YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Kaplan

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2026-03-11
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2026-03-11
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  1. “Yeah, and the personality was a big part of it, like capturing, this isn't some generic the jumper, it's this person Lina Oxtin. You know, and she has a life, and we're gonna make you interested in her.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And I went to Arnold, and I'm like, what if this wasn't a class? Who is this as a person? Not a class. Oh, what if she's British? And her name's Tracer and that was the origin of Overwatch. And some of the pragmatic part of that was I knew that Jeff Goodman was going to be on this team. And I knew that Arnold Sang was going to be on this team. And it's play to your strengths moment. Like, what could we make in two years with the talent we have? And what is realistic? Like what could we realistically make? And so then I just sat there and I sort of, I went through a bunch of Titan classes with a guy named the Gun Jack. Who became Reaper, we had actually the ranger got split out and became 76 and became bastion of all things.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I was just cribbing Infinity Ward. That's where Tracer's guns came from. And we had all these different guns, like some that bloomed and some that had this like really crazy recoil. And we had other types of guns. And I took every version of like the Titan jumper and I just distilled it into what I thought was the best version of the jumper, which was, you know, the dual wheel pistols, the blink, the recall and time bomb. And then I took Arnold Sang”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And I started taking some of the old Titan characters that we had designed. We had a class called the Jumper, and the jumper could like teleport forward and rewind time and come back. And the jumper used dual-wheeled pistols, which was at the time designed after my dual G18s from Modern Warfare 2. It was my favorite loadout.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “He 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 fifty classes. And I wish instead of having like, you know, a hundred abilities on the classes, the 50 classes all just had like one or two things that was really interesting about them. And then the class meeting ended, like we designed our six classes in that meeting. And then the meeting ended. And I was back at my desk and it just stuck with me what Jeff had said about the way he wished he could design the classes. And then I also had we had this directory of all the amazing Titan art. And I started pulling up Arnold Sang's characters, Arnold's vision and his art is second to none.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And it's usually some combination of those. But class based, you're like choosing I'm going to be a warrior, therefore I use sword and shield and I do these things where more of a skill basis, everybody's kind of an avatar and then the skills that you pick define. So I might take that I know how to use swords. So you're kind of making those decisions. with all things game design there there's no right or wrong it's all trade-offs so the trade-off decision we were making is like oh i think we want to be class based with this crossworld thing and we were in a design meeting and one of my favorite designers of all time is a guy named jeff goodman he was one of the original wow encounter designers he designed like onixia and all the big raid bosses like if someone has a favorite raid boss jeff probably designed it and”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Let's do it. I like it. So it was actually that it was Crossworlds we were working on Crossworlds and like the StarCraft frontiers for frontiers we were having the class meetings you know how class progression worked like the game designery stuff And on CrossWorlds, we were having a class meeting of like a big decision in RPG type games is always, are you doing like skill-based or class-based?”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “No, you don't have to design them, but then they're yours if the players really are reacting to the green people planet or whatever. And someday you're like, hey, what expansion should we make? I don't know, green people planet.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, idea number two was crossworlds. That was a medicine vision for a universe. And like I'm glad Metzen's back at Blizzard and I hope they make this game someday. The way Chris described it was there's a planet on the edge of the universe that's like the Moss Ice Lee spaceport with all these freakish aliens and people from all walks of life and it's kind of seedy and criminal. And there's traitors and smugglers and diplomats, but this one planet is sort of the planet that they've agreed to like meet on. And this is like the neutral place. And then the game was going to take place on that planet.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, we had two weeks, so, and I don't think we were, I was working on weekends, but we weren't getting the group together. So it's, you know, like 10 working days.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “The scoping, your best case scenario is when your tech director, art director, and game director are doing the scoping. Because then you know, like, this part, we got to spend big bucks on, there's no getting around it, this part we can cheat. If you have a giant team and one guy's job is just to make props, you know, crates and chairs, guy's going to make the, you know, that's a triple A awesome developer who's going to put his heart and soul into it. If you let him, he'll take, you know, six weeks to make a crate. Have to have that moment where you're like, I kind of need 200 crates, so just spend like a couple hours on that one. And that's a hard thing to say to somebody”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “What do executives, what do those types have at their disposal that they can hit you with meetings and outlook and tell you that you can hire more people? That's not really how you get the game made.