.

No, you don’t have to design them, but then they’re yours. Like, if the players really are reacting to, like, 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.

Like, “Let’s do it.”

I like it.

So it was actually that, it was CrossWorlds. We were working on CrossWorlds, and like the StarCraft Frontiers, you know, for Frontiers, we were having the class meetings, you know, how class progression work, like, the game designery stuff. And on CrossWorlds, we were having a class meeting of, like a big decision in, like, RPG type games is always: are you doing, like, skill based or class based?

And it’s usually some combination of those, but class based, you’re like choosing, “I’m going to be a warrior, therefore I use sword and shield, and I do these things.” Where more of a skill base is everybody’s kind of an avatar, and then the skills that you pick define, so I might take that I know 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 is like, “Oh, I think we want to be class based with this CrossWorlds thing,” and 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 WoW encounter designers; he designed like Onyxia and all the big raid bosses.

Like, if someone has a favorite raid boss, Geoff probably designed it. And he just kind of off the cuff said in this meeting, he said, “I wish instead of making, like, six classes, I wish we could make 50 classes. And I wish instead of having, like, you know, 100 abilities on the classes, the 50 classes all just had, like, one or two things that was really interesting about them.” And then the class meeting ended. Like, we designed our six classes in that meeting, and then the meeting ended. And 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. And then I also had… 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 is second to none. And I started taking some of the old Titan characters that we had designed. We had a class called the Jumper, and the Jumper could, like, teleport forward and rewind time and come back. And the Jumper used dual-wield pistols, which was, 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.

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

And some of the pragmatic part of that was I knew that Geoff Goodman was gonna be on this team, and I knew that Arnold Tsang was gonna be on this team. And it’s a play to your strengths moment. Like, what could we make in two years with the talent we have, and what is realistic? Like, what could we realistically make? And so then I just sat there, and I sort of I went through a bunch of Titan classes with a guy named The Gunjack, who was… became Reaper. We had… Actually, the Ranger got split out and became 76 and became Bastion, of all things.

You’re describing the game of Overwatch where exactly that vision from that meeting- … 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 with each their distinct look, distinct set of skills.

Yeah, and the personality was a big part of it, like capturing… This isn’t some generic, the Jumper. It’s this person, Lena Oxton. You know? And she has a life, and we’re gonna, you know, make you interested in her.

Yeah, there’s, like, a deep backstory. And that’s also what’s interesting about Overwatch, is that backstory is not, like, revealed in a direct way. It’s, it sort of, like, seeps in indirectly throughout the game. So, the backstory is implied almost. And it’s told not directly. So, there’s a lot of ideas like this. And so you’re… This is the thing that the team converged to.

Yeah. Well, and it was funny because, like, we’re having these CrossWorlds. Like, people are, you know, writing design docs and doing concept art for CrossWorlds. And, you know, we’d have some brainstorm meetings every day, and I put together… It was a seven-page deck, Overwatch deck. And it was called Monetized Shooter at the time. And it just said, “Monetized Shooter.” And then the first slide was League of Legends plus Team Fortress 2 logos.

And then I had, like, six heroes, like, sloppily designed. And as everybody was working on CrossWorlds there were two, you know, co-leaders of that team for… There was, you know… Chris Metzen was there, and Ray Gresko. And I remember Ray coming over. Ray is, like, a phenomenal game developer of all time. He, like, wrote the Dark Forces engine, was the production director on Diablo III. He and I killed Titan. And then he’s at my desk looking over my shoulder, and he’s like, “Well, what are you working on? Is this the CrossWorlds pitch?” I’m like, “No, this is, like, another idea that I’m just working on on the side.” And I show him the seven slides, and he just looks at me, and he says, “Go show Metzen this.”

This is what we should make instead.” And then I went and I showed Metzen, like, “Hey, this is just an idea.” And then Metzen was like, “Yes. You know, this is what we should make.” And I showed Arnold, and it was Arnold’s art. And then Ray tells me, he’s like… ‘Cause we would- Every morning, we’d get the team together ’cause we were in this dire, you know, dire straits, and we’re midway through at that point. And Ray and a producer named Matt Hawley said, “Tomorrow morning at the meeting, you’re gonna 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.

And I’m walking down the hall with Matt Hawley to go, like, pitch this to this group, you know, we’re supposed to be working on CrossWorlds, and they’re like, “You gotta pitch this idea to them.” And Matt Hawley stops me in the hall and says, “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, you know, creative devel-” And I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right.” Like, well no one was supposed to see his deck anyway.

You guys are all looking over my shoulder. He’s like, “You need to put a name on it.” I’m like, “It’s Overwatch.” Like, right on the spot, I said the name was Overwatch. And where that had come from was when we were working on Titan, I was really angry about this. We did this fake… I did not do this, another leader on the team did this, of this fake, like, we’re gonna put up whiteboards and everyone gets to 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 towards that name.

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

Yeah, yeah.

You know? So…

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

So my, my deck was terrible. People actually- … there’s a thing called the Jeff Deck, which is: it’s always gray with black writing and then the default, like, PowerPoint blue shapes, because I just don’t bother making it look good-

… Besides dragging Arnold Tsang’s art, you know, desecrating it into my deck. We put together… 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, not only was he a great game designer, but he had the ability to sell things better than anybody else, visually. So Jeremy took my shitty deck, and then we had lots more, like, creative brainstorms and we thought through the game of Overwatch a lot more, and 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, then we had to go through Activision.

And in that deck, because we had to speak to schedule, we had to speak to two things that were tough to speak to. One, we had to speak to schedule, and we came up with this concept of crawl, walk, run. We had identified the reason Titan failed is 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. So this first game is just to establish that there’s a universe you might give a shit about.

