Back in 2016, I sat in the popcorn-stained cushions of a movie theater, consciously ignoring the pretrailer advertisements and diligently scanning my phone. Then the annoying chatter of soda and candy commercials faded into a quiet screen showing the Blizzard Entertainment logo on a dark background. 

For the next minute, I watched colorful heroes stand up to protect the people around them, speaking in accents from around the globe about the ideals they clung to. Hope, courage, justice -- each paired with a scene illustrating that concept, until an astronaut-looking bespectacled gorilla proudly declared, "We are Overwatch." 

I immediately turned back to my phone to look up what the hell kind of game this was.

I got my first taste a month or two later, when visiting a friend who'd picked up the game. Even though I'd grown up on first-person shooter games like GoldenEye, Perfect Dark and the Halo series, I had never played anything quite like Overwatch. 

Everything was colorful and kinetic and, honestly, pretty confusing -- but also satisfying. I stayed up late into the night watching Overwatch guides on YouTube so I could try again in the morning. A few months after that, my sister gave me the game for my birthday, and I've been playing it ever since. 

While Overwatch has had its fair share of struggles and stumbles on the way to its 10th anniversary, which was this past May 24, it's remarkable that a game like this -- an online team-shooter without a single-player narrative mode -- is still around. It might not be the biggest title, and the competition has multiplied considerably since 2016, but Overwatch is still in the conversation, particularly after its Reign of Talon season, which brought a surge of players into the game.

Most new shooters struggle to last 10 months, much less 10 whole years, but Overwatch has survived a rollercoaster of a lifecycle that has included everything from Game of the Year awards to calls for boycotts, cries of "Overwatch is dead," and cheers of "Overwatch is back."

While the backing of a large, storied company like Blizzard is a factor, Overwatch has also built its longevity on pillars of character, community and evolution -- three elements that have given the game a meaningful influence on my life. They've helped the game last for 10 years and could very well keep it going for another decade and beyond.

Overwatch's character design is a great hook for new players

When I first unexpectedly had a chance to play Overwatch, I scrolled immediately over to Mercy. Her character design (and placement on the hero select screen) told me everything I needed to know. Halo, wings, support? Done. 

In truth, I'd made my decision when I'd seen the theatrical trailer. Watching her descend from the skies and reach out a hand to an injured child has given me the essential information -- not her name, abilities or gameplay loop, but the savior fantasy she represented. I saw her design and knew I wanted to swoop in and save people, too.

In a group media interview, Overwatch's Game Director Aaron Keller talked about how important rosters are to competitive player-versus-player, or PvP, games. "You look at each hero in that lineup and you start wondering what they can do and what their role is on a team and the different amazing abilities and mechanics they might have, he said. "It really is the major hook of a game like this."

For about two years, I played almost nothing but Mercy, racking up hundreds of hours on the hero as I learned the ins and outs of her play style. Like many other Overwatch players, I also bought artwork and sketched doodles in my spare time. 

The vast coffers of cosplays and fan art prove the power of Overwatch's designs. Keller referenced the 2014 announcement at BlizzCon and the team's shock at seeing people show up the next day in hastily constructed cosplays as a particular highlight from his time with the game.

My play habits have changed a lot since those early years -- Ana and Ashe are my most-played heroes, and I rarely pick up Mercy anymore. But I still get drawn to character design more than gameplay. When I saw Anran as one of the five new playable characters in the new season 1 earlier this year, I had an immediate sense of what her gameplay would be like, and I spent most of that season playing her. 

It's not just the heroes (and villains), either. The entire world of Overwatch is filled with color, life and history that reflects back on the characters. Maps are filled with rich visual details and soundscapes that may go unnoticed during a match, but stitch together to create a world that feels cohesive, yet distinct. 

Scott Lawson, a senior narrative and audio designer with Overwatch, described the team's process for creating the audio for the Junkertown map set in a sort of postapocalyptic Australia. The audio team visited an old mining town he described as fairly unchanged since the early 1900s, as well as a train museum filled with gears and tension wires, which the team used to create the map's mechanical audio identity. 