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So, when you're brainstorming and you're with the team and you're the creative leader, it's guys what's fucking amazing? What's big? What do players need? There's a blizzard design value called What is the fantasy? What is the fantasy? You want to be in space. You want to be in the StarCraft universe. And then your job as the game director, and if you have a great creative director, art director, tech director, the director should be scoping it back into reality. The mistake I see on a lot of game teams is scope becomes a production problem. You give it to the project managers or the executives or the producers to say, no, there's not enough time or you guys should hire more.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Like an endless thing that you'd spin on that team. You're making the StarCraft game. How do you get from planet to planet? Is it a cutscene? No one's going to want to cut scene, but we should probably make it a cutscene because that's easy. But we got to have spaceflight That you're adding like three years just by saying we got to have space flight.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “It's five years on Blizzard's best day with nothing going wrong in perfect scenario five years to make that game. Probably with 150 to 200 people, like these 40 people are not making that game in two years. So as much as I, like again, that was an idea, not a vision, because it lacked. It lacked the path to reality.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “He's got his foot on a hydrolys skull And then there's like a med vac in the background, and they're on this big alien planet. And that picture, you just wanted to like, here's my money. I'll pre-order now. Like, sign me up for that game. That picture ended up being McCree from Overwatch Redid it. But yeah, that was where McCree actually came from. So that was the StarCraft Frontiers idea. We kind of, we went all in on the design. We had a world design. We had class design, like how How the classes would work, what progression might look like, and you also have to think when you're trying to design an MMO, like what could expansions and live content be like. And we put together a really good pitch. We all knew there's no way you can make this game. Like, even though it was more focused than Titan,”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “You want to be on the ground? Like, what's it like on the ground floor? And I don't want to be a minion in a giant army. I want to be Indiana Jones in space, you know? So then there was this Metzon picture, the prospector, and then two of the most amazing artists, Arnold Sang and Peter Lee, Arnold's the great character artist. Peter Lee's the great environment artist, they did this concept art for frontiers that was Metz in space prospect or he smoking a cigar.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “RTS is always about the three races and the giant armies. And kind of what made wow wow and separate from the Warcraft RTS series was that instead of being like a footman in the army in World of Warcraft, you were like a lone adventurer make your mark on the world. So we had this idea, it was this old Chris Metzen drawing of a space prospector. And I love that idea that somewhere out in where all the giant StarCraft battles were happening, you know, thousands of Zerg and Protoss and Terran, there's like this like lone prospector on some planet like going through like a mysterious dungeon, you know, looking for minerals, but finding monsters. Like, it was that kind of spirit of”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “And then there was a very small creative group that was supposed to come up with these three pitches and given six weeks. And we just sort of arbitrarily decided, like, let's spend two weeks on each pitch. The ground rules that I sort of led with is you have to be all in for the two weeks on the pitch. So if we're, you know, pitch one was a StarCraft MMO and we have to live and breathe and want it more than anything. And I kind of warned everybody, I said, at the end of this two weeks, you're going to think this is the only game idea. And you're not going to be invested in the next, but we're going to throw it out as soon as we finish it and do the next one. And the StarCraft MMO actually really love that pitch. It was called StarCraft Frontiers. And the concept was like less of your playing like space marine. Like it was less armies. Starcraft the Army.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “And then there was a very small team. There was a group of engineers that was mothballing Titan. So it exists somewhere at Blizzard at that point. And they were also deconstructing the engine because they knew it didn't work anymore. And to make a new game, it had to be way reconsidered to sort of what it is today”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And to date, at that point, there was one game that had World of Warcraft like revenue, which was World of Warcraft. Immediately, I just threw out the revenue thing because it's all fucking monopoly money to me, like this game money is, it's insane and I just don't think about it. That's someone else's problem. But I did want to be as realistic as I could about the schedule part of it. So most of our team, the Titan team was 140 some people. Most of that team got moved to go work on Here's the Storm, the D3 expansion, World of Warcraft Hearthstone. immediately large number of the team was gone. Then we had a bunch of like what we called templans, people that someday were going to come back to us, but we loaned off for like six months tour of duty.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “But for a blizzard game, it's kind of insane And then the second, okay, the second is even more ambitious and crazy was whatever we made, whatever we pitched had to have the potential to have world of Warcraft-like revenue.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, the six weeks was supposed to be the greatest time ever, if you think about it because you're a game developer at Blizzard and you get to come up with a new idea. So that sounds awesome, like to everybody at Blizzard, to all game developers. It sounds great. But we were probably the most demoralized we'd ever been in our careers. At least I was. I didn't know if I was going to be fired. I didn't know if that was the end of my career at that point. And so it was like a really serious kind of dire environment that this was happening in. We were given two criteria that we had to hit for these pitches. The first one was that we had to ship within two years. And that is a very ambitious timeframe for any game.