We also knew that the timeframe we were given of two years, there was no way to create a compelling PvE experience, so we just kinda randomly put dates in a slide of crawl, walk, run, thinking it was aspirational, and really, we were just trying to save ourselves. Like, don’t cancel us. You know, this team can make something great. The other part that we had to talk to too was, like, a mobile strategy. Like, at that time, it was like, everything has to be also on mobile, which I think is the dumbest thing ever. And so literally what we did is, this was Jeremy’s brilliant part, we had a picture with all the boxes and then one of them is, like, a tablet with just a fucking Photoshop of, you know, Arnold’s art on it. We’re like, “And also-“

“… it’ll be on mobile.”

Brilliant. But I think this crawl, walk, run idea is really nice. So the, the, the initial idea is you would have basically a shooter with all these different characters, all these heroes, and then the, the walk would be the PvE version of that, co-op. And then if people really fall in love with the world, then you build a big MMO around it. Quick pause for a bathroom break. Quick 30-second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. We got Fin for customer service AI agents, Blitzy for code generation in large code bases, BetterHelp for mental health, Shopify for selling stuff online, CodeRabbit for AI-powered code review, and Perplexity for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Best Overwatch heroes

Choose wisely, my friends. And now, back to my conversation with Jeff Kaplan. And we should also say that there’s a whole world that was built around Overwatch. And one of the ideas was… So, Warcraft is a very particular kind of world. StarCraft is a particular kind of world. Diablo is a particular kind of world. And you wanted to bring Overwatch to Earth and make it positive. You give this talk where there was a lot of respect paid to the sort of dark, gritty, post-apocalyptic games on Earth. 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, and fun, and more sort of surreal, versus like 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 think, how you craft in this vision. And not just, like, different characters like Tracer and so on, like what the personality is, but, like, bringing the world to life in which they will be. What was that process like?

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

Mm-hmm, yes.

You know, if there’s gonna be all this fighting, like the… it kinda has to be worth it for something. Picking the locations in the world was the funnest thing. You know, there’s just a group of us who would sit around, and be like, “Where do you wanna go?” You know, “Santorini looks amazing.” And you’re looking at pictures, and like, “Let’s make that place.” You know in a video game people are gonna 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. And I know why they exist, they’re easy to make, but we kinda wanted Overwatch to be this world tour of great places that you’d wanna go to.

Or in the case of like Oasis, it’s like, okay, maybe Iraq, back when we were making this game, wasn’t the top of people’s list, but what is the bright, hopeful version of what that could look like? So we just really tried to sell this idea of these aspirational locations. One, just to get people thinking about different places on Planet Earth and how awesome they all are. But also, from like a pure game design standpoint, you’re gonna 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’s from the best of your knowledge of the internet, favorites?

My favorite… I have a couple favorite heroes. Obviously, Tracer.

She’s the OG.

The OG, the cornerstone. You know, we put her on the front of the box. She was that moment of, “We should just take the best of the best,” and we know this gameplay is good and solid. And it’s so simple. Like, the mechanics are very easy to explain to somebody. It’s very easy to pick up. The first time anybody hits Recall for the first time and they try to wrap their mind around like, “Wait, does that mean if I…” You know, and they’re mapping out the possibilities.

And by the way, we should say that it’s a PvP game with six versus six at first, and where there’s three distinct roles that people take on on a team. And those roles, at first, I guess were not required. Like, you can reallocate those roles as you wanted. And then to maximize the fun, you add a little bit of structure. You enforce two per role, and the role being Tank, Support, and Damage. So, that. And then there’s all the kinds of heroes that are associated with the different roles, and people pick and there’s lore. And some people are probably like hardcore just one particular hero. And so there’s a lot of personality and story and community that builds around each of the heroes. And, but at the end of the day, it is just a fun shooter.

Yeah. 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. Uh, Team Fortress started as a Quake mod, which was brilliant and I played tons of. Then there was Team Fortress Classic that 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. And there’s obviously just huge influence there. But the shooter mechanics of Overwatch are… They hearken back to what people call the arcade or arena shooter genre. Which pains me ’cause I never… Back in the day, I didn’t think of Quake as an arcade shooter. It was almost an insulting way of saying it. But just the fast movement, really epic, over-the-top weapons. You have a low time to kill, or TTK, that players call it. Meaning you’re very survivable; you can take a few hits. Where, 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, like, I’m somebody who’s attracted to the simplicity and design. And I did not design McCree’s six shooter. The way that gun feels is phenomenal, and to capture the spirit of that, we had a designer named Mike Heiberg design the High Noon ultimate. And then just all the care and love the team put in, like when he does the ultimate, we roll a tumbleweed across the screen like every time. It’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, you know, in any of these games, whether they’re MOBAs or hero shooters, and they start, like, “This guy throws orbs, and he throws three orbs, and then he runs out of his orb bank, and then he can call the orbs back, or he can catch the orbs.” And my head is spinning, and I’m like, “Just give me a fucking good gun.” You know? 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 of 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 like every hero shooter since, and even non-hero shooters. And 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 you could play in versus mode where you could be the enemy zombie guys.

And there was an enemy boss zombie called The Charger who had that charge ability. And 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. And watching Reinhardts charge to their deaths is kind of hilarious, and it’s what separates a great Rein from a shitty one. The challenge of matchmaking

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

The matchmaking systems are some of the most complex design and engineering tasks you’re ever gonna tackle. And they’re thankless. It’s, it’s very hard, too, because I think most people, and they’re not being disingenuous, like if you ask a gamer, “What do you want?” They’re like, “I just want a fair match. Like, just make it even.” And the reality of what they want is they want a match where they’re slightly better than the other guy.

