Jeff Kaplan still has plans on this day in November. He's wearing a t-shirt that shows the silhouette of Soldier 76, an old and grumpy military guy, the former commander of a now-disbanded elite group. "They always call me 'Papa Jeff' in our reddit community", explains Kaplan, game director of the hugely successful online multiplayer game "Overwatch" by Blizzard Entertainment ("World of Warcraft", "Starcraft", "Diablo"). "So me and the other old guy from our game, Soldier 76, we've got to stick together." Kaplan and his team at Blizzard were shooting a video that day, to say "thank you" to the game's fan community at reddit, and to congratulate them on reaching one million subscribers. "It's such a friendly place, they celebrate each other", says Kaplan with eyes glowing with pride and excitement. Outside of reddit, Overwatch had at that time just reached 35 million players worldwide. Kaplan is not a pop star or Hollywood actor, but for these 35 million people, he's the face of Overwatch. He's appearing in videos like the christmas bit, where he just sits in a chair in front of a fireplace for ten hours, without doing much. And he still doesn't seem to have realized that he's famous now.
SZ: You once said you're sort of the "black sheep" of your family, career-wise. Your brothers started out on traditional business careers and were successful at an early age. So, let's talk about money: Are you now the top earner in your family?
Jeff Kaplan: Would you believe me when I tell you that I never asked my brothers what they make?
Seriously?
Yes. It's never of any interest to me. As a youngest brother I always looked up to my older brothers. They were my idols, my superstars, my heroes. In my eyes, I will never be as good as them. And I always assumed I'm not as successful as they are.
You are the game director of one of the most successful games currently out there. Isn't this a very well paying job?
When I came to work at Blizzard, I was 29 years old. I had already been working for many years in a different industry, for a decent salary. And Blizzard offered me a very, very low salary. I know this because of the position I'm in now: I've seen the salary of every single person who works in development at Blizzard, so I know what every single developer makes. In my 15 years here I've never seen anybody make less than what I was offered when I came here. Yet I still decided to take that offer. I don't care about the financial part at all. As long as I can take care of my wife and my kids, it doesn't really matter. And I need internet, a really good internet connection.
Being able to take care of your family and having a good internet connection? Those are modest financial goals...
When I was trying to make it as a writer and I was really struggling and failing, I had these three goals: One: I want to be able to afford a good internet connection without struggling. I was playing "Quake" on a dial-up connection. And they would call me "HPB", "High Ping Bastard", because I had a high ping and people would yell at me to get off the server. I was jealous of people who had ISDN or DSL. Two: I wanted to be able to afford any video game that I ever wanted to play. There was a time when I had to decide whether to buy "Warcraft 2" or a different game. I forgot which one, but I remember standing in the game store and realizing that I can only afford one of these two games. And I really regret that to this day. And three: I want to be able to have at least five dollars for lunch every day. I was stressed about money to the point where I was going to a fast food restaurant where they had a dollar menu. And you're like: "What can I eat for a dollar today? Imagine if I had five dollars to spend on lunch, how good lunch would be!" These were my financial goals in life. And I think I hit them by the time I was thirty. Probably a bit later than I should have.
Were you really that poor?
I wasn't poor. If I ever needed help, my parents would help me. But I felt a tremendous guilt if I ever asked them for something. I remember asking my parents for a loan for the first house I ever bought. I mean, everybody asks their parents for a loan for their first house, right? Yet I still had to live with a feeling of guilt about that. When I payed off the loan - it was off of one of the bonus checks for "The Burning Crusade" -, that was the happiest day for my wife and myself. So it was less about being poor and more about being stubborn.
Apart from how financially successful you now are or aren't, you realize that you're doing a job that a lot of gamers only dream about, right?
I think I am one of the luckiest people in the world for the job that I have. But some people would think about the job differently than I do. They think that I can make any decision I want. That's not at all what's so great about my job. The most awesome part is the people I work with. Every single day you're learning from these super smart people. I work with a guy that has a PhD in physics. Our tech director was a practicing lawyer before. Our executive producer has done every form of programming and design and is just a genius at what he does. I've gotten a lot of attention because I do the "developer updates", so I'm the face that the players are most familiar with. I always try to tell people that I'm just one hundredth of a big pie. Everybody here has contributed equally if not more to Overwatch than I have.
