Some skins for Overwatch's Jetpack Cat will be inspired by the developers' own cats

One of the star reveals of the recent Overwatch Spotlight was the announcement of the hero Jetpack Cat. It's about as literal as it comes, a feline character that sits in an airborne unit that can zip around the battlefield and cause trouble and be a nuisance. With such a striking addition being planned for Overwatch when Season 1 for 2026 arrives next week, we had the chance to sit down with some of the art team at Blizzard to understand the logic behind Jetpack Cat's design.

When asked about how the idea for Jetpack Cat came about, lead character concept artist Daryl Tan told Gamereactor: "We've released concepts into the wild before, like a rough sketch of it before. There was, I believe, some expectation of how the cat would look and function. We definitely went off of that. We explored for sure. We explored a bunch of ideas but we definitely landed on the idea that we wanted it to be a cat with a jetpack."

But things could have been wildly different, as Tan also noted that some quirkier and more unusual ideas were being floated around, including sticking the cat in a UFO or in a mech.

Tan explains: "There were different ideas, it could be a cat sitting in a UFO or in some sort of a mech or something like that. There were many ways we could have answered that question of what Jetpack Cat would look like, but we landed on a cat with a jetpack."

Character artist Melissa Kelly then added a bit to Tan's comments, noting "it sounds hilarious when you say it out loud but it really is that. Then it's like how does the cat wear the jetpack? Is the cat sitting on the jetpack?" To which Tan said, "there was a lot of open-ended answers to all of these questions in development, but the fantasy was there for us."

Art director Dion Rogers then chimed in to add even further context about Jetpack Cat's design and appearance.

"We already have two animals in the game with Winston and Hammond/Wrecking Ball and we wanted to make something that was slightly different despite being another animal," Rogers began. "The difference is Winston is intelligent, he's as smart as any human, and the same for Hammond, he's very intelligent but he just doesn't speak. So the cat... we actually landed on that it is a cat. A very suspiciously smart cat. There's probably more to that than it appears but once we settled on that that's how we approached how would they look, how would they animate. It's a cat..."

But where did the inspiration come from? What cat was used as the base model? Was it a particular developer's cat? Seemingly not, but the feline friends of the dev team are being represented in-game in the form of skins for Jetpack Cat, as Rogers explained.

"Actually, Epic skins and above, she will change fur patterns. These fur patterns are based off of... we had the team share a bunch of their cat images, so the fur patterns will be inspired by someone's cat on the team." He goes on further, "we kind of do a little lottery and the next skin will be yours. But it doesn't change the shape of them, it's just inspired by them."

It will only be the fur colour that changes for skins for the moment, but Kelly did tease that Blizzard could go further down the line by saying: "The textures for now, but I mean in the future for different skins, why not...?"

What kind of cat would you like to see represented in-game by Jetpack Cat and how else would you like to see Blizzard explore her feline form with wackier cosmetic options? For more on Overwatch, read about the "challenge" of the Overwatch 2 era and how 2027's content plans may be wildly different from 2026's.