One of the five new heroes coming to Overwatch next week is Jetpack Cat. She’s exactly what she sounds like: a furry feline friend who rides a jetpack around the battlefield healing her friends and harassing her foes. She’s also the revival of a decade-old concept from the hero shooter’s early days of development. If Blizzard is looking back at old ideas and bringing them back in this new era, is there hope for other old concepts like Mama Hong?
For those unfamiliar, Mama Hong is another scrapped hero from the early days of Overwatch development, dating back to when it was going to be an MMO called Titan. Not much is known about her beyond what can be gleaned from an image depicting an older Asian woman with her hair up in curlers, a cigarette in her mouth, dressed simply in a robe like she just got out of bed. Her appearance has been likened to that of the landlady character in Kung Fu Hustle but is also sometimes criticized as relying on stereotype, and altogether she doesn’t really fit the vibe of Overwatch as we know it today. But that hasn’t stopped fans from fixating on her and requesting that Blizzard bring her back. You can even find full fan concepts for her kit online. If Jetpack Cat is coming back, is there still a chance the meme queen herself could return? Maybe, according to the Blizzard devs I spoke to on the company’s Irvine campus last week.
“I sure hope [she can come back],” narrative designer Joshi Zhang said. “I think something really cool about working in game dev as a whole, I do think we can do it well, the things that we put away that don’t make it to the public, we always draw on these things, even if not exactly the way it once was, we draw on that. Sometimes it does come to light. So it’s one of those things where it’s like a ‘never say never’ situation. We can’t talk in detail about what is coming down the line, but the concepts from Titan, we talk about those all the time. We talk about story concepts from that all the time. From a narrative side, we’re always looking at the pool that we have to work with because we’re trying to make the world bigger. It’s about what stories we haven’t been able to tell yet in our world, what factions, if we want to add any, if we want to elaborate on any. It’s really exciting that this story now, with the 2026 story arc, that we have this opportunity to start getting into depth, it opens a lot of doors. I think in general, it’s safe to say players should be excited for the potential of more storytelling coming forward and their faves coming to life someday.”
When I followed up with the art team, art director Dion Rogers let out an exasperated “oh, my god,” and character artist Melissa Kelly said she wanted it on the record that she wants Mama Hong to make it into Overwatch someday. Rogers says that “there’s hope” that she might make her way into the game down the line, though they had nothing to announce at this time. For now, none of the darkened silhouettes teasing the next year of heroes quite looks like her, so it’s probably safe to say that if Mama Hong does come to Overwatch it won’t be in 2026. But hey, with the addition of Jetpack Cat, at least we know that she could still show up one day.