If you design a game, hundreds of people have influence on your baby. How hard is it to not be in charge sometimes?
I am the least intelligent and least talented person on the Overwatch team. I like to think that Blizzard is a place that a lot of developers from all over the world want to come to and be a part of what we're doing. If that assumption is true, then we can have access to some of the top game developers in entire world. If you have access to the top game developers in the world, you have to let them be empowered and make amazing decisions. Every member on the Overwatch team is empowered to affect any part of Overwatch they want to be a part of. And they're good at it. So it makes it very easy to relinquish control. More than that: It actually feels like a failure otherwise. We call it the game director card. There are moments where they'll come up to me and say "Jeff, you've got to play the card on this one, it's time", because the team can't agree on something. It feels like I failed as a leader, if it comes to that.
You worked in the film industry before, that seems to be a similar working environment as games development. Yet you said that you hated the collaboration there. What was so different about working with movies than working with games?
The last time I worked in Hollywood was in the 90ies. So it could be very different now. But at the time it was very stratified. Everybody was super passionate at every tier. But I felt that you had these executives who would talk down on who I thought were creative and brilliant people. Also often times the business decisions overpowered the desire for creating a work of art. I worked in the story department, so new scripts where coming in constantly, and I had to xerox them. This was the 90ies where everything was paper and nothing was digital, and I basically had to live in the xerox room. I was 19 years old and would just read the scripts as I was making the copies. And I started reading a copy of the "Pulp Fiction" script. "Reservoir Dogs" had been out and I thought that was one of the greatest movies ever made. It changed my whole view of what a movie could be. So I'm reading "Pulp Fiction" in the xerox room at Universal Pictures. I remember going to my boss and asked: "Are we making this? This is amazing!" And he said: "Oh, no, no. The studio has no interest in that." And the script that I was xeroxing and which everyone at the studio was excited about instead was "Green Acres - The Movie". The movie version of a really old TV show. "Green Acres is the place to be!" (sings) That's what they wanted to do instead of "Pulp Fiction".
And they ended up making this movie?
They didn't, thank God. But everyone around me was excited about "Green Acres" because they believed in the bottom line. I remember feeling like I never had such a disconnect with the place I'm working for.
And in games development, the bottom line is not that important?
I feel like in games we value the people and their opinions differently. In front of Blizzard headquarters, there's an Orc statue, and around the statue are a couple of bronze signs. One of them says "Every voice matters". It doesn't matter if I've been here for 15 years and I'm the game director and you sit at the front desk or work in the cafeteria or are an associate programmer on one of the teams. Your opinion is as important as mine and we're gonna figure it out and make the game together. There's more of an equality in video games than in the movie industry. In fact we expect new people to teach us a bunch. They're going to bring something to development that we didn't have before. Plus, we recognize that the older you get, the worse you get at video games. I can watch this 20 year old guy who's a grandmaster at Overwatch, and I can learn a lot of stuff from him about the game that I made.
"I was very sassy, for sure! I don't think I was a troll."
Before you came to Blizzard, you were one of those outside voices. You were very vocal as a guild leader in the online game "Everquest" back then and there are still a couple of forum posts from you floating around ...
I'm sure there are.
Oh yes, there are. And some of them sound very angry. How difficult is it to find constructive criticism within the angry rants of some frustrated player?
I have got a degree in creative writing. People often ask me what about creative writing helps me in video games: Do you come up with the story? Do you write these characters? The truth is: I don't. We have far better writers here in the studio than me. But studying creative writing is very intense. You have these long workshops. Before you meet the group, you have to submit your story to the whole class. Everybody reads your story. You walk in the classroom, there's a large table for twelve or 14 people. I was lucky enough to study with E.L. Doctorow who wrote "Ragtime" and "Billy Bathgate", somebody who I really looked up to. And he's sitting at the end of that table. You walk into that room and the one rule was that you're not allowed to talk for an hour. Instead the room just dissects everything you ever wrote.
So you learned how to take criticism?