He spoke about the final stretch of the map, performed some of the sound effects from the map, and explained how they're synced to the same tempo to create an immersive sound profile. "All the emitters in that environment that you hear chugging, it's all from that trip," he said.

The characters brought me in, but the community kept me around

I've spent more than 2,000 hours of my life in Overwatch matches, and probably another thousand-plus in menus and waiting in queues. But 10 years after the game's launch, Overwatch's biggest legacy in my life is the community I've found in it. 

I made friends with strangers through Overwatch. I cannot overstate how rare that is for me. I'm a deep introvert who works from home, so the avenues for new friendships are very few, which I'm fine with at this point in my life. But back in 2017, when I was still a Mercy one-trick, I was pretty desperate for more social interaction. 

I thought I might find it through friends of friends, but instead I ended up stumbling into a group of strangers on Overwatch.

What began as occasional Overwatch nights escalated into a Facebook group with regularly scheduled team queues. Even though people were spread across multiple time zones and, sometimes, continents, we put together a full lineup. Eventually, I made jerseys with everyone's battletags, and flew out of state for most of us to meet up together. 

Although that larger group hasn't stayed intact, I became close friends with one particular internet stranger from those early days. He was living in Japan when I first heard his voice over Xbox party chat. We've been queuing up every week for nine years now.

Overwatch's community has changed me, beyond introducing me to people I never would have met in person. I've played on two organized teams, starting when I was stuck at home during the pandemic. I'd spent years watching Overwatch League, the game's premier esports league that lasted from 2018 to 2023, where regional-based teams like the LA Valiant, London Spitfire and Guangzhou Charge battled out high-stakes matches on live stages… at least until the pandemic hit and the league eventually dissolved. 

I'd grown up playing traditional sports, so watching top-level competition gave me an appetite for that kind of competition in Overwatch. I played as a flex support player on both teams, specializing in heroes like Ana, Kiriko, Baptiste and Zenyatta. Both teams had their struggles, but one of them made it to the finals of a tournament, which was exciting and heartbreaking in equal measure. I eventually stepped back to focus on other things in my life, but I'm happy about both stints.

In 2022, half a decade after I started playing Overwatch, the game became part of my job when I started covering the Overwatch 2 beta for CNET. I'd been an editor for most of my career, so covering the game gave me a chance to do more reporting, interviews and storytelling than I was used to. 

The past year has felt like a series of culminations for me in my Overwatch journey. Last fall, I dedicated time to grind the game's competitive mode, eventually reaching a new career peak at the rank of Master. And my longtime duo, the one who was on the other side of the planet when I met him? He emceed a party game at my wedding last year. 

'Every battle makes me stronger'

Overwatch in 2026 is not the same game that Blizzard launched in 2016. The game has made many major changes to evolve with its players, weighted toward larger shifts in recent years. Some of those changes have been more successful and popular than others, but all of them have incrementally shaped the game into something more polished than it was on release.

One of the biggest changes came in July 2016, just a couple of months after launch, when the game introduced hero limits in its competitive mode. No longer could you roll out on three Bastions and three Reinhardts, or a team of six Lucios speeding around the map. Instead, once a player chose a hero, that character was unavailable to the rest of the team. The restriction set the precedent for many of the game's biggest adjustments: large changes that traded away some of the game's openness and flexibility in search of more stability.

The next major change came about two years later, in August 2019, when Overwatch introduced role queue. Now, when players queued up for the match maker, they would select a particular role -- tank, damage or support -- and be locked into that role for the entire match. 

Role queue was a bit divisive at the time, but not nearly as controversial as the change that launched with Overwatch 2: a switch from two teams of six players to teams of five players. In response to a dearth of tank players, which caused rocketing queue times for damage and support players, Overwatch dropped down to a single tank on each team. The change seemed to fracture the playerbase, split between people who were sick of 10-minute queues and others who saw it as a bridge too far from the game they originally bought. 

The switch to 5v5 also came at a rough time for Overwatch. Players had already grown restless during a years-long content drought while most of the team worked on Overwatch 2 behind the scenes. For two-and-a-half years, the game received no new heroes or maps for core game modes, just a pair of deathmatch maps. A lack of updates about progress on Overwatch 2 raised doubts and concerns. And all the while, Blizzard had been the subject of a rolling series of accusations about a discriminatory and harassment-filled workplace, which led to 20 employees being fired, alongside the resignation of several leaders. 

