Before the rise of Overwatch there was the fall of Titan, a cancelled Blizzard MMO which was stripped for parts and used to craft the foundation of the team-shooter we all know today. Ex-Overwatch boss Jeff Kaplan had been working on Titan and was the driving force behind redirecting the team to something new. It ended up with success but the interim certainly sounds like an ordeal, with the team given just six weeks to come up with and pitch a new game.
"It was supposed to be the greatest time ever if you think about it, because you're a game developer at Blizzard and you get to come up with a new idea," Kaplan says in an interview with Lex Fridman. "So that sounds awesome, to everybody at Blizzard to other game developers it sounds great. But we were probably the most demoralised we'd ever been in our careers, at least I was. I didn't know if I was going to be fired, if that was the end of my career at that point. So that was a very serious dire environment that this was happening in."