The vast majority of human beings on the planet don't know how to constructively give feedback. They usually say "That's broken!" and "That's terrible!" or they make wild suggestions that don't actually fix the problem. But that doesn't mean that their opinion is wrong. You have to filter out the mean part of it, you have to ask yourself: Is there actually a problem there and if so, how can we fix it? It depends if you respect the game designers that you're giving the feedback to. If you do, you can show that you know that it's not a trivial thing that anybody could do and you could say: "Hey Jeff, I'm not sure exactly what it is, but something feels off about Scatter Arrow. I'd appreciate it if you and your team could look into it and maybe make it better." That's kind of what you want to hear. But instead players like to cut to "Just remove Hanzo from the game!". You wouldn't walk into a doctor's office and say "Listen you idiot, give me a shot of penicillin right now in this arm!"
Some people do.
Maybe they do, yeah. But then they're not respecting the knowledge and the passion of that person. We want to hear from you! It's as important for us to hear what you like as what you don't like. If everything we hear is what you don't like, we don't know what we're doing right. Sometimes when people just get angry, it becomes a little bit more challenging for us to actually fix their problem, because they might not necessarily understand their problem as deeply as I think we do.
Did you always criticize constructively?
No! No. I did not. The Internet has chosen to remember a few choice rants that I made, more than to remember how much I celebrated the game. I was a leader in the "Everquest" community. If you go back and read some of what I had written, most of it shows a tremendous amount of love and dedication to the game. But I did have moments of frustration and I think I was not only naive and ignorant about how game development works, but I was also out of line and inappropriate. But a lot of those rants at least were only on my own fan website. That is very different than going to somebody's forum and saying the same sort of thing.
Would you call yourself a troll back then?
I was very sassy, for sure! I don't think I was a troll.
No troll would say that they're a troll.
Probably. I was more positive than I was negative.
That's what every troll would say.
I think some of my angrier posts were coming from a sinking feeling that nobody was listening. I was trying to be overdramatic to get somebody to pay attention to me. I would have loved a dialogue with the developers that I was unable to have. I don't think that was the developers' fault. I feel really bad about that. I don't feel like they were wrong and I was right. I feel like I was wrong. When you're in a position of influence like I was over that community, you can sometimes take advantage of the situation.
I was going to say I don't have regrets. But I do have regrets. I know that there are human beings on the other side of of the internet. You receive those comments and ... it's scary. I often wonder: Is there some creative Darwinism going on? If Michelangelo or Van Gogh or Mozart or Bach lived in the era of social media and have received that much negativity about their craft: Who would have given up? Maybe we're actually driving some of the most creative and brilliant minds away. I said everything I said because I was so in love with what they created that it had become emotional and personal to me. But I hope that whoever I was mean to or whoever my words might have hurt, I hope that they survived and persisted and are still making games. That realization does help me today because when a similar sort of hateful criticism comes my way, I know that there's love and passion in the statement. Who has time to just hate on things that aren't important to him? I still wish that I could go back and fix what I had done.
Were you ever close to giving up?
I have given up before. I've been at that breaking point. When I was sending out my short stories to get them published in literary magazines, I got 172 rejections in one year. It broke me. I think anybody working on games had moments where they wanted to just not care anymore. That's the magic of working on a team and not being there by yourself, because there are times when you want to give up and your team steps in. It's cheesy, but I always quote Zarya, saying "Together we are strong". We have each other's back.
How important is it in life to be rejected?
It depends what you take from your failures. It sounds cliché, but: "Make mistakes, just don't make the same mistakes twice." I've been fortunate my life has been a roller coaster of success and failure. I failed at my creative writing career for ten years. That taught me a lot. I was very fortunate to be a part of the World of Warcraft team during its inception and during the release of Vanilla WoW and Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. So that taught me to understand what success feels like.
What does success feel like?
It feels like a runaway train. You don't appreciate it until it goes away. It's not that you'd necessarily take it for granted. But when you are being successful like we were in those early days of WoW, you're focused on everything that was wrong. I didn't realize how awesome everything was until I left the World of Warcraft team. I went to work on Titan, and I was finally able to reflect and realize: "I was just part of something super super special and I might not ever have that again in my career."
Could success make you feel depressive?
It does. If you look at a project like World of Warcraft, that is a once-in-a-lifetime game. There might not ever be a game that has a reach and an effect on people like WoW. We loved Titan just as much and we put as much of ourselves into Titan and we showed up every day and we worked as hard on it as we did on WoW. It was cancelled, it all went away and it never saw the light of day. It ruined people on the team, it changed a lot of people's lives. Some people didn't want to work on this team anymore after that. Some people didn't even want to work at Blizzard anymore.
