Kaplan, Jeff
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Kaplan traces an unusually candid arc from failed novelist to legendary game designer: after an MFA and 170+ rejection letters, he hit a breaking point (alcoholism, deep depression, eventually electroconvulsive therapy) and literally threw his manuscripts in a dumpster. What filled the void was obsessive EverQuest play (~6,000 hours), where he rose from lone rogue to leader of a top raiding guild — a role that taught him motivation and leadership by accident. He was discovered by Blizzard employees who were secretly playing in his guild (including founder Allen Adham, disguised as a character named "Barfa"), leading to a six-month recruitment process and a job as WoW's first outside-hired quest designer. His core advice to young people, drawn from that period: "focus on what you want to do, not what you want to be" — societal pressure to declare an identity/career obscures the more honest question of what actually brings moment-to-moment fulfillment.
On World of Warcraft's design, he credits the team's inexperience (vs. Titan's later "too many experts") as a hidden advantage, and identifies the pivotal, non-obvious innovation as quest-driven leveling: rather than EverQuest's "path of least resistance" being grinding stationary mobs, WoW made the fastest way to level be following quests through the world, which incidentally taught players the lore, made solo play viable in a genre previously requiring forced grouping, and is why WoW reached tens of millions of players versus EverQuest's hundreds of thousands. He also describes early crunch culture unsentimentally (30-hour shifts, catered dinners for years) as something he doesn't regret personally (self-directed, not imposed) while distinguishing it sharply from executive-mandated crunch, which he calls "wrong and immoral."
Titan — Blizzard's canceled next-gen MMO, $83M and seven years — failed, in his account, from a leadership failure of scope: massive anticipatory hiring (70 environmental artists before the game's story or art style existed) into a broken engine, producing a team with "no shortage of ideas" but no shepherded vision connecting them. Overwatch's success, by contrast, came from deliberately small-team constraint: given six weeks and two impossible criteria (ship in 2 years, WoW-level revenue) after Titan's collapse, a skeleton crew distilled unused Titan character concepts (a "Jumper" class became Tracer) into a hero-shooter pitch literally titled "Monetized Shooter" before Overwatch's identity crystallized. He traces his eventual 2021 departure to a specific moment: Activision-Blizzard executives (post-Overwatch League's over-promised, financially strained rollout) demanded a hard revenue target for Overwatch 2 and threatened that missing it would mean 1,000 layoffs "on him" — a moment he describes as breaking nearly two decades of loyalty to a company he'd expected to retire from.
He is emphatic that great game design requires reading one's own psychology honestly (players say they want fair matches but actually want to feel slightly better than their opponent, hence Overwatch's 50%-win-rate-target matchmaking) and that online communities' harshest voices are unrepresentative — the first BlizzCon, held while the WoW team felt demoralized by forum toxicity, turned out to be "nothing but an outpouring of love" in person. Post-Blizzard, he and programmer Tim Ford founded the studio Kintsugiyama (named for the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, emphasizing beauty in imperfection) to make The Legend of California, an open-world survival/action game set in an alternate, island version of Gold Rush-era California, deliberately funded to prioritize creative control over investment size, and to be released into early access with visible rough edges rather than polished behind a marketing veil.
Excerpts
On the counterintuitive innovation behind WoW's success, discovered by accident in an early playtest:
“We had vastly underestimated the number of quests we were gonna need... we developed this philosophy... you design along the path of least resistance. In EverQuest, the path of least resistance... is to find the easiest creatures and kill them over and over again in place... we decided in World of Warcraft... why don't we make the path of least resistance... overload the experience into the quests themselves, and then that will move you through the world.”
On why Titan failed despite having "the best of the best" on the team:
“The right way to incubate a video game is you have the smallest group possible and you try to get the idea across with whatever technology you can get your hands on... You prove out that idea, and once you know what you're doing, then you expand the team... Titan kinda had that hubris of like, well, we're gonna build a really big world. We don't know the story of the world yet... but we know we're gonna build a really big world, so let's just start hiring environmental artists.”
On the CFO meeting that led to his departure from Blizzard:
“He gives me a date... and he said, 'Overwatch has to make in 2020, and then every year after that, it needs a recurring revenue of...' And then he says to me, 'If it doesn't do dollars, we're gonna lay off a thousand people, and that's gonna be on you.' That was just the biggest fuck you moment I had in my career... I had believed I would never work any place but Blizzard... I never thought the day would come, and that was it.”