Overwatch’s Hype Is All About Those Kids

Consider the vast majority of blockbuster video game releases. They usually star men. Those men are scowling. They’re involved in bloody violence of the grimmest sort. The lighting is dark, and smoky, and hostile. From Call of Duty to Battlefield, Assassin’s Creed to Far Cry (and most games in between), the big games from big teams share a very similar tone. And that tone isn’t very fun

Now consider Overwatch’s reveal. Happy kids, a talking ape, a very chirpy British girl. It didn’t really seem like a video game trailer at all, did it? People compared (wrongly, I think) the art design to Pixar, but they’re close: it felt like a Pixar movie, with a youthful sense of joy and excitement.

In this business, that’s pretty rare! Which is bizarre when you think about it. Humans, even nerd humans, have a variety of interests, which allow them to enjoy things across a wide spectrum of genres, tastes and styles. We love Toy Story as much as we love Aliens. Yet when it comes to games, we usually only get the latter.

Sure, there are exceptions. Loads of smaller indie titles get by just fine being super happy. You could say Borderlands does as well (though its toilet humour and violence sets it apart from Overwatch’s gentler comic-book approach), as does TF2, along with Blizzard’s own World of Warcraft. But those are just that, exceptions.

The world’s biggest video games can’t always be so serious; sometimes it’s great to let the full colour spectrum in, embrace the absurdity of the medium (and the comic books its so clearly drawing inspiration from) and just have fun with a game’s universe.