Like, they want it to feel like it was close but then win. And you can’t architect that. Like, there, it’s, you know, it’s a zero-sum situation, so there’s gotta be winners and there’s gotta be losers. The other really core problem, and we would study this all the time when people would complain. You know, you see a Reddit post, and somebody would say, “I had a six game losing streak. This is so fucked. It’s the worst matchmaker ever.”

Oh, Reddit.

Yeah, right? I love Reddit.

Me too.

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 six-game losing streak. He had an eight-game winning streak before that. There was no post about how awesome is this. And the human psychology doesn’t allow for that. One of my hindsight regrets about Overwatch, and this is, I think we did the right thing in the moment. It’s you know, like, I wouldn’t go back and redo it, but if I was making a hero shooter from scratch today, I would make it less team-focused. And we put all of our eggs in you noticing if 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, it was not good because the losing team got medals and the winning team got medals. And on the losing team, they would use that. They would weaponize it against their teammate. “Well, I’m the top kills, and all you guys are making us lose.” And it’s like, “Okay, you’re the top kills by like one, and you guys still lost.” So I would, 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, they’re selfish. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just, it’s that human nature, they can’t help.

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 is individual. Even when you’re on a team, you’re still feeling- … it’s individual, a fundamental 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. Can you… 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. So can you explain Rust?

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

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. So I 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 takes place… It’s basically… It’s 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, and 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.

Like, permanently?

Permanently. Like-

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 one 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. And-

Like, real low lows.

Real low lows.

Wow. All right.

Like, debilitating, like, “am I ever gonna play this game” lows.

Right.

You know, like, you spend a week building the world’s most perfect base and getting tons of loot, and then it… There’s what’s called online raiding and offline raiding. Online raiding means that my enemy is… I can see that they’re in their base right now, and I’m gonna try to attack them while they’re in their base. Offlining, which is, like, 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. Yeah. It’s-

Yes,

… gamer etiquette.

Yes.

Offlining’s when, like, “Hey, I think that my neighbor logged off for the night. You know, they just played six hours. I’ve been watching them, and now there’s no activity in their base, so I’m gonna, like, blow up their walls and take up 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. Just, I want… If I want-

That’d be a great tag.

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

Call of Duty.

Call of Duty just has its own-

You know, there’s a lot of haters. Like, Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 were the pinnacle of Call of Duty, with Black Ops being a very respectable, you know, third. But you’re never gonna get a better gun feel from a game than Call… Like, 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, like, the flow of the multiplayer is just great. Like, there’s… There’s a map called Crash from Call of Duty 4 that Aaron Keller and I… Aaron’s now the game director on Overwatch. We just sat and studied that map, or Terminal from Modern Warfare 2. Just studied the maps of just, like, 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. So did you start thinking about, in this framework of crawl, walk, run, about the walk, the PvE piece?

Yes. So the PvE piece was what Overwatch 2 was supposed to be. And I don’t know if people know this or not, but we started working on Overwatch 2 in 2015.

♪ Over- ♪

So, Overwatch 1 didn’t ship until 2016. So before Overwatch… And it wasn’t like work in earnest. It was like pitching the game. I remember I spent a lot of time… It was myself, Chris Metzen, and Michael Chu sort of brainstorming a framework for what, like, a campaign could look like. And we had this idea of, like, 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 my biggest mistakes I’ve made as a creative leader in my career, was Overwatch 2. There were two points of failure for me.

The first was, I had people on the game team who didn’t like PvP or competitive shooters, and they really loved the Overwatch universe and wanted to play these characters and heroes, but they wanted to kind of do it on their own terms in like a PvE setting. So even though Overwatch is this like runaway success and everybody’s talking about it, they felt like they couldn’t really engage with it. And so like people on the dev team are like, “Okay, thank God we, you know, shipped that PvP thing-“

“… When do we start work on this other thing?” So that came from a genuine place of excitement. And then the other point of pressure was from the executive team, and this was both the Blizzard and more so the Activision executive teams, and they started really putting the heat on, “Well, you said Overwatch 2 was gonna be out in 2019.” And they’re referring back to these slides that were just crazy dates. Like- … it was… You never want to put a PowerPoint deck in front of a corporate executive. Like, 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. This is just… In the same way we put, like, the tablet, you know? We just put Overwatch, like put Tracer on a tablet and say we have a mobile strategy.

So the executives started getting really angry at us that Overwatch 2 was slipping, slipping. And so when Overwatch 1 took off, I remember very early, we were in like May of 2016, and that year the Olympics were gonna be in Rio, I think. And, you know, I always like to pay, pay respects to, like, when a big event is happening, I’m like, “Hey, we should do, like, an event for the Olympics.” You can’t call it the Olympics or else they sue you, so you just… 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 like these two developers, Mike Heiberg and Dave Adams, like worked on this quirky… Like, they made soccer in Overwatch. We called it Lúcioball.

Like, they made a map and they made these mechanics. We’re like, “Yeah, let’s do an event called the Summer Games.”

And we do a live patch that’s the Summer Games. It’s extremely successful. And then after that, we’re like, “Yeah, let’s do… Halloween’s coming up. Let’s do a Halloween event. How cool will that be?” And our fans just loved these events, but there were two groups that were struggling with it. One was that group I told you 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 be doing… We should start work on Overwatch 2. We shouldn’t be this focused on the live game,” which was fucking nuts. Like, that was just crazy. There’s this phrase of 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 plays it for two weeks.