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Being a creative leader, you're in two modes. You're pushing or you're pulling. And whatever mode you're in is the exact opposite of the team. When they're not Thinking outside the box enough, or like elevating the vision enough, that's when you're pushing them. Like, come on, guys, you know, don't worry about the schedule. We got, you know, capture hearts and minds, inspire people. And when they're going a little crazy and they endless source of great ideas and really fun development, that's when you got to pull and say, guys, we need to ship this. The best feature we can add for the player is shipping. That was a common phrase that we had”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Which is to this day, Ted is the proprietary tool for Overwatch since Overwatch came from the Titan engine, which was Tank. And we said to Dylan, I want you to log your uptime in the editor and Ted. And in a 40-hour week, he was only able to work for twenty hours. And you can imagine you're building a team of the best and the best in the industry and they can't work. So not only are you just burning cash faster than anybody on the planet, it's also like imagine having fighter pilots, but we don't let them fly. Like the creative frustration and the way that that manifested itself and how demoralized the team got. It was a disaster.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Have these like brilliant team huge, and we don't have a roadmap for what we're making or how we're going to make it. And now you're having to deal with all these people. Like they're coming into your office, you know, you're trying to figure out what is the quest flow? How do I design the quest system for Titan? How can we prototype it? And we're like, oh, this prop artist over here is running out of stuff to do. What props should he make? Should he work on Chinatown or the Hollywood set? And you're just making up busy work, the engine didn't work. When we would run playtests on Titan, we would have to tell the team stop checking in because it slows us down with this really great technical artist, guy named Dylan Jones. And he was on Titan with us, and I remember in the”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “And you try to get the idea across with whatever technology you can get your hands on using other engines, using art from whatever, you prove out that idea. And once you know what you're doing, then you expand the team. Know the cliche of idle hands, the devil's work, or whatever.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “We would hire like 70 environmental artists from all over the world. You know, we're getting visas and like the top tier talent because at the height of World of Warcraft and nobody knew the team that they were coming on. It was Blizzard's next MMO top secret. And their first day at work, like some poor guy from Belgium just shows up and he says his first day at work and he's like, are we making World of StarCraft? Is that? And they're like, no, dude, let me show you it. And he's like, what is this game? You know, we were in that world and we hired way too many people the right way to incubate a video game is you have the smallest group possible.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And there was also a lot of what I call anticipatory hiring or like there's opportunity hiring and then there's also anticipatory hiring. I have the exact opposite hiring philosophy. I won't hire anybody on any team until we're feeling like we got to work overtime or like we might not ship if we don't get somebody else in here. And Titan kind of had that hubris of like, well, we're going to build a really big world. We don't know the story of the world yet. We don't really have it mapped out what it should be like. We don't have the art style really defined. We don't know technically how we're going to make the art or what the constraints of it are, but we know we're going to build a really big world. So let's just start hiring environmental artists. And like in one year.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Design plan. There has to be an art style for the plan. There has to be a pragmatic production reality to the plan. And 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. I don't know if people are going to like it. And we were now in the era of like, we made World of Warcraft, we can do no wrong. This next thing is going to be the best ever.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Correct, as like a game designer, I use semantics a lot, and I like to define my semantics so people know where I'm coming from. Talking about ideas versus vision for a second. Ideas are easy. You know, I can have 10 and 10 seconds. You know, let's make a 2D platformer about a mouse, whatever. Like you can, I want a secret agent by day is, you know, doing all this cool shooting stuff. By night is running a flower shop. Ideas are just infinite, at least on creative teams, you have no shortage of ideas. What I call vision is the ability to not only take a great idea, but shepherd it into existence. And you're doing that through inspiration first and foremost. If you need a team to make it, you need a team to believe in the vision of the idea. And then there also has to be a technological plan for the idea. There has to be a”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “So it was a multifaceted failure for many reasons. Ultimately, the failure of Titan lies with leadership, team leadership, myself included. Like there's just no getting around that. And then on top of that, like a lot of games you can point to as being like an engineering failure, like the servers didn't work. Like an art failure, like no one responded to the look of the game or design failure, like it's just not fun or it's tuned poorly. We failed on art, engineering, and design. And I'm cautious about calling out art because some of the best art ever made at Blizzard was made for Titan. My criticism isn't of the art that was created. My criticism is that we never had any art cohesion. So the art looked like it could have come from ten different games.