What Happened to Darwin, Once the Most Prolific Overwatch Workshop Creator on The Internet?

The sands of Junkertown lie empty but for two figures. Outside attacker’s first spawn stands one Roadhog. Across from him is a Bastion in Tank mode. The Bastion lines up its shot, ready to send a rocket flying into Roadhog’s ample stomach. Instead, when the trigger clicks, a Molten Core Torbjörn launches out of Bastion’s barrel, flying toward the Roadhog faster than his tiny legs could carry him. Roadhog panics and begins to run, but demon Torbjorn follows him unerringly, pounding him with his hammer. Bastion keeps firing, and the Torbjorns keep coming, beating Roadhog down until finally he collapses in death.

The vision is simple yet striking. Using the recently-released Overwatch Workshop, internet creator DarwinStreams has replaced Bastion’s rockets with manic, target-locking Torbjörns of death. His video of the project strikes the Overwatch community’s funny bone like a Swedish hammer, and within hours it’s racked up thousands of likes.

Seemingly overnight, DarwinStreams turns this first success into a string of hits, becoming a household name in Overwatch as the mad scientist behind the most mind-breaking viral Workshop creations on the internet. He streams daily, churning out warped inventions in real time to thousands of viewers. Eventually, he’s approached by Blizzard to be a sponsored streamer during the Baptiste Reunion event, and he gladly accepts.

His chat is moving faster than he’s ever seen it — this mysterious creator who, just months ago, had never streamed — and it all climaxes when Brandon “Seagull” Larned drops a 22,000-viewer host on his channel. Darwin can barely keep up with the hype, and all at once he’s shattered his previous popularity peak.

Then, over the weeks, the Workshop creations slow. The Twitch channel grows moss from disuse. The chat lies empty. And Darwin, as quickly as he came, is gone, leaving his fans to wonder where he went and why.

An Abrupt Change

DarwinStreams’ real name is Art, though he’d prefer not to share his last name. He’s soft-spoken and thoughtful, speaking English with a charming accent I would never have pegged as Russian. He has short black hair buzzed close on the sides and a thick, controlled beard that stretches nearly down to his chest. I’ve never seen him stand — he always streamed from the desk in his home office — but even sitting you can tell he’s big.

When we speak, he tells me about graduating secondary school at 16 and the lack of direction that let him slip into public relations.

“It was bad,” he says, laughing. “It was just, like, you’re 17 and you don’t know what to do or what you want to be, or what you want to study, and you just go to PR and because it has all the pretty girls and stuff.”

After a year of wasting his time, Darwin decided to go to the S.M. Kirov Military Medical Academy. His family had close ties to the sciences and medicine, so it made sense even if it wasn’t glamorous. He studied there for four years, working hard and leading his class in scores. Then came the E3 trailer for Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.

In the trailer, protagonist and assassin Ezio fends off dozens of Templar combatants. The action is propelled by the percussive, brassy grandeur of “Iron” by French folk artist Woodkid. The trailer met a firestorm of hype on release, and Darwin found himself swept up alongside the rest of the gaming world.

Darwin had been a gamer for as far back as he could remember, but his strongest memories of game design came with a different, older Blizzard title: WarCraft 3.

His designs weren’t always so ambitious as they are now.

“I remember what I did a lot is I just took existing maps and then I built in some cheats and I hosted servers and I just cheated,” he says, and I can hear the smile in his voice.

It wasn’t until Ezio took the mainstage at E3 that Darwin felt, all at once, his need to develop games. Military medicine wasn’t going to cut it. Instead, he wrote up a resume.

“It was mostly completely bullshit, like 100% bullshit,” he says, “but also I mentioned that I did a lot of mods and maps for Warcraft, and I mentioned what I did.” He submitted the resume to game developers in St. Petersburg and landed an interview at a company despite his inexperience. That interview led to a job, and that job led Darwin to drop out of the military medical academy a month shy of his exams. He hasn’t looked back since — though he should probably return the textbooks he still owes the library.

Darwin wasn’t the only young employee at the company, which hired lots of fresh talent in what Darwin suspects was an attempt to save money. All that inexperience mounted faster than the founder and CEO could handle it.