If you’re lucky enough to have caught the wave- … ride it till the end. And my instincts at that point were like, “Let’s just keep… How many more of these live events can we do?” Why Jeff left Blizzard

So yeah. 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 was… really wanted Overwatch 2 built instead of the live events. And then the executive pressure became monumental. And what would have been correct was to do more world events, like keep it going, but the major derail was Overwatch League. And we really like… The, the weirdest part about Overwatch League is I believe in it. You know, I helped pitch it along with some other people. We thought it was like the future of esports and doing regional-based teams, ensuring minimum player salaries and player protections. Like, there was a lot of 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 of like regional based, player protection, try to make esports more of a first class citizen, because there were all these stories about like shady teams, you know, screwing their players over. Where it got away from us was there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League, like too much so, and then it got over marketed to the people buying the teams. They went on this road show where they had a deck basically, and like you could put anything in a deck and sell anything, and they were pretty much selling the Brooklyn Bridge, that Overwatch League was going to be more popular than the NFL.

And we got a bunch of…… billionaire investors in these teams. And when 2018 started, like 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. And that means that here’s all these commitments we made for Overwatch League of like in-game stuff that had to exist. Like a lot of it was integration with Twitch and camera control and that kind of stuff. The other part of it was a bunch of skins and you know, uniforms for all the teams, which was not just getting the art in the game, but there was huge technical challenges to, like, how all that worked and was efficient and hit the right, you know, memory footprint and all of that kind of stuff.

And so all of your plans at that point kind of go out the window. Like you’re not gonna work on new world events. You’re not really even focused on Overwatch 2, you’re just kind of treading water. There was a lot of talk of like, “Oh God, you know, the deal, like, 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, you know?” Like, if you… The deal isn’t what people wanted, like, putting it on us, the Overwatch team, to, like, support this beast.

And it was a great idea that the wrong instincts and sort of, I don’t know how to phrase this in a way that’s not damning, but there was too much focus on, “Let’s make lots of money really fast.” And a lot of people got dragged into it. And while Overwatch League was great for Overwatch in terms of the players that it brought in, and the Overwatch League players, they were awesome. I love them. The Overwatch League staff at Blizzard, some of the nicest, most motivated, great creative people- … like 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, where these teams now, we didn’t just have, you know, executives at Activision and Blizzard who cared about the bottom line of Overwatch. We had all these people who 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’s going to be big ticket sales and then merch, you know, and all of that. And I think really quickly everybody learned like, yeah, we can’t do in-game events when you have a London team and a Shanghai team and, like, 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 comes onto the team, and then the pressure to ship Overwatch 2 and all the care and love that we had for, like, the live game and the live server, “Let’s just make events and new heroes and new maps,” we’re losing all these resources. And it got to the point, you know, my exit at Blizzard, I believed in Overwatch 2. I think we could have made a great game. I have a lot of hindsight of, like, how I would have designed that game differently with what I know now versus what ultimately we didn’t ship.

And Overwatch 2 is 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 that were… Overwatch is great, but the PvP, but I would have loved to play the PvE version.

I think everybody would have loved to have played it. And there’s a misconception online that all I cared about was PvE and 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. And what eventually broke me was it used to be like in 2016 and 2017, I felt very in control of the Overwatch team and the direction of the game as a game director, you know, working with Ray Gresko as the production director, it felt like we were running Overwatch.

And we were very, very successful and doing a good job. And I think the fans were happy. And then as we transitioned, you know, Overwatch League was the best intention. You know, 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. And then Overwatch 2 is the same thing. And what it boiled down for me, like what sort of ultimately broke me in my Blizzard career was I got called in the CFO’s office, and he sits me down and he says, he gives me a date, which at the time was 2020 and was going to slip to 2021, but at the time, it was 2020.

And he said, “Overwatch has to make in 2020, and then every year after that, it needs a recurring revenue of…” And then he says to me, “If it doesn’t do dollars, we’re gonna lay off a thousand people, and that’s gonna be on you.” And that was just the biggest fuck you moment I had in my career. It felt surreal to be in that condition. And as somebody who’s worked on a lot of games, made a lot of games, you get in these meetings where they’re like, “There’s 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?” And that was… 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, and 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.

I mean, 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’re done by small incredible teams, the hodgepodge that you describe taking big risks and falling in love with the thing they do and then just chasing it, working extremely hard. And just because you figured out a way how to make a lot of money doesn’t mean it’s not at the core this incredible creative journey that’s incredibly difficult to pull off. And 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 hodgepodge of weirdos working together, and weirdos have to run that thing. If you have, ever have a chance to create something special, you have to have weirdos at the helm. And the degree to which you don’t have weirdos at the helm, creative minds at the helm and you’re a businessperson at the helm, get out of their way, right? You can’t, you cannot have the meetings like you’re describing. And I don’t just speak about this particular company. It’s just the entire industry. I just, 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—we’re so focused on the love of the craft that we get lost in it and we love doing it and we’re not cutthroat and 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 are very cutthroat and very ambitious. And for whatever reason, we keep giving ourselves to them, and we need to stop giving our so… World of Warcraft, when we made it, 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 now start adulting by bringing in a CFO. You can figure it out.

And there are great finance guys. Like I’ve worked with finance guys who get it and get out of the way and respect, and they’re gamers, and they sort of understand, but like, 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. I mean, there’s those moments where you’re like, “I wish that hadn’t happened,” but on the whole, that place is mecca for game development, and everything I have is due to Blizzard. They provided for me and my family, made me the person I am, so separating from Blizzard was one of the most painful things. And I was very sad when I resigned, and I didn’t realize how broken I was until recently, like the mourning, grieving I had gone through of like… I think I’m a little fucked in the head for not being there any… How could I give that up? How could I not be there anymore? It was—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, created some of the greatest games ever, Warcraft, StarCraft Universe, Diablo, WoW, Overwatch. What made it such a legendary game company? Just looking back at the whole of it?

The start is Mike, Allen, and Frank. It was run by three gamers. They were, all three of them, 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, and even when they would align with a businessperson, they had a COO in the early days named Paul Sams, and Paul protected us.

