Many fans of Blizzard’s popular first person hero shooter, Overwatch, will tell you that their favorite thing about the game is its characters, who overflow with personality. In an act of pure wish fulfillment, YouTube user Lion Montages has edited Blizzard’s cinematics and voice lines to make a trailer for a wishful-thinking “Netflix Original Series” adaptation the game. The result, above, speaks for itself.
Although the game features only competitive multiplayer modes, with no single player to speak of, its story is told both in-game through environmental details and incidental dialogue, and out of the game through animated shorts, text, and comics. Since the early StarCraft and Warcraft games, Blizzard has earned a reputation for producing Hollywood-caliber cinematic sequences for its games. This has peaked with Overwatch, which earns frequent comparisons to Pixar films for its charming, diverse, colorful, and recognizable characters, and generally upbeat attitude about “a future worth fighting for.” Fan engagement with the game’s characters and story is impressive, given how little official narrative content there is, so a lot of people are eager to make Lion Montages’ proof of concept into a reality.
Set in the recognizable future, Overwatch is about the former agents of a global defense agency created to deal with a war between humans and sentient machines (called Omnics). Following years of peace, Overwatch was disbanded but rising terrorism around the world and threats from a dark organization called Talon brings Overwatch’s former members back together. In practice, this has no bearing on gameplay other than providing a loose narrative frame to get cool characters shooting at one another. Any character can play with or against any other, regardless of their in-fiction loyalties. Many fans would no doubt enjoy a more in-depth look at their world, excited at the prospect of a huge ensemble cast and world-spanning story encompassing action, political drama, and all manner of interpersonal relationships.
Lion Montages, as the account name suggests, primarily posts fan trailers and machinima videos stitched together from video game footage, which has a long and illustrious history as an online practice. This is not, in fact, its first Overwatch video, with a shorter movie trailer posted last year (below) closer to the game’s launch. The new Netflix trailer shares a lot of the same footage but expands it with the videos that Blizzard has subsequently released.
