An Audience With… Aaron Keller

Blizzard’s assistant director on Warcraft, working lunches and Overwatch’s baby steps

- Jen Simpkins

As assistant game director at Blizzard Entertainment, Aaron Keller is one of the key developers behind Overwatch, the company’s wildly successful team-based hero shooter. After 18 years spent working at the studio in Orange County, California, it’s clear that his considerable experience helping create MMOs World Of Warcraft and (the now cancelled) Project Titan had a hand in making the Overwatch universe the sensation it is today. Now, with the announcement of Overwatch 2, he’s at the forefront of fleshing out a world that has up until now merely served as a shiny backdrop to gun-based battles.

Indeed, it seems everything Blizzard touches turns to gold. Here, with Keller, we try to pin down the specifics of the design ethos strong enough to span multiple projects and genres, and that affords Blizzard’s games their consistent hallmark of quality – and discover how Overwatch 2 will continue the World Of Warcraft maker’s legacy.

How did you come to work for Blizzard?

I started in September of 2001, right after Blizzard had announced World Of Warcraft, on the World Of Warcraft team. Initially, I was slated to work on the dungeon team – we were considered 3D artists. So we had a group of about five guys, and we were just assigned to build all the dungeons and the cities in the game. So that was – gosh, that was like, three years before shipping the game, and we worked a tonne of hours. And we worked with all sorts of different departments on the team, from the exterior level designers to all the texture artists. We worked a lot with Bill Petras, who was the art director on World Of Warcraft, and he’s now the art director on Overwatch and he was actually the person that hired me. I always kind of give him a hard time for the questions he asked me in the interview [laughs].