You know, they just, they found great people who got it. The company when I joined was, like, 95% developers and, like, 5% operations. It’s, when I left, it was, you know, 50/50, and that’s like 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, just the commitment to excellence, the high-quality bar and then finding these passionate people like Chris Metzen or Sam Didier, they were, like, the visionaries of early Blizzard, Allen Adham, of just these worlds that we’re still making and we’re still playing in today. It was infectious and it was inspirational, and you wore the Blizzard blue with an esprit de corps.

Like, you felt proud to be part of it and you felt like you had made it to be there, and 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, like you knew you were part of something special. You didn’t take it for granted.

Yeah. That’s the sense. Reading everything, that’s the sense I got. Everybody there was a part of it that truly, truly, truly honored that time. Just to, just to take a small slice, what were some of the brain… So you mentioned Chris Metzen. You gave so much love to so many people on the team, but I gotta ask about Chris Metzen, who I would, by the way, love to do a podcast with at some point. What were the brainstorming sessions with him like? It seems like those are pretty awesome.

They were the best. Like, you could walk into a room. Like, the way I would work with Chris is early on when I was more junior, it was just sort of getting creative direction from him. “Hey, Chris, I’m about to work on this zone called Westfall. What are your ideas? You know, how could I capture them in gameplay? Well, that won’t quite work. How about like this?” It was more like that. Later on, like, I, I still remember the first discussion I ever had with Chris about Wrath of the Lich King, I went up to his office like, “Hey, we’re, we’re finally doing it. We’re doing the Northrend expansion. You know, what excites you about Northrend?” And that’s all you had to say. And he would draw a map and he’d start pulling up old, like, Warcraft II and Warcraft I manuals- …

and, you know, showing you, like, pictures he and Sammy had drawn and, like, maps and, and he, all of it, he would just go on for an hour and then I would sort of digest. I’d just listen, taking constant notes. I’m photographing his whiteboards all the time, and then I go back and start to put those into design flow of, like, “Okay. What, what’s a zone? What’s a dungeon? What could be cool? What should come first? What should come last?” You know, Lich King, for example, we wanted to try a very specific design to counter a problem we had in Burning Crusade, which is everybody entered through the Dark Portal through Hellfire Peninsula, all the server programmers hate you because everybody loads into the same zone at the same time. Lich King, we split them up for better player flow.

Plus, it’s more interesting the more choice you have. You know, Sid Meier says, “Games are a series of interesting choices,” so we give them two starting zones, but that was the flow with Chris. And so often we would just, like, okay, in that first meeting, Chris had put a zone called Grizzly Hills on the board. Well, I don’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. And you have no idea how much of it, like, he had pre-thought about 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 and together, I mean, that is what you’re doing. As a consumer of those worlds, you kind of take it for granted that they’re incredible, but, like, you’re crafting them. Like, you’re looking at a blank sheet of paper and then together coming up…

My job, as I saw it working with Chris, was I had to on World of Warcraft specifically working with Chris, is I was like the translator into gameplay of what Chris wanted, how to get it to play like how Chris wanted. So my favorite story is we’re working on Burning Crusade and we’re in this meeting and Chris is like… He’s 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. So we’re in this meeting and we’re talking about Silvermoon City because we’re introducing the Blood Elves, and Chris is like, “And Silvermoon City’s got the tallest fucking tower in all of Azeroth. I mean, it is the tallest thing. You know, it’s mind-blowing, the awe of it.”

Only the blood elves could build it.” Fast-forward like two weeks later. I’m walking through the hall and I see a bunch of level designers and artists are all like crowded around the screen, and on the screen they’ve dragged Blackrock Mountain and Karazhan and the Stormwind Cathedral. I’m like, “What the fuck are you guys doing?” And they’re like, “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.” And I’m like, “Guys, Chris doesn’t know how tall the Burning Steppes, you know- … and the cathedral in Stormwind- … is. What Chris means is just make the tower really fucking tall.”

“You don’t need to measure it.” And they’re, “Oh, okay. That’s okay?” Like, “Are you willing to take the heat if he—” I’m like, “I’m willing to take the heat on this one, guys.”

Yeah. It’s just a feeling. It’s a vibe. It’s-

It’s a vibe. Diablo IV

Yeah. And I also just personally have to give all the love in the world for the current Diablo IV team, because I’ve spent, most recently out of the Blizzard games, I’ve spent a huge amount of time in Diablo, and they’ve created some… And it’s not just the loot, all right? It’s the, the whole experience, the art, everything together. And the seasons they’ve created, they’ve created a really wonderful world. So I can, I could see, I could feel how much effort goes into that.

They’re crushing it. And I think Diablo IV in like modern times is one of the best worlds that they’ve built. And they know, they understand Diablo players. Like that community is so hard and so demanding, and that team is amazing.

Yeah, there’s a lot of richness. It’s like there’s this really… I mean, I don’t know how often you get that, but it’s really the perfect Diablo game. They’ve really like evolved a lot, grew a lot. So there’s this whole mathematical component of just so many numbers everywhere and it’s all balanced really masterfully. And then, of course, you have to come up with new content with the seasons and they figure out ways to do that, and at a crazy pace. And still make it super fun.

They’re a great live team, yeah. Getting back to making video games

And for me personally, like I said, the co-op, the couch co-op experience has been really… like 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, ’cause this is a powerful speech, is sort of instead of doing some kind of a corporate goodbye as you were leaving Blizzard, you allegedly shared with your team a video of David Bowie giving advice. And 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 co-exist with the rest of society. I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other peoples’ 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 and just, you know, I’d been going really hard. I’d gone 19 years barely taking vacation and I let Blizzard consume me. And, you know, 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 ’cause that’s hers- … but I’m allowed to pull the weeds. So I got very good at that. I was very proficient. And then of all things, I cracked out on Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and I unlocked Dark Matter Ultra, which I’d… that’s like a crazy achievement to do in that game.