So when Overwatch 2 launched with one fewer tank per team, new heroes locked behind battle passes and legendary skins that cost $19, it was fighting an uphill battle. A particularly steep one was added when Blizzard announced that hero talents -- an enormously anticipated feature shown in the game's 2019 announcement -- were being scrapped, and that the game's story mode would be released in paid installments of a few missions at a time. The three that were released didn't inspire confidence.

I was a fan of Overwatch 2's core gameplay changes, which opened up maps and placed the burden (and reward) of proactivity on players throughout the roster. But many players had suffered too many changes and too many broken promises. 

Keller acknowledged that some of Overwatch's low moments came from "missteps" the team took. "We had to do a lot of soul-searching about what our players were really looking for with Overwatch," he said.

But Walter Kong, SVP of live games and mobile for Blizzard, said the team was able to turn that adversity into something positive. "There are experiences that really shape your willingness to try and do something hard," he said, and pointed to the resilience of the team for being able to believe in and create a better game for the players.

It reminds me of an iconic moment in the very first Overwatch cinematic, where Winston's mentor tells him, "Never accept the world as it appears to be. Dare to see it for what it could be."

The Overwatch team seemed to take that message to heart after the launch of Overwatch 2. It didn't happen overnight, but as the company transitioned to its new ownership under Microsoft, the devs incrementally changed the game for the better. Heroes were freed from battle passes. Keller and the other devs started communicating with the community more often, through frequent Director's Take blog posts and other updates. They made more ambitious changes to the game, such as the Stadium mode and perks system.

With these changes, the devs began actively shaping Overwatch each year, instead of letting it languish. The game feels fresh but familiar, giving longtime players like me a reason to stick around, while also giving players who left the game a reason to come back -- at the very least, a reason to be curious. To wonder what the game might be like now.

Overwatch isn't what it used to be… and that's a good thing

To celebrate Overwatch's 10-year anniversary, the game brought back its Overwatch Classic mode, which recreates the experience at release. The original roster. No hero limits. Abilities and weapons reverted to their launch state. 

My duo and I queued up for a few games. In one of them, two teammates locked into Widowmaker, a sniper. Somewhat as a joke, I did the same. The rest of the team committed to the bit, and we walked out of spawn as a team of six Widowmakers. As it turned out, the enemy team had a similar idea, except they rolled out as a squad of six turret-building Torbjorns. 

What unfolded was one of the weirdest and most interesting games of Overwatch I've ever played. My team had to carefully crawl around the map, relentlessly checking our corners for fear of getting caught in the sights of three turrets on a crossfire with several Torbjorns. The map was a game of chess, pieces moving carefully and strategically across the board, with my attacking Widowmaker team coming up just shy of completing the map. 

It was an experience that current Overwatch, with hero limits and role queue, can't replicate. But it was also fun as a one-off event. A strange quirk of a game that I can say, "Remember that one time…?" I don't actually want to go back to that degree of unpredictability in every match.

After a few rounds of Classic, we went back to a standard 5v5 quickplay game -- a back-and-forth slugfest defending Havana. Our team seemed horribly outmatched in the first half, but we started shaping up in the middle of the map and eventually dug our heels in and held the enemies off at the end. Every person on our team had some moment of heroism that turned around a losing fight.

Afterward, my duo and I agreed that, while we had fun in our Overwatch Classic games, we liked what Overwatch had become -- a faster, more dynamic game. A decade of quality-of-life changes makes a big difference on its own, and all the new heroes, maps and systems like perks have shaped the game into something more robust than its original sparkle-in-our-eyes version.

Playing Overwatch for 10 years has felt like a relationship -- we found each other, grew together, had disagreements, found and lost mutual friends. We both stumbled along the way, and we're both different people now than we were at the start. But good relationships invite you in and reward you for your time and effort, and Overwatch has done that, making it a game I want to continue investing in for another decade or more.