“It’s bad business when [the] CEO of the company has to micromanage, like, 40 people because he can’t delegate anything to them,” Darwin says.

Accordingly, the business failed about a year after he joined. (Darwin is quick to point out it was not his fault.) His family was unimpressed. They had been happy to see him move into the sciences, and were skeptical about his future in game design. He had no formal training in the field, and no degree on which to fall back. His grandparents had taken the departure from medicine the hardest, and this first failure did little to lessen their fears.

But Darwin persisted. Game design felt special, and he wasn’t ready to let it go. Instead, he quickly moved on to another developer in St. Petersburg. While working there, he met another developer whose idea for a mobile game struck him. Darwin asked his coworker if they could team up and develop the game themselves. He offered to make the art and handle the business side of development while his coworker handled building the game. They agreed, and the two set to work on the game, using whatever spare time they could to see the game published.

“It was kind of stressful because we weren’t sure if the company might claim anything considering we were still working for the company while doing this side project,” he says. “We didn’t want to leave the company until we released the game because we had no idea if we would make any money at all.”

Both members of the team held up their ends of the bargain, and the game ultimately released in August 2014. After Darwin and his partner produced a second title together, they left their jobs and went independent full time.

Darwin’s early success was enough to convince most of his family that game development was a real career, and that he had what it took to make a living at it. Even his grandparents eventually came around, though it took them a few years.

One day his grandfather told Darwin he had found an old notebook of his from when he was a child.

“My grandfather, just randomly he was searching for something at his house and he found a really, really old notebook from when I was maybe 10 years old, when I was staying at his place on a holiday or something. And it was a notebook with a bunch of game design. Like, I literally was drawing games and writing scripts and all that shit.”

Darwin had always referred to WarCraft 3 as the start of his game design career, but this notebook predated the game by years. For a still-learning game designer, the notebook seemed to validate all the work he’d put into games.

“That was kind of a cool moment when I realized that, yeah, that’s probably what I actually want to do.”

The Overwatch Workshop

For Darwin, developing for the hyper casual game market is more about constant reinvention than depth of design. These are games playable with just a finger. Design is necessarily constrained, forcing developers always to seek new ways to present the same actions.

During active development periods, Darwin is a whirlwind of activity. Though they’ll hire contractors to fill gaps, the core of the team remains Darwin and his cofounder. Darwin himself acts as something between a product manager, an artist, a designer and a CEO. “It’s a small company, so I do pretty much everything,” he says. “So I work with contractors, I make 3D myself, I make graphic design, I do a bit of code. Just figuring out game design and making content. Making sure that we’re on budget and everything is coming together.”

But there are also lulls in the development process. Times when the team is coasting after a release, looking for its next big mechanic. During these periods, Darwin spends most of his time working on things other than game design. Outside of banging his head on his desk a few hours a day, he spends most of his time working around the house and playing games for inspiration.

When Overwatch released in 2016, it quickly entered that rotation of games. Darwin started playing when the game was in beta and became immersed in its culture. In addition to playing himself, he would watch streams of prominent players and make friends through their communities. There he met Andrew “Andy” Bohan, now the general manager for the Irish Overwatch World Cup team, and became an administrator for the community’s Discord channel.

“Irish people refer to me as their adopted Irish brother,” he says with a chuckle. He says his Discord role even labels him an honorary Irishman.

When Blizzard announced the Workshop, Darwin and Andy were hanging out in a Discord voice channel. Bohan muted himself to watch the announcement video, and Darwin went to do the same. He knew right away he had to be a part of it.

“I’ve been in game modding since childhood, and Overwatch is my most played game by far of all games. It felt very natural to do as much as I can with the world. It’s kind of like a dream come true when you spend so much time in a game and then you get the tool to mod the game, to edit the game.”

Darwin didn’t plan to stream his time in the Workshop, but Bohan pushed him to try it out. His own streams had pulled around 40 concurrent viewers, far above his average, and he wanted Darwin to get in on the fun.