So I did that, and then I just, I couldn’t help it, like it’s how I’m programmed. It was like, at this point, it’s late spring, early summer and I’m just sitting in the backyard and I just started writing with Notepad about, “Here’s a game I want to make.” And it was so terrifying because for 19 years I had worked with the greatest developers, I thought, in the industry. And, you know, there’d be moments where it’s like, “Okay, I wanna do like a game world map.” Like, “Hey, Erin, you’re amazing at making game world maps. Like, you do that.” And you know, I, like, “I need some story hooks. Hey, Chris, what do you think would be cool here?”

Like, you know, it’s so collaborative and I was surrounded by the best of the best, and there I was by myself. And 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’s asking me for unreasonable amounts of money and unreasonable amounts of time. And I had forgotten the pure joy of the craft of making games, and I was designing, I was going on, I was watching YouTube videos to learn Unreal and Adobe Illustrator and all these things to like help me make games, whatever, Blender. Um, I had no right to be doing any of that, and it just felt so amazing to do it. And I sort of realized, I came to two realizations. One, I never wanna work for someone else again.

I never wanna create something and then have somebody take my baby away from me, you know? That’s really hard when that happens, and it’s sort of happened a few times now, you know, where you have to just let something go that you created. And I wanted it all to be focused on the craft of making games, the art, programming, design, audio, you know? Like, just 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 gonna play together. And around that time, my I call him my development soulmate. There’s a programmer named Tim Ford.

He reached out and he’s like, “Hey, man…” He was like an associate tech director on Overwatch at the time. And he’s like, “Yeah, I don’t think I can do this anymore. It’s just not like it was, you know, I just handed in my notice.” And I’m like, “Whoa, you know, well, if you wanna do something together, like fuck it. Let’s take a stab and, you know, just see what happens.” And Tim came over to my house, and well, before that, he says, “My last day’s on Friday.”

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

… it was so awesome when he said that.

Brilliant.

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

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.

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

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

Oh, God, well, there’s, yeah, this one’s gonna set him back some time. But, yeah, I needed-

You know what to do.

I needed for none of that to happen. I just needed to be able to, like, mourn the loss of Blizzard-

… and create on my own so it was great. And at that time, like as soon as it was announced that I was leaving Blizzard, I had like 60 people reach out to me. It was, this was April of 2021 and investment money was nuts. Both like the VC money and the strategic money was crazy, like the, especially the Chinese companies, because apparently they weren’t getting publishing numbers in China or something. The whole economy was crazy, and so just everybody was trying to throw money at me, which was a very good position to sort of be at to start a company. So what Tim and I did was say, “We’re not doing this for money, but here’s the game we wanna make, and it’s gonna take this many developers, and we think it’s gonna take this length of time, and that means the budget is this.

And we need, for any of these people who wanna invest in us, we gotta hit that number, but after that, we’re not gonna go for more money. It’s not an auction to raise as high as we can go. We’re gonna optimize for control.” The Legend of California

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. Like, it’s incredible. But I almost immediately fell in love with the world and everything I saw. See, I’m tempted to say some of the things I saw but it’s just an incredible game. So 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. The most unconventional way to talk about this stuff for the first time. So, our company name is Kintsugiyama, which most people will struggle to pronounce.

Nice.

And the company name has a deep meaning to me, which I’m happy to explain later if you’re interested. And the game name that we’re working on, it’s called The Legend of California, and it’s an open world game. People are gonna 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-

In the gold rush

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

So, it’s this beautiful, almost ultra-realistic version of California, but it’s in an alternate history, 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, like, amalgamation of this 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, you know, cowboys. Like, it’s a really fun thing for us to explore, all of those themes—people in mines. We wanna build mines and we just wanna 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? So.

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

I’m glad you like it.

And one of my favorite things is just going down to the mine and digging. I mean, that’s done extremely well. And 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, so like the shape of California is always the familiar shape of California, except it’s an island. So, you know, 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. And so all of those familiar landmarks are there, but then we have like dozens of points of interest, and those move around the map in, depending on the map seed. And the map is also tiered in terms of difficulty. We don’t really have levels in this game. We have tiers, and there’s only four tiers right now. Maybe, maybe that will change. But the way that the map tiers itself each time changes with every world seed. So not only…

Any server that you join will have a different seed in terms of how the tiers play out. So, Mojave might be the easiest newbie area on your server, but on my server it’s an endgame, tier four area. But all of our notable points of interest also move around. So, we have a really amazing point of interest that we call Dread Rock that’s inspired by Alcatraz. And like, sure, sometimes it’s in San Francisco, but sometimes it can be sitting in the middle of the Mojave Desert also.

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

We have a great lighting artist who’s this amazing guy named Mike Marra, and some of the inspiration for the game like… There’s a lot of inspirations for this game, but there’s a painter named Albert Bierstadt, who I discovered while researching California, and he painted these just epic landscape pieces of, you know, Yosemite and a lot of other, the gorgeous parts of-

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

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

And so you see a painting like that and you’re saying, “We wanna create that world.”

Yeah. I mean, when I see that painting, this is, this is what video games brings to the table. So, every art form that evolves after another gets to incorporate previous art forms.

Movies got to take sound and, you know, fine art. We get to take everything, including movies. So, you know, it’s, it’s Katamari Damacy, the art form. But like… I see a Bierstadt painting, and I wanna walk around that world. I wanna see what’s around the corner. And our lighting artist, Mike, he, you know, he sees these pictures, and he’s like, “Okay. Yeah. Hold my beer.” Like, “I’ll make it look like that.” And he, and he… We are all blown away by the, like, how much impact just the lighting has. And I’m not an artist, so I don’t think about things like the color theory, the lights, the clouds, what all of that’s 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, the feeling of the game?

