Your favourite Overwatch hero could (should?) have been a cat in a jetpack

According to this graphic posted by Reddit user Oberdiah in December last year, Ana, McCree and Genji are the best competitive Overwatch characters. Now, before you sound off with your own favourites, you may be interested to know that a jetpack-operating feline character almost made it into Blizzard's fast-firing first-person shooter. Yes, really.

"It was a cat in a jetpack," Jeff Kaplan told Gamespot in a recent interview, speaking of the hero which ultimately didn't make the cut.

The director explains that prior to the game's launch, he and his team were keen to test the boundaries of what they could and could not get away with hero-wise—and that the straight-shooting Soldier 76 and slightly outlandish talking gorilla Winston acted as "good bookends" who featured on opposite ends of the likely/unlikely spectrum.

"We had done a lot of concepting," says Kaplan. "We had one hero who was just a hockey player. Literally a hockey player. We later made a Lucio skin for a hockey player. But he was just a hockey player hero. Then there was this one hero that was a huge internal debate on the team because we just loved it so much but it didn't make it. It was this jetpack and it had this cat that laid in it, like a cat does. Then every once in awhile it would paw at the controls.

"That was one of those moments that helped define Overwatch. We just went, 'Yeah that's probably too far.' But yes. We had a cat hero."

So there you have it. Gamespot's interview with Kaplan in full can be read over here—the rest of which contains far less feline hero-related scoops.