Overwatch recently celebrated its fourth anniversary in late May and developer Blizzard is still celebrating with one of the most interesting facets being some memories from the people who worked on the title.

In a post on the official Overwatch website you can find the recently uploaded post “Cheers to four years: dev memories of Overwtach” which highlights some key moments from, fittingly, four developers.

Starting right at the beginning is the part from Jeff Kaplan himself, game director of Overwatch and constant source of humour in the community.

Kaplan shares a short video (embedded below) which shows the backstage view of the original Overwatch announcement. It’s not much to look at being mostly darkness and loud cheering, but it really does feel like a part of gaming history that you’ll eventually see in a documentary one day.

It’s also a bit bittersweet this year as the video is taken from BlizzCon 2014. In 2020 BlizzCon was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In what was Blizzard’s possibly best kept secret, I had the honor of standing backstage with Chris Metzen as we awaited our turn to go out onto that big stage in the main hall and introduce the game for the very first time,” Kaplan says.

Kaplan goes on to explain that he filmed the video so the rest of Overwatch team (which was in the audience) could share in the excitement.

Our other favourite account from the developers comes from Dylan Jones the lead character technical artist. As you may have guessed from the job title this is where the stick figure Tracer comes from.

“Another great memory––someone on the internet was confused about what a character designer was. They thought that lead hero designer Geoff Goodman drew up the concepts for all the heroes. Goodman, who found that thought hilarious, replied to the email with a joke stick figure Tracer. To keep the joke going, I made a skin out of Goodman’s brilliant concept,” Jones says.

The stick figure Tracer has been known in the Overwatch community for a while but this may be the first time that it has officially shown off like this.

Now would be the a great time to release the skin as an actual in-game item, Blizzard, just saying. While that would probably cause problems with hitboxes and players’ perception, why not fill the blank character model space with the classic PNG checker board?

The rest of the Overwatch dev anecdotes can be read here.