Overwatch is a fantastic game with a deep and interesting lore
but the game doesn't put it all out on the table.
Here are five dark Overwatch backstories that the game doesn't tell you.
Number one: Mei is pretty happy for having such a horrible life.
Though Overwatch takes place sixty years in the future,
most of the world's most important events happened decades before.
See, about thirty years before the game takes place.
Mei Ling Zhou was working Overwatch's Antarctic station, when the base was hit by a massive polar storm.
The snowed-in scientists hopped in to their cryo-stasis pods as a last ditch effort to survive.
But help never arrived.
Decades passed, one by one the life support pods failed, causing scientists to wake up and die horribly locked in their cryopods.
Miraculously, Mei's pod continued working and she awoke to a changed world.
One without Overwatch and with an even worse climate than before.
But she didn't let that get her down
All of her coworkers died, she missed out on what should have been the prime of her life.
And yet he still starts matches saying things like "The world is worth fighting for!" At heart Mei just wants to make the planet a better place.
Number two: The Omnic Crisis is just a fancy word for Judgement Day.
For a while there humanity was living pretty peacefully with consumer-grade robots called the Omnics.
But when it was discovered that the Omnica Corporation was fraudulent and up to no goodery
Omnica was shut down for good and their bots were deactivated.
The Omnics were understandably a tad upset about this.
Naturally, nobody saw the violent AI uprising coming.
The deactivated Omnics went ahead and reactivated themselves and started hijacking military hardware.
It was around this time that overwatch came about
Formed as a strike team to battle the Omnics
The Omnica corporation had set up these automated
self sustained robot mills
All over, that would constantly improve the robots
coming off the assembly line.
Essentialy creating a never ending stream off self improving soldiers.
So why not just blow up these factories?
Well, someone did and that's how we got these jerks.
After a brief and unsteady peace, the Australian Liberation Front
came together to fight against the Omnics
and with the help of a man who would become Roadhog!
They destroyed the main Omnium on the continent
They didn't really think that part through though,
Omniums are fueled by fusion cores
and when these are destroyed
The surrounding land becomes a bit of a nuclear wasteland
It was out of this Mad Max-ian hellscape that a scavenger named Junkrat
met a newly deformed Roadhog, and the two went on to become international criminals
This is what you get when you don't play nice with robots.
Number 3: Mercy saved Genji, and created Reaper
Like many other members of Overwatch,
Mercy has been around since the old days.
And as a medic class, it only makes sense that Angela Ziegler
would be the Overwatch team's resident doctor.
And as nice as it is to be on the receiving end of Mercy's healing beam,
it could be argued that she takes her incredible medical knowledge just a little too far sometimes.
Just ask Genji.
Genji was once part of the Shimada clan.
For the longest time, Genji was kind of a terrible ninja,
forgoing his training in favour of living it up in the lap of luxury.
At some point Mercy brought Genji back from the brink,
and with the help of Overwatch, Mercy and her team outfitted Genji
with advanced cybernetics which allowed him to systematically tear apart the Shimada clan,
and a criminal empire.
But after his revenge was complete, there really wasn't anywhere for Genji to go.
Humans reviled him for being half machine and he wasn't exactly at home with the Omnics.
It was only under the mentor-ship of Zenyatta that Genji came to grips with himself, and his new form.
Mercy has, something of a habit of playing around with people's lives in the interest of science.
Exhibit B: Reaper
Like Genji, Gabriel Reyes also had a brush with death before being "saved" by Mercy
after a fight with Soldier 76.
Changing his name to Reaper
Reyes engaged in terrorist acts across the world.
Reapers cells were rapidly decaying at the same time they were rapidly regenerating,
leaving his body in the nebulous state of limbo.
The desiccated corpses in Reapers wake are likely a result of him sucking their life-force to stay stable.
Whether or not Mercy went to far in her work to bring back her old friends still seems unclear.
Either way, all will be forgiven if she will just tell us what skin cream she uses. C'mon!
Whats your secret?
In the animated short “Alive” we learned a little more about Widowmaker
as she attempts to kill the Omnic leader Tekhartha Mondatta
Mondatta and his group the Shambali believed that every Omnic had a soul
and wished to live in harmony with the humans.
But that didn’t stop Widowmaker from icing them all the same.
Immediately after the assassination Tracer tackles Widowmaker and demands to know
why would you wanna kill robot Gandhi?
For Widowmaker the answer probably pretty simple, she enjoys the act of murder.
But her organization talent obviously put her up to the job.
And its still not entirely clear what their end game is.
Was it for money or chaos or just hatred of robots? Who knows!
In any case a statue of Mondatta now stands in the place where he was killed.
In death Mondatta has become a martyr for a righteous cause.
Likely becoming far more effective as an iconic figure than a mortal being.
Which in retrospect was a pretty predictable outcome.
Maybe these Talon guys do want to make the world a better place, with...
Bullets.
The games entire premise of heroes regrouping after a long time off the job relies that the fact that the band had to break up in the first place.
A lot of things took their tole on overwatch but the most controversy centered around Overwatch's covert ops team “Blackwatch”
Right away Blackwatch had a big problem and his name was Gabriel Reyes who had a big beef John Morrison.
The two were at odds until the very end and the existence of Blackwatch has just been reviled to the public
when Overwatches Swiss headquarters was mysteriously destroyed.
The in-universe media isn’t clear on just what brought the building crumbling down, but its pretty clear to us what happened.
There was a mutiny within overwatch and the resulting civil war destroyed the group from the inside.
Morrison and Reyes were supposedly killed during the event, but we know they both live on as Soldier 76 and Reaper respectively.
This mark the end of an era, and the team disbanded.
The most of the remaining members scattered to the wind, there were others that seemingly joined the side of the terrorists.
Jesse Mccree ran afoul of several talent operatives in a special comic and noted that they were using tactics utilized by Blackwatch.
He should know sense he used to be part of Blackwatch himself
that Talon has its hands on Blackwatch playbook shouldn’t be too surprising
sense Reyes joined the ranks as Reaper.
Of course we know that Overwatch reformed though now its unsanctioned by the UN and holy illegal.
Now that the new team seems to be free of the bad apples that plagued its first iteration
they can get started on making the world a safer place without worrying about internal politics.
And first item on the agenda is
escorting this floating truck for like..
500 yards...
That sounds good.