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Probably deep into 2009, I knew that the game in its current form could never ship and would never exist. And by 2010, like after numerous times trying to convince the powers that be that like this game is not going to happen. It's in trouble. I remember going to Mike Morheim in 2010. And like you're going to the CEO of, you know, at that time, Blizzard was a big company. And I'm like, you got to shut us down. We're just going to burn money”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Early work really got going in late 2007. And then I had to ship Wrath of the Lich King. And it was, we had the like, we always did like a champagne toast. I still remember it because it was election day. I think it was like election day on my birthday and the day Obama got elected. Then I left the WOW team on that day. It was like memorable in all those ways. And then I joined the Titan team. And that game. We went on like the fast forward part of that is we shut it down in 2013. That was one of the most painful development processes that I've ever been a part of. And probably”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Full blown like GTA style driving, it was such a gargantuan, huge undertaking with a brand new engine, a brand new team, a brand new IP, intellectual property, you know, setting, which we really wrestled over, like the amount that the IP just, you know, trying to figure out like, are there aliens or not aliens? You know, like all that sounds kind of dumb and fun. But when you're building a game, like you, especially world building, you have to have rules. That's what makes world building work is that like this exists in this world and this doesn't. And, you know, why. It's like, because someone said so and just the way it needs to be. But that development started in 2007 kind of as ideation brain.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Meaning people play on different realms or servers, and a Wow server, I don't, I haven't been on that team in a very long time, but back in the day, you might have 5,000 people on a WOW server before they'd have to spin up another Wow server. The big idea behind Titan is that everybody would play on one server. It was a one-server one-world game. And the world was massive. It was going to take place in future Earth. And we were literally building like we have what we call Bay City, which was San Francisco. We had, you know, Hollywood. And then we had to build all of California between that. And we also wanted to build like Cairo and London. And there's this realization of like, how do we connect all of these? The game had driving in it.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “And the by day stuff, we're going to let you run businesses. We took a lot of influence from games like Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, the Sims. We had a brilliant game designer and game director named Matt Brown, who was the creative director on the Sims. He came over. And so we had this vision that there was going to be all this daytime business house stuff. You could build a house. You could live in a neighborhood. And beyond that, there was also a vision on the technical side, game design and technical side that unlike World of Warcraft, which the modern day term for is that it's sharded.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Eventually it started in earnest, like real development around 2007, the first team members joined. And it was a real ambitious project, including like building a new engine from scratch. I think maybe the first team member was a guy named John LaFleur who was just the stellar game programmer. And the engine which ultimately failed for Titan ended up becoming the engine for Overwatch, which is a great success story for him. And the idea behind the game, it was going to take place in future Earth, and the players played as secret agents. And by day, they all had day jobs, and by night they went off and did cool secret agent stuff. And the secret agent stuff was very first person shooter, but over the top abilities like you would see in Overwatch because that's where they came from.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Sure. So as we were experiencing success with World of Warcraft, there was this concept in the studio that WOW wasn't going to last forever. Wow would be maybe successful for five years and eventually kind of age out. And the studio would be in real trouble if we didn't have another massively multiplayer online game sort of waiting in the wings. So starting around I want to say 2006, maybe 2005. The talk of starting a team. Really picked up momentum and we were working on Burning Crusade. Rob Pardo took the helm to start sort of tighten development. We didn't even really have a team then. And I remember being embroiled in burning crusade and going to Titan meetings. And Rob pulled a group, you know, from kind of across the company. And we started talking about what this next MMO could be and when it would get going.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “That level of access is very dangerous, and I worry that there is a whole group of people who's receding from us that will never see the brilliance and they're being shut out by the negativity. There's a very real example was Jay Wilson, who I think is one of the great design minds who was the game director of Diablo 3. And he took so much heat, it just affected him to the point where he essentially retired from making games, wrote novels. I was very happy for him because, you know, I'm glad he found his place. And I think he's getting back into making games now. But we lost. We essentially think how many people loved Diablo 3. Played the shit out of Diablo 3. And Jay is one of the people you have to thank for that. And yet that community basically removed him from making games for like 10, 15 years. And it feels criminal to me.