Jeff Kaplan

“And, like, I don't wanna be discouraging to anybody because I really do believe, like, you hear it so much. Like, you have to work for your dreams, Never give up. Like, we're trained this way. Like, never give up. The universe actually, maybe not the universe. A group of editors at literary magazines across The United States was telling me it was time to give up as a writer. Like, I wasn't cut out for it. And, I stopped.”

“So the advice that I always give, and it sounds so stupid, like, this sounds really trite, but, focus on what you wanna do, not what you wanna be. The the pressure that society kinda puts on us is, you know, oh, you wanna be an astronaut? Do you wanna be a firefighter? Do you wanna be a writer? Do you wanna be a game maker? And I think we get lost in the trappings of, like, a vision of what that role is and how to perform as a fake actor in that role.”

“The funny part for me with EverQuest is, you know, you play a game as much as I played EverQuest, and people are like, you threw years of your life away. Like, you can't win a game like that. And I'm like, I don't know. Like, sitting here today, my whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest, so I think I won the game.”

“Having lunch, Rob introduced me. This is Allen Adham. He plays Barfa. I'm like, oh, Barfa. And we you know, he has you saved me in the hole that time. Well, it turns out Allen was the founder of Blizzard, and he was the head he was sort of the head of everything at that time. And what I didn't realize with these lunches were, like, I just loved them because I felt like as myself. And one day, Rob logs in to Evercrest. He said, I want you to tomorrow to check the Blizzard job site.”

“When that person speaks up and says, I think like, with Overwatch, for example, I think we should do this, you know, we should do x instead of y. Instead of saying, well, I'm a believer in y. Why are you against my idea x? You should take a moment, have a deep breath, and say, man, the best prop artist in the industry is suggesting something. Why don't I listen to it?”

“Green Hills Of Stranglethorn holds a lot of emotional value for me because amongst Wow players back in the day, it was unanimously hated as one of the shittiest, most annoying quests. The quest giver, Hemet Nessingwary, which is just me rearranging the letters of of Hemingway. The pages of Green Hills of Stranglethorn could be looted off of any creature anywhere in Stranglethorn Vale. And it was kinda like that McDonald's monopoly game where you have to have all the pieces or else you're not gonna win. The pages didn't stack. There wasn't a dedicated container to put all the pages in. So players had very limited bag space.”

“My big worry is that there are creators. Like, now being a creator of anything, writer, musician, you know, make online videos, whatever creator means to you, make games. Now part of the skill set is being able to weather like a fire hose of criticism like the world has never seen. And I make up these scenarios in my head of, like, would Van Gogh have existed if, you know, Reddit and all these things were out there commenting on, like, how many people were able to communicate with Beethoven in his lifetime or in a week?”

“Titan kind of was like that was the hubris of Blizzard in that era at its height of, you know, we were over being hurt about, you know, World of Warcraft. And we were now in the era of, like, we made World of Warcraft. We can do no wrong. This next thing is gonna be the best ever. The right way to incubate a video game is give the smallest group possible. You prove out that idea, and once you know what you're doing, then you expand the team.”

“Jeff Goodman just kind of off the cuff said in this meeting, he said, I wish instead of making, like, six classes, I wish we can make 50 classes. And I wish instead of having, like, you know, a 100 abilities on the classes, the the 50 classes all just had, like, one or two things that was really interesting about them. And then the meeting ended. And I started taking some of the old Titan characters that we had designed. We had a class called the the jumper, and the jumper could, like, teleport forward and rewind time and come back. And I went, you know, to Arnold, and I'm like, what if this wasn't, like, a class? Who is this as a person, not a class? And aren't oh, what if she's British and her name's Tracer and, like, that was the origin of Overwatch.”

“What sort of ultimately broke me in my Blizzard career was I got called in the CFO's office, and he sits me down and he says he gives me a date, which at the time was 2020. And he said, Overwatch has to make in 2020. And then every year after that, it needs a recurring revenue. And then he says to me, if it doesn't do dollars, we're gonna lay off a thousand people, and that's gonna be on you. And that was just the biggest fuck you moment I had in my career.”

“So Kintsugi is a Japanese craft of repairing broken pottery. Basically, like, you take a broken piece of pottery and then they would use golden joinery. Like golden lacquer to put the piece back together. And the thought was rather than hiding the scars, you make them more beautiful. There's also a philosophy in Kintsugi that nothing's ever perfect, and the pursuit of perfection is actually a mistake, and that there's beauty in imperfection.”

“So there's one that's the best. It's Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild. Every aspect is so thoughtful, so well designed. The art matches the design and the tech and even integrating with the switch in the way it does. The way you can chop down a tree and float in a river and, like, the world is a toy and everything works as you wished and hoped it would work. There's so many things that that game gets right that other games are lucky if they get one of those things right.”