It’s hard to believe that Overwatch came out a whole-ass eight years ago. I was still a young and spry college student, blissfully unaware of just how little time I had left to comfortably enjoy hunching over a monitor for 10+ hours playing a Korean streamer in a giant mech.
Regardless of me being old and constantly enduring back pain now, Overwatch has been a staple in my gaming rotation for almost a decade now. I drop off it for pretty significant periods—even moreso since its sorta-but-not-quite-a sequel launched in October 2022—but it’s the only shooter that’s ever grabbed my attention enough to keep me playing well into triple-digit hours.
Me and 99,999,999 other folk, it seems. Blizzard revealed in a blog post that it recently surpassed 100 million players across Overwatch 1 and 2 combined. Mathematicians assure me that’s a large number, putting it up there with games like Call of Duty: Warzone and fellow Blizzard game Hearthstone. The shift to free-to-play with the sequel’s release has no doubt been a big boost, but 100 million folk passing by your game at some point is no small feat. While Hearthstone players were treated to free card packs for the occasion, Blizzard’s going down a more sentimental route for Overwatch players. The developer’s knocked together a little personalised montage video that’ll show you the various stats you’ve accumulated as far back as the original game’s 2016 launch.
For those of you who are bad at the game—hi, hello, raising my hand over here—it may end up unintentionally shading you. The montage splices high-action footage of the game’s cast of heroes with things like your K/D ratio, win rate, which role you’ve played the most and the folk you’ve partied up with more than anyone else. The video wraps up with a message of thanks from director Aaron Keller and executive producer Jared Neuss, with Keller saying: “When we started working on Overwatch in 2013 we never imagined it would grow to the point where it touched the lives of 100 million players.”
It’s a simple but sweet video, one that, unfortunately, is frustratingly limited to one country. Those in the US will be able to peep their specialised recap video over on the Recap Overwatch website. Anyone outside of the States (like myself) will have to stare at their stats in-game, like a normie. I hope Blizzard brings the feature to other countries soon as it’s pretty neat, and does involve some stats that you can’t see by poking around in the game. For now, I will continue to remain montageless and blissfully unaware of how terrible I really am at pushing the payload.