Darwin had already created an entire brand around streaming, but he had mostly used it to create Overwatch machinima on YouTube. Months had passed since he named himself DarwinStreams, but he had streamed only a handful of times, mainly to miniscule audiences, before letting the name lie fallow.

“My friends were always mocking me, ‘When are you going to stream, DarwinStreams?’ And then I started streaming! Only two years later!”

And so he did. His first broadcast he tapped into the voracious curiosity around the Workshop, managing around 300 viewers. People in the chat started asking him questions, and even though he knew as little as they did about the Workshop, he started answering. DarwinStreams the artist, the educator, was born.

Came and Gone

Darwin’s channel only grew from there. His creations claimed viral fame among the Overwatch community, burning across Reddit and Twitter with endorsements from prominent community members. The head coach of the Overwatch League’s Dallas Fuel retweeted one mod, then the official Overwatch account itself started to do the same. Darwin picked up speed at a rate possible only in the internet age, springing across social media and feeding always back to the stream.

At first all the attention was a joy. Darwin loved making his absurd creations, took pride in the practice tools, and reveled in the outpouring of adoration constantly scrolling through his chat.

To capitalize on the moment, Darwin started working on the stream full time. He would spend four to five hours live on the channel, building in the Workshop. Then he would end the stream and work another several hours on Workshop creations, or on trailers to advertise the creations. Finally, he would make the rounds on all those social media that fueled his rise and respond to messages. It became a full time job, claiming his time from 9 a.m. to midnight.

Even during a vacation to Slovenia he found himself attached to the online feedback. “I actually bought a laptop specifically so that I can stay in that loop of the Workshop,” he says. “I had to keep that going while the momentum [was] there for the Workshop. So I had to keep making mods.”

When the Reunion event began, Darwin’s status as a sponsored streamer grew his audience even further. Suddenly his audience was two or three thousand, all clamoring to be entertained. It was a far cry from his early streams, and Darwin found himself quickly growing exhausted.

“I had to constantly produce something with the Workshop,” he says. “Something that will keep people watching and entertained. Basically, it was just like finding 1 million ways to break the game in some unspeakable way.”

The constant and immediate feedback of a view count made that pressure all the worse.

“I enjoy streaming, and I enjoy interacting with my audience, but when you’re streaming you have to constantly, every second, you have to re-evaluate what you’re doing on-screen.

“Let’s say you have 60 viewers. And you can see: ‘Oh, it dropped to 50, what did I just do? Was that too boring? Ok, let’s do something fun now.’ And that is really stressful.”

Darwin’s audience peaked when fellow streamer and former Overwatch League pro Brandon “Seagull” Larned hosted his stream with 22,000 viewers. In the moment, Darwin was ecstatic. This was what success was supposed to look like. But with that success came a new and unfamiliar pressure, one that Darwin wasn’t prepared to deal with. He’d gotten into streaming to quietly puzzle through physics problems with a few friends, and here he was performing in front of thousands of viewers a world away, working tirelessly to keep them entertained. He felt it dragging at his happiness, threatening to burn him out.

So he stepped away.

What's Next?

Darwin hasn’t streamed in weeks. Members of his Discord community still occasionally ask him when he’ll next go live, but he doesn’t feel the same pressure he used to. Next week, he tells them. A week passes without a stream, but no one seems to mind. The community keeps chatting, and Darwin stays at peace.

Darwin isn’t a nervous person, but he has an anxious mind. It grows restless, pushing itself always to the next thing. Public relations couldn’t tame it. Neither could medicine. Only with game design did he find an outlet for that energy. Darwin explains it with a metaphor.

“So a normal job is as if you have a basketball and you need to score 20,000 times, and then you’re big,” he says. “You’re good. And then this job, you need to score just once, but you have to be standing, what, 200 feet away and not looking at the hoop. It’s kind of that chance element. It’s almost gambling.

“And it’s just that kind of hope to make a new big thing, a new big popular game that literally 100s of millions of people will play, is something that keeps me going.”

At the end of the day, streaming was just another big new thing Darwin managed to land. It was difficult, and it was stressful, and it ate up time like nothing else, but it tested him like few challenges had before. When he reached the top, it was clear there could be no permanent stay. He had won, and that meant it was time to move on.