![]() ![]() THE ACCIDENTAL CREATIVESīen Dai and Jeremiah Johnson are both 20-year veterans of Blizzard. But those cinematics never went away, In fact, many of the people who worked on those animations in the late 1990s and early 2000s are still at Blizzard today, and continue to use their skills to produce animated shorts that are no longer just a technological feat and worldbuilding tool, but are impressive, self-contained pieces of storytelling in their own right – like the Overwatch Animated Shorts. Less Tim Allen, more Alien.Īs technology rapidly accelerated, Blizzard, as well as other game studios, would create games that matched and exceeded the once lofty ambitions of their cinematics Blizzard is of course known for the seminal multiplayer role-playing game World of Warcraft. At a time when the cutting edge of CG animation was broadly perceived to be in family-friendly films like Antz, here was a studio pushing the technical envelope just as hard, and using that ability to build ambitious sci-fi and fantasy worlds for an adult demographic. Such an impact these CG shorts had, that my friends and I would work to extract the movie files from the CD-ROMs of games like StarCraft and Diablo II so we could watch them all end-to-end. It was as if while reading Lord of the Rings, you were suddenly treated to a scene from the Peter Jackson films, the hypothetical images in your mind now vividly realised for the first time. Known at the time for top-down strategy and action-role-playing games where the player perspective was quite distanced from the pixelated action, Blizzard games were nonetheless known for their rich character and narrative, and a great deal of their growth in popularity was achieved through the storytelling achieved through their ambitious CG cinematics which bookended and punctuated key moments in their narrative campaigns.įrameborder="0" allow="accelerometer autoplay clipboard-write encrypted-media gyroscope picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen> And in the Western industry, no studio was pushing the boundaries more than Blizzard. But beyond the cinema, the best place to witness the then-unreal spectacle of top-end CG was in videogames, where short, pre-rendered animations stuffed into CD-ROMs became impactful narrative tools that visually realised characters and worlds in a way that consumer-grade computers and game console hardware just weren’t able to yet. In cinema, Pixar led the charge with two Toy Story films and A Bug’s Life, with Dreamworks Animation forming and following suit soon after. The late 1990s was an exciting time for CG animation. ![]() But it’s hardly the first time its developer, Blizzard Entertainment, has used CG animation and linear storytelling to expand its worlds far beyond the bounds of their games. With an accumulated viewcount that sits well past the 200 million mark at the time of writing, Overwatch undoubtedly has countless fans who have never actually touched the game. Instead, what’s helped flesh the Overwatch cast out as fully realised characters – complete with backgrounds, flaws, motivations, and morality – is a long series of exceptional animated short films released outside the game on YouTube, over the course of 6 years. What’s interesting about the growth of their popularity, however, is that within the confines of the actual game this roster of men, women, robots, and animals rarely interact with each other in a meaningful way that doesn’t involve, well, frantically trying to gun each other down. You would be hard-pressed to point to a group of videogame characters that have received more universal adoration in the last five years than the cast of Overwatch, a team-based, multiplayer first-person shooter.
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