This is really different. It’s been hard for people. When people were talking to us about, you know, they know me and Tim, and they’re, “Oh, the Blizzard guys, the Overwatch guys. You’re making, like, a bright, aspirational future team-based hero shooter, right?” And I’m like, “Why would I want to do that?” I felt like, first of all, respects to Blizzard, and I don’t want to try to crib Blizzard and make a pseudo-Blizzard game, you know? This is… I want to make a Kintsugiyama game, you know? Me and Tim and this crack team, you know, we’re only 34 people. We want to define what a Kintsugiyama game is, and this world seemed so inspiring to us, you know? The setting is really interesting. You know, 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 kind of do a spin where, you know, it feels authentic. We can have guns that feel like they’re kind of from that time period, but we’re not spaceships and aliens and steampunk. That’s what we would have done at Blizzard. We’re gonna be a little different here. So, the tone of this game, you know… Metzen would describe Blizzard as the hero factory. You know, we make… And what he means by that is not only are we making heroes, but we make the players into heroes.

This game is gonna have an edgier tone. You’re gonna enter this world. It’s gonna feel lonelier. It’s gonna feel mysterious, larger than you. You’re gonna feel small until you earn the right to feel big. It’s gonna feel really dangerous. You’re gonna want to see what’s over that next hill, but if the sun is setting, like, get to shelter. Can’t wait to get back to my ranch and put my cozy fireplace on and wait till morning, you know? 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?

So, this is the beauty of me and Tim kind of getting to run the show and why we’re excited about it. We can kinda do whatever we want- … within reason. So we’re just gonna kinda quietly put it up on Steam and see what happens.

Nice.

You know, no, like, big corporate marketing group would ever think to do that in a million years- … without, like, some, you know, $10 million announce or whatever. We’ll just kinda put it on Steam and be cool if people wishlisted it. There’s my plug. And then I think we are shooting to have some sort of public-ish alpha in March. And then our plan, and something I’m really excited about, ’cause I’ve never gotten to do this before, we wanna put the game in early access. Some people hate early access and won’t touch it, and I understand it, and then some people are like, “I wanna 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, you know?

Is it scary to you to have a sort of 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, like, the most rough edges we would have at Blizzard is, like, showing it at BlizzCon, which was heavily polished and controlled. This is gonna be more, you know, in development than anything else I’ve ever worked on. But that’s-

I love it.

… part of the excitement too, you know? It’s kind of like this is how the sausage gets made. I mean, you’re gonna see it front row.

I’m gonna 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 just doing an incredible job. And thank you for putting out rough versions of it so we get to-

Yeah. Of course.

… not wait forever for the perfect thing. And because you feel in… 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?

So, Kintsugi is a Japanese craft of repairing broken pottery. So there’s a lot of philosophy that goes into it as well. And you know, I wanna do a good job of explaining it, but basically, like, you take a broken piece of pottery, and then they would use golden joinery-

Like golden lacquer to put the piece back together. And the thought was rather than hiding the scars, you make them more beautiful. And the philosophical parts that sort of appealed to me with that is there’s a lot of me and Tim in that, of… We’re so appreciative for our time at Blizzard, but we didn’t come away unscarred. And 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. And so 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. And I think it’s also an analogy for the making of games. Like, it’s a…

Making of games is a constant pursuit of imperfection. A game is never gonna be perfect. Just ask the players. They’re very vocal about it. And seeing the beauty and the imperfections and the strength in something that’s been broken that can be stronger. Greatest video game of all time

You had a heck of a difficult couple years here. And so in some sense, it represents that beauty in imperfection. So everybody listening to this I hope, I hope you do have it out on, on Steam. Go check out Legend of California. Truly a beautiful world. I’m so glad you are actually creating this, low-key, quietly creating this beautiful, incredible world. Ridiculous question, but can we talk about some of the greatest games of all time?

Yes.

What… I mean, 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 in the list?

So there’s one that’s the best. It’s Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. And then there’s this list of greatest games: Zork, Ultima,

So Breath of the Wild is, is the best, yeah?

The greatest game ever made.

What makes it the greatest game ever made for you?

Every aspect is so thoughtful, so well designed. The art matches the design and the tech, and even integrating with the Switch in the way it does. How do you keep making Zelda better? How can 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, and, like, the world is a toy and everything works as you wished and hoped it would work. And there’s a narrative aspect to it, and there’s really fun combat and action and itemization. There’s so many things that that game gets right that other games are lucky if they get one of those things right, and are… become best in their genre just for getting that one thing right. And Breath of the Wild does them all right and the best.

There’s a certain kinda lightness to the way the world feels, the openness of the world feels. 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, like, really great games, to be able to deliver once again.

Nintendo is, like, the Mecca. Like, they’re the best, you know? That’s all there is to it.

Do you understand how that company works?

No.

That they’re not…

I don’t at all.

Like, because, I mean, they’ve been around for a long time and still to be able to deliver.

I kind of rationally or irrationally just worship. It’s just sort of: if it’s from Nintendo, it’s gonna be great.

