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Nine years ago this May, I sat in a packed movie theater surrounded by sweaty gamers, all of us cheering at cutscenes from a video game that hadn’t even been released yet. This was the AMC Theater 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Overwatch Launch Celebration - a strange and wonderful fan event that feels like a m𓄧emory of a wei🦩rd dream whenever I think about it, which is pretty much never.
Overwatch 2 Players Are Already Deciding What Heroes They'll Ban
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Seeing everything Overwatch has been through over the last decade, and the way it’s managed to alienate its fan base through its many missteps and mistakes, I can’t help but feel nostalgic for that one night in 2016 when Overwatch was the most exciting game in the world, even th🌳ough most of us had never played it.
The Birth Of The Overwatch Fandom
To be fair, some of us had played it, and a lot. Overwatch launched on May 26, 2016, but in the months leading up to that date, Blizzard had hosted a series of beta tests that gave us our first taste of the game. I was managing the cell phone department at a Best Buy in California at the time, and a customer who worked at Blizzard offered me a beta key after helping them change their Verizon plan. I was excited, but I didn’t have a computer to play it on, so I negotiated with the manager of the PC department to sell me an open-box laptop with a bi𝓡g scratch on the screen for a huge discount.
The beta ran off and on from 🥀November 2015 to February 9, 2016, and by the time it ended, . During this time I had gotten back in touch with my gaming friends from college through the beta, and we played together every night we could. I remember being devastated when the beta ended in February and we knew we’d have to wait until May to play it again. After a few weeks, the Overwatch subreddit started to look like a support group for gamers in withdrawal. It was brutal. For three months, all I could think about was Overwatch.
The launch celebration happened at movie 𒀰theaters around the world the week before Overwatch officially came out. I bought tickets for myself 🤪and two of my Best Buy co-workers and we drove 40 minutes to the closest participating theater. We left pretty early because we weren’t sure what to expect, and it was a good thing we did because we found a line of gamers wrapped around the building, waiting to get inside and watch some advertisements for a video game. It felt like Comic-Con or E3, but for a single game.
An Overwatch Short Film Festival
The event was a lot of fun. They handed out inflatable noise makers and Overwatch cups with different characters on them (I got Widowmaker, and still have it) and ushered us into a theater to watch the previously released cinematics that had been released online in the lead-up to the game’s release. We watchꦦed the original ‘Punch Kid’ cinematic༺ Trailer that was used to announce the game at Blizzcon 2014, followed by Winston’s short called Recall, the Tracer and Widowmaker short, Alive, the short about Soldier: 76 called Hero, and the heart-wrenching Bastion short called The Last Bastion. Then they debuted a brand new short called Dragons, featuring Hanzo and Genji, which revealed the two characters were brothers.
Yes, I cried♉ when Winston said, “Never accept the world as it appears to be. Dare to see it for what it could be.” Everyone did.
After all the shorts, we got to watch the developers talk about the game💧 and share some behind-the-scenes info. I wish I could remember what they talked about, but I wasn’t getting paid to write about games back then, so I didn’t take any notes. What I do rem🀅ember is the energy in the room. The theater was buzzing with excitement, and it felt so cool just to be a part of it.
It’s hard to imagine an event like that ever happening again. There are plenty of games that have a lot of hype behind them of course. Rockstar cou𓆉ld get GTA players together this summer for a launch party, or Bethesda could put on an event for Elder Scrolls fans some day in the far distant future, but it wouldn’t be quite like this. Overwatch was a brand-new IP that built its initial fanbase around emotionally compelling sꦑhort films and a trust in Blizzard that, unfortunately, no longer exists. It was a weird fan event for a one of a kind game that only sort of still exists.
I don’t love what 🧜the game has become, but those early days meant so much to me that I’ll never stop loving Overwatch.
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