Before his career as an actor, most recently as the stacked but sensitive dad on comedy police procedural Brooklyn 99, Terry Crews’ job was to smash through a line of equally huge men and bring down the guy with the ball. A linebacker in the NFL for six years, Crews is no stranger to intense competition, but now he might be getting involved in a competitive environment of a wholly different nature.
Rumors about Crews lending his booming voice, perhaps most popularized by the absurdist, shit-postesque Old Spice commercials, to the cast of Overwatch have been circulating since November. It began when Crews responded to a Reddit thread suggesting the actor would be a good fit for the role of Doomfist, a character teased in the very first Overwatch cinematic Blizzard released. This was just wishful thinking, until Crews actually responded, saying that he would love to play the character.
Then, in December, Crews actually visited Blizzard HQ, documenting it via Instagram. On his Facebook, he declared: “LOVED my visit with the geniuses of BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT today, and meeting the creators of one of my favorite games! OVERWATCH! LETS GO!” This was accompanied, of course, by a picture of him flexing and screaming in front of the Overwatch logo. Many fans believed this to mean that Crews joining the cast of the game was all but assured.
Ironically, the developers of Overwatch had no plans to actually turn Doomfist into a character, at least at first. In an interview with PC Gamer, Chris Metzen admitted that “Doomfist” was originally just a compound name he pulled out of his ass to give the announcement trailer some flavor. After that, the name gradually grew to mean more and more: “You got the Gauntlet in the announcement cinematic,” said Metzen. “And then you’ve got the same Gauntlet being taken on the payload in the Numbani map, and then this exhibit (featured above, about Doomfist in Numbani), and we kind of started thinking how fun would it be if the Doomfist character is actually more of a generational hero,” like the Green Lantern and his ring. But as a planned character or not, the attention Crews gathered with both his original Reddit post and subsequent visit to Blizzard can’t have been easily dismissible.
Weeks passed without any more information in the case—until yesterday morning, when Crews tweeted this:
Who wants to hear me do the voice of Doomfist for real?? https://t.co/l4aszRrDYE
— Terry Crews (@terrycrews) January 4, 2017
Everybody, Terry. Everybody wants that. Including The Rock.
This tweet doesn’t seem to be confirming anything as much as stirring the embers of fan desire. It’s been two months now since one hapless fan suggested he don the oversized gauntlet, and Crews shows no sign of ending his campaign. And he’s surely given Blizzard something to consider; with the enthusiasm he’s already built up among Overwatch players, the developer wouldn’t need a mediocre ARG to hype up their next character.