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “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 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, like how many influences could comment on his music directly to him versus like if I want to insult Brad Pitt right now, I can just go on 10 different devices and do it. And it's like,”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “I couldn't agree more. You know, as somebody who's taken a lot of heat online, like any game developer, you just get destroyed, doing what you do. You must get destroyed, you know. And it doesn't matter. You get 100 compliments. It's the one, and you're supposed to read it and supposed to be fine with it and have it not affect you. It'll stay with you for years. You know, I have those and I think of it like the cheesy way I think about it is like is there some kind of social Darwinism going on? And my big worry is that there are creators. Like now being a creator of anything, writer, musician, make online videos, whatever creator means to you, make games Now part of the skill set is being able to weather”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “No one's interested in that. I have to either love this thing or better, this thing's a crime against humanity in some way. And it's very self reinforcing, and everybody sort of feeds into it.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “I feel bad because I played a role in the earliest development of some of that online culture. It really was social media before it was called social media. You know, I ran, I actually, I had this reputation for being edgier than I really was. There were a couple notable posts that survived 30 years that people like to look back on, but they don't look back on the ones where I'm just being chill. And that's unfortunate. I think a lot as a game designer about the design of social media. And unfortunately, social media in general is designed in such a way where The maximum hyperbole works. And that's how you get the most points is by being max hyperbolic and usually, unfortunately, it's more in the negative direction than the positive direction. That's a pretty nice mug. I've seen nicer, but I like this one.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Up until that point, your perception was because you're just reading online and it was the perception of such hatred because people who are passionate online, they express themselves in the harshest ways because it gets attention. That's the lesson I should have learned from my early days. And it's such an unfortunate thing because then you met these people in person and they loved World of Warcraft. And all they wanted to do was talk about World of Warcraft and hear about what was coming next and be around other people who loved World of Warcraft”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Flaming us all the time, like there's lag on this server and can't log into that server. And that was our perspective of what was happening. And then, like I said, give Mike Moorheim credit where credits due. He kept us committed to that launcher and they put the Blizzon tickets on the launcher, which they hadn't done before. It was on the website. And so everybody who logged into World of Warcraft suddenly got this like, hey, we're doing BlizzCon in Anaheim. Do you want to come sold out instant like instantly sold out? And when I showed up at that show, one of the most emotional things in my life, it was nothing but an outpouring of love.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “You'd sit with your guild at like a banquet room table and to give credit where credit's due. I remember sitting in the meeting for what was to become BlizzCon. It was Pardo who said, Blizzard's bigger than that. We're not just one game. And I know everybody's focused on World of Warcraft right now. We should do BlizzCon. And at the time we had a game called StarCraft Ghost was in development and that was getting ready to show. And there was Frozen Throne which was expansion to Warcraft 3. But we knew we were going to make StarCraft II. And then there was a lot of motion happening with Blizzard North, which is a whole separate story. But there was like, hey, we could really do a cool show that's this BlizzCon thing. And at first, we kind of announced it and it just was crickets. You know, when you're like excited about something, you're like, man, everybody's going to love like we're doing BlizzCon. Everybody's kind of like crickets. What's BlizzCon? Who cares? And we're idiots. We're reading the forums and the forums are just.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “And we had to start putting patches out. And now we're making patches. For a while we had one animator who stuck around. And then eventually he left also, but you're doing like, okay, we got to now do a patch without an animator. A lot of our art team was gone at that point. And you're trying to keep the ship afloat and the morale was just in the shitter. Everybody felt very down on team two, the WOW team is called team two and that we had somehow failed. And during that time, there was this idea to do BlizzCon. And the way that started was EverQuest had done these like meetups because they knew it was like a big guild social game and people would get together at like some hotel ballroom.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “It was, I think, all of our animators and some of our best programmers. And like it's really demoralizing when you lose team members like that. But then we were also underwater, like the servers aren't running. We're not able to keep up with demand.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “There were all sorts of issues with the servers because the game did way more successful than we expected it to do. And the server load was just nuts. Like we were just doing our best to hire database programmers because we just didn't know how to deal with this sheer scope of the game. But when you're an individual, like and at that time, like I mentioned, there were multiple exoduses of people who quit Blizzard. They went and formed a couple notable studios. One was Carbine. The other was Red Five. And we lost like kind of our core people. Like when Red Five started, that was our team leader. That was Mark Kern. And our art director, Bill Petras, they quit. When carbine started.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source