And even if my first impression is like, “Wow, they’re doing what weird thing with the controller this time,” and then you get your hands on it and you’re like, “God.” My son and I, we both played Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and he makes games also. And we had this moment where he’s like, “I’m so sad after I played it.” And he’s like, “I know I’ll never make anything like this.” And it’s that weird, like, you honor it so much and think it’s so great. Red Dead was like that for me. Red Dead Redemption 2 is… that’s a game I put on a shrine. Not just how brilliant the game itself is, but as a game maker, as a craftsperson who makes games, how the hell do you make that? Like, only Rockstar with all the years of making those types of games. No one else can come in entry level-

… and compete with that. So that’s-

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

Yeah. I don’t give anyone a pass. I feel like a lot of gamers and game developers, like, if it has writing, they’re like, “The story’s so good.” I’m like, actually, very few games have great story. But Red Dead has a great story. It’s got great character development. It’s got a good plot. And the dialogue is like… It’s like Tarantino-level- … high-quality dialogue. So… Red Dead’s up there. I have my other games that make the list for me, and these are… Both these games are… I would never tell you to play them. EverQuest and Rust are two of the most defining games to me and 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.

That’s-

It… When you are ready, it will come down.

It will come down. It will let you know.

The, the sky will part. Okay.

In Rust, you are considered a complete noob that doesn’t know what he’s doing- … if you don’t have a thousand hours. Even a thousand hours-

A thousand hours

… people would be like, “Oh, you only have a thousand hours-” “… in that game.” Yeah. But Rust and a lot of inspiration for me in the game I’m working on now… My game is 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? Just…

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 is the world reset do you think, 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 wanna make it rewarding. Like, the trick is coming up with not why am I upset that the world resets, but why am I excited that the world- … resets? And 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.” And if you wanna play the first time with me—like, if we wanna play World of Warcraft, and I’m level 80 and you’re level one, 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, you know, from minute one.

What about the experience of Rust where you can have everything taken away from you? So 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 gonna lose everything you have. You’re thinking, “I’m gonna take everything somebody else has.” But-

See, my perception of the Rust audience is there’s, like, three people, they’re in a castle somewhere. It’s a very exclusive group.

They are, they are highly skilled, highly passionate… highly knowledgeable, but yeah, it’s an inspiration for me. That and EverQuest were defining… And I’ve… The amount of hours I’ve logged in both those games are insane.

What do you think has more hours from Jeff Kaplan, EverQuest or Rust?

Well, you said I was 6K on EQ, so that puts me at… I’m at 5K in Rust.

And, and also in that collection is Zork.

Zork was… I mean, Zork, it just brings me back to that old IBM PC with my mom and my brother, trying to figure out, you know, like, how to keep the lights on or else a grue’s gonna eat us, you know? AI and future of video games

Yeah. So certain games just capture your heart and they stay with you forever. What do you think is the future of video games? So there’s a lot of conversations about AI helping expand maybe the storytelling aspects, the world creation aspects, becoming a tool that people can use more so. Maybe creating more believable NPCs, that kind of thing. But also there’s, as we’ve talked about, the video game industry is changing and evolving and trying to figure out, well, there’s the indie game makers that will have more power… Or these larger game makers will have more power, so what do you think the future of games looks like?

I think 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, you know, games are a technology-driven art form. And somebody much smarter than me once described it—and I’m paraphrasing—making a game is like making a movie if you had to invent the camera every time, because you’re kind of inventing the technology of your specific game. And 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 it’s overconfident in what it tries to deliver. Like, I fooled around, obviously like everybody, you mess around with, you know, ChatGPT and Gemini and you fool around with some of the art generation, and it’s fun for non-artists to fool around on Midjourney. But it’s mostly weird and shitty.

And even, like, when trying to have AI answer for me… Like, I don’t normally make UI in a game, and so I’m trying to figure out, like, UMG and Unreal Engine and I’m asking ChatGPT how to fix, like, a simple problem, like, how do I make the chat wrap, you know? And it, like, overconfidently gives me the wrong answer. And it’s, like, right one in 10 times. So its hit rate has to be a lot better. I think there’s a lot of moral concerns around AI when it comes to creative pursuits as well, like no one’s creative work should ever be used by AI without their permission.

You know, voice actors and artists, it can’t be lifting from them without their permission. That’s just immoral. It’s no different than just sort of stealing. So that’s wrong. I think how I’m curious, like especially as somebody who runs a small studio with 34 people, it’s like, what are the points of tedium that maybe AI could help out with that I don’t wanna do, and I’m not gonna hire someone to do? So I have, like a really dumb example: I’m making a bunch of images, I size them all incorrectly ’cause I’m dumb and I’m not an artist, and I did it all in Photoshop, and I have like 2,000 images that are the wrong size. I can have ChatGPT resize those and zip it in a file for me, and it literally takes it like a minute to do that.

I wasn’t gonna hire an intern to do it. I was just gonna work an hour later or two hours later that night to do it. Like, 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- what I don’t worry about is, no matter how good AI gets, never gonna draw a picture like Arnold Tsang. It’s never gonna tell a story like Chris Metzen. You know, that human spirit is irreplaceable.

Yeah, it’s hard to put into words what is that magic that humans produce, but they do. Truly great creative minds, truly great creative teams, they- they create something special. It’s hard to really articulate exactly what’s missing with- with AI, you know, what people call AI slop. ‘Cause it creates really beautiful imagery and beautiful stories, and very believable text. But it’s not quite… It doesn’t have that, I don’t know what it is, the edge that’s human. Maybe it’s the imperfections.

Yeah, I think so. Like AI to me right now currently, it’s like an interesting fever dream, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. 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 the small studios have hope in 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 in. The really compelling, new, innovative ideas are gonna come out of small studios.

What advice would you give to video game creators, small teams, if they wanna create a truly special game?

Well, they know how to do it. I mean, if they’re doing it, they know how to do it. It’s more 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’m, 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. So 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. This entry was posted in transcripts on March 13, 2026 by

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Host of Lex Fridman Podcast. Research Scientist at MIT, working on human-AI interaction, robotics, and machine learning. View all posts by Lex Fridman →