Why Everybody Loves Overwatch‘s Sombra

Around high noon, roughly speaking, a video being duplicated across dozens of huge screens in a convention hall, as well as to millions around the world, suddenly glitches. The lights go out, and everyone, even myself, starts screaming. The glitch was in charge: Sombra, Overwatch’s 23rd hero, had finally arrived during the opening ceremonies of Blizzcon, Blizzard Entertainment’s annual convention to celebrate the company and its fans. The reveal, which included her “disrupting” a video about the game’s player numbers, debuted a three minute cinematic full of the character’s personality, skills and motivations. It was one of the more detailed that anyone in the game has gotten thus far, and with a backdrop of enthusiastic shrieking from fans, it proved that Blizzard’s missteps with the character up until this point were largely forgiven.

When the game first released, it was not clear as to whether or not Blizzard would be releasing new characters in the future, but sharp-eyed fans noticed that amid some of the Easter eggs and lore points that were left around maps, that there was a name that came up on the Dorado map: Sombra. Given that Blizzard had snuck other character reveals in the beta period this way (notable was a screenshot of the Hanamura map that had a D.va banner hanging), fans quickly latched onto the idea that this could be another clue. A character wearing a hood was spotted in a Gamespot documentary, which was also believed to be Sombra.

As soon as Ana was released officially, that theory was both shot down and a new one emerged from Ana’s own reveal video: a series of hexadecimal codes that said when translated, “La que tiene la información; tiene el poder.” (“She who holds the information, holds the power.”) A second set provided later spelled out the name: Sombra. This ARG was now afoot with our first real brush with Sombra as a character. We knew it was a “she” of some sort, spoke Spanish and had a predilection for disrupting normal operations. As the game unspooled over the next couple of months, subreddits for Overwatch as well as the Game Detectives were ablaze with speculation and attempts to crack the clues left behind in subsequent videos as well as Sombra’s attempts to mess with Blizzard’s websites. She left behind tiny snippets of info about various heroes, along with her patented skull logo and snippy jokes. The game reached a fever pitch when a site called amomentincrime.com (it now redirects to her player page) was discovered (after a post made by “Skycoder” on the official forums had ticked down to 0) and had a slowly ascending percentage. People checked the site every day from mid-August onwards. However, this is where it all fell apart: ARGs typically work best when constantly fed clues and these timers only artificially extended the game and people’s anticipation fizzled into frustration. When the percentage finally hit 100% in October, people were hoping (maybe a little too optimistically) that Sombra would be revealed. She was not, and many people felt sour on what was sure to just be a new character for Overwatch. The next part of the game included more story progression that underlined Sombra’s intent to hack into and destroy Lumerico, an energy company that controls one of the major structures on the Dorado map, but as the clues kept unfolding closer and closer to Blizzcon in early November, people stopped paying attention. It was clear that she had always been planned for the convention, where the company unveiled all their big announcements for the year. A leaked poster of official Sombra art a day or two before the start of Blizzcon all but confirmed it.

Even though Blizzard said they didn’t do very well with the ARG, the character feels like a victory. You can’t say that the impact of Sombra hasn’t been felt or continued the team’s mission towards diversity. It says a lot that the last two characters added to the line-up have been women of color, both with different motivations, allegiances and overall looks. Blizzard’s made some mistakes in the past with how character’s ethnicities and cultures have been represented in-game, but once again, it feels like Sombra improves on the model. This is what made the reveal so exciting—it happened this year, in this culture, with thousands of people thirsting for months over a shrewd Latina hacker who has perfectly coiffed hair and eyeshadow. It’s just not what we’ve come to expect when it comes to gamers, a segment of whom often throws tantrums when women, much less women of color, are given center stage. They complain about inclusion being deliberate, political and pandering; what they don’t realize is how sorely it’s needed to make these kinds of moves in a sea of characters that only ever look like they do.