It was devastating and it hurt our families, it wasn't just us. My wife and I were in the process of buying a new house during the the final month of Titan, we had already made an offer and the seller accepted. We were away for our anniversary. And we knew that Titan was going to be canceled that week. We're driving home from this anniversary trip, and instead of being happy and enjoying the moment together we decided to not buy the house because of the failure of Titan. Behind Blizzard, the brand logo, there's all these passionate people. Behind every server, there's somebody staying up late making sure that server is running. He's maybe missing his kid's birthday. Okay, fine, there's a big corporation around us. But that's not our fault. We're game makers. We make this thing that people love, because we love it so much.
You're wearing a Soldier-76-shirt. He's the commander in Overwatch, the experienced strategist. Are you the Soldier 76 in the development team?
He's a little bit more jaded than I am. I think I was a little more jaded when I was younger. I've come to wisen into a sense of optimism and positivity. He's a little bit broken. I'd like to think I was more like him during the peak of Overwatch and not during the fall. I hope I'm a little bit more Jack Morrison than Soldier 76.
"I want to be in charge of a Blizzard theme park right now"
You were always looking up to your brothers ...
Yeah, and I still do.
You're world famous for what you do. How do your brothers look at you now? You have fans, now. Do your brothers have fans?
I'm their fan. I don't really ... that's actually ... I should talk to my brothers ... I don't really know how much awareness they have about ... Being video game famous is different than being actually famous.
Nowadays? You were at Blizzcon and saw 30 000 people coming there ...
I was. Yes. (laughs) It's weird when you're the person it's happening to. In your own mind you have not changed at all. What has changed is how people perceive you. I don't think of myself as famous. I don't know how my brothers recognize that. My one brother, who's two years older than me, is the world's biggest Hearthstone fan. He probably would know who Ben Brode is and think that he is famous. And my oldest brother doesn't play video games, so I don't know if he has an awareness about what video games have turned into. I don't know if me being video game famous is a thing for them. I actually would hope that it's not a thing for them. I hope that they still just see me as the goofy, awkward, quirky, black sheep, younger brother. That's the area that I'm comfortable in. They'll always be superstars to me. I think I'll be chasing them my whole life trying to be more like them. That's the world I'm comfortable in and I hope it stays that way.
You recently put out "Blizzard World", an Overwatch map set as an amusement park celebrating Blizzard game universes. How did it come to that?
Blizzard has always been defined by those three pillars: Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo. When we started to work on Overwatch, we were very nervous that here was this team who just failed tremendously with Titan and now had the hubris to say, we're going to come up with something brand-new. Every step of the way, we were standing on the shoulders of giants. Not just that those other games paid for the development of Overwatch. But also the creative integrity of the company was built on those other game universes. It felt very scary to say that we could put up a fourth pillar that would be just as beloved as the other three. But we received a tremendous amount of support from the other teams. Blizzard World is an attempt to write a love letter back to our big brother franchises to whom we owe so much.
How similar is making a video game and building a theme park?
Video games are a form of entertainment first and foremost, but there's an escapism that comes along with any game. There's that childlike wonderment that we've all felt when walking into a place like a theme park. For a brief moment, even though you know it's not real, even though you see a trashcan over here and the custodians' closet over there, for a brief moment, if you just squint a little bit, you can feel like you're walking through the gates of Stormwind or into the Skeleton King's throne room. That's a goal that games and theme parks very much share.
Would you like to design and run a Blizzard theme park?
Yes. I want to be in charge of it right now. In some ways Blizzcon is the Blizzard theme park. Can we have Blizzcon 365 days of the year? That would be my dream. Plus just designing all the rides would be off the hook.
At Blizzcon, for a couple of seconds it sounded like you were announcing an actual theme park.
It would be awesome to announce that. Well, we'll start with the map in Overwatch and we'll see how that works out. If people are feeling pretty good about it, maybe we will branch out at some point.
You're talking about it like a joke. But are there any plans to create something like that in the future?
I think there are dreams, which is different than plans.
Walt Disney had the same dream. And your company makes a lot of money.
(laughs) If they put me in charge of spending the money, I have some plans for that. But we're not there yet.
