You wouldn’t know it to hear it, but decorated video game actor Jennifer Hale – famously the voice of Mass Effect‘s Commander Shepard – is the person providing the meows of new Overwatch hero Jetpack Cat.
Blizzard confirmed this at its headquarters last week while detailing Jetpack Cat and the four other heroes coming to Overwatch (formerly known as “Overwatch 2“) next week. “The voice actor is Jennifer Hale,” audio and technical director Scott Lawson told a group of press that I was in, “and she did an incredible job, and working with it was so much fun.”
Note that Hale already voices another Overwatch hero, gunslinger Ashe, who was added to the game in November 2018.
Jetpack Cat has been a rumoured hero for Overwatch for a long time, and she finally arrives alongside four other new heroes on 10th February with the game-changing ability to tow other characters through the air. She can do this to both allies and enemies, though doing it to enemies requires using her Ultimate.
I’ve played her; she’s great fun. Very manoeuvrable, very fast, and with some useful healing abilities for supporting diving or flanking characters, not to mention the ability to pick up slower heroes from base or airlift Bastion in chaingunning form over groups of enemies. She also has lots of voice lines, although they’re all variations of “meow”, amusingly.
Jetpack Cat has been around as a concept nearly as long as Overwatch itself. “Jetpack Cat in particular, as a concept, is something the team has wanted to do since, man, we launched Overwatch 1,” lead hero producer Kenny Hudson told me. “We’ve had early concept art for Jetpack Cat on the wall in our hallway for like eight years now.” But the idea never got any further. “You’d walk by it like every day, like, ‘Maybe we should…’,” added associate game director Alec Dawson.
The reason why Blizzard can do Jetpack Cat now is because it’s releasing so many new heroes at once – five on 10th February and a further five over the course of the year. “Going all out on making five Heroes at a time gave us some cover to explore new things, try new things,” Hudson said. “When we said okay who are the five going to be…? It’s funny because Jetpack Cat was always in the conversation from day one.”
“It just felt like it’s time for the cat,” art director Dion Rogers said in a separate interview.
Jetpack Cat may seem silly but she’s not the first animal character in the game. Winston, a gorilla, has been at the heart of Overwatch since it launched, and a hamster was added in the shape of Wrecking Ball in 2018. And, as Rogers told me, there are ideas for more.
“We actually have a random idea we joke about,” Rogers said, “this character called the Oranga-tank. It’s an orangutan that’s a tank and he’s a villain. Because most of our animal characters are good guys, we were like how do we make villain animals? And Oranga-tank is an idea that’s been floating around for a while. I don’t know if he’ll show up in the game. It’s a funny drawing; there’s a bunch of funny drawings everywhere.”
Overwatch is currently experiencing an exciting moment. Blizzard announced an ambitious new yearly expansion plan for the game and it will release the first of these, The Reign of Talon, next week. It also announced it would be removing the tainted “2” from the game’s name to make it, simply, “Overwatch” again.
