Overwatch: Elon Musk Calls Team-Based Shooter 'Amazing'
By AJ Caulfield 12 January 2017
Blizzard Entertainment’s team-based title Overwatch gains another fan in Canadian-American inventor Elon Musk, who praises the game in an interview with Y Combinator.
Fans of the smash-hit Blizzard Entertainment game Overwatch and technology enthusiasts alike are in for a bit of good news. In an interview with American seed accelerator Y Combinator, well-known inventor, engineer, and business magnate Elon Musk talked space travel, productivity, and artificial intelligence. What Musk also discussed with Y Combinator’s Sam Altman was video games.
Toward the end of the interview with Y Combinator, Altman asked Musk for a few game recommendations, and he dove in enthusiastically. First on his list? Blizzard Entertainment’s team-based multiplayer first-person shooter title Overwatch. Musk praised both the game and its developer, calling Overwatch “amazing” and stating that he thinks Blizzard “generally does great stuff.” He also mentioned he is a fan of another title from Blizzard: Hearthstone, the free-to-play online card game.
Musk continued to talk video games with Altman, stating he heard “great things” about the Sony Interactive series Uncharted, whose fourth installment, A Thief’s End, sold over 8 million copies last year. The multi-talented Musk also expressed his dissatisfaction about hearing lackluster things about the most recent release in the role-playing FPS series Deus Ex. As Musk had apparently been informed of Square Enix’s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, “The storytelling is kind of lame,” as he instead prefers the “amazing” storytelling of the earlier Deus Ex installments.
In a follow-up interview with a different company, Elon Musk declined to give an explicit answer when asked which out of the Overwatch character roster he mains, stating it is “too embarrassing” to reveal. Expectedly, fans have begun playfully speculating Musk’s hero preference. Some are convinced he is a Bastion supporter, while others have suggested he may prefer D.va and her newly-updated nerf.
While hearing that the man behind PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX (among many others) is a fan of Overwatch is fairly exciting in its own right, it does not come as a surprise. As the winner of the Game of the Year honor at the Game Awards 2016 and as Blizzard Entertainment’s fastest title to hit 20 million players, Overwatch is not exactly an “underground” title. The high-energy team-based FPS title has garnered many accolades and a thriving online community in kind since its May 2016 release. At the end of the day, Elon Musk, despite his status in the tech world, seems like just another fan of the Blizzard game.
Overwatch was released on May 23, 2016, and is currently available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.
