It goes without saying by now that every time a new hero is teased in Overwatch, players get very excited for it, and for good reason. The new heroes offer new strategies, new weapons, and essentially new ways to play the game. So, when Blizzard teased hero No.28, the fans got pumped. You can imagine their surprise though when a giant mech arrived though, and out of it came a hamster named Hammond. Uh, say what? Well, Hammond is now fully available in the game, and his backstory has been revealed.
This came via the PlayStation Blog, where Adam Gershowitz talked about Hammond became the Wrecking Ball:
“There’s more to Wrecking Ball the hero than just a robotic ball armed with quad cannons, as some of you may already know,” he explains. “Really, ‘Wrecking Ball’ is just a persona that was crafted by Hammond, a super-intelligent hamster, when he began fighting as a gladiator in Junkertown.”
He also confirmed that Hammond was indeed on the Horizon Lunar Colony as a test subject, which to Blizzard was a key reason he was made the next character:
“Based on Winston’s history, some players may have assumed that all of the specimens at the Horizon Lunar Colony were apes, or at least primates. But here on our own Earth, humans have sent all sorts of animals into space over the years for a variety of different reasons — cats, dogs, turtles—and we thought that would be something fun to explore in the Overwatch universe.”
Though he was clear in noting that the experiments were the exact same as Winston’s:
“Hammond was another test subject at the lunar colony, but the experiments they conducted went a bit further than the ones they conducted on Winston. That’s why Hammond isn’t just smarter than a normal hamster; he’s also much bigger.”
To learn more about Wrecking Ball, head over to the blog, and if you’re up for playing him, you can get him in the game now.
