The licence plate of HAL-fred Glitchbot’s trailer on Hollywood.
I was exploring the Hollywood map in spectator mode when I came by Glitchbot’s trailer and wondered if it had a licence plate. At first I thought “nah, no way, where would it be? I never saw one.” Then I wondered if I could fit in that tight spot between the elevated platform and the trailer, as I had a lot of fun finding tight spots to fit in in spectator mode on other maps. And the spectator camera fits !
You can’t go there as a hero, you can barely see the licence plate even if you know it’s there. But in spectator mode, you can squeeze in and this is what you see from up close
CALIFORNIA 88GNAKD
I spent dozens of hours trying to make sense of it. I like spending dozens of hours trying to make sense of things that aren’t really worth trying to make sense of. It’s a healthy hobby of mine.
HAL-fred Glitchbot’s name is a pun, it’s based on Alfred Hitchcock, the famous british director.
I've learned that Alfred Hitchcock, despite his obvious genius, was actually a deviant intimidating man who was especially rude and abusive towards women, including his lead actresses, behaving in ways he couldn’t get away with nowadays. So I thought, maybe 88GNAKD stood for “BaBy Get NAKeD” since it was on the licence plate of his trailer and a movie set trailer seems like a good place for abuse to take place. Hollywood sex scandals involving movie directors are a very real issue. From the outside, it doesn’t look like it’s happening but if you look close enough, if you really look for evidence, you’ll find some. A bit like the licence plate. Hidden, in the shadows, yet very real.
But yeah, you know, nah. I really doubt that’s what the Overwatch team was going for with this, even if Glitchbot sounds like a real jerk.
As often, good old Occam’s razor prevails.
88GNAKD most likely stands for
1988′s comedy The Naked Gun : From the Files of Police Academy.
(19)88 G(un)NAK(e)D
The plot : An international terrorist group filled with enemies of the United States plots a conspiracy to humiliate the USA by assassinating the Queen of England during her visit to Los Angeles. The Queen will attend a baseball game and the terrorists plan to use a device to control the mind of a player, have him get close to the queen and kill her. Incompetent and goofy police detective Frank Drebin is on the case to make sure this doesn’t happen.
Now why would the Overwatch team add this detail to Hollywood?
The movie and the map are both set in California, roughly in the same area, around Los Angeles. In the movie, the police has to make sure nothing happens to a VIP from England, in game we have to make sure nothing happens to a VIP whose name is a pun on a famous british director. Glitchbot needs to be escorted by a squad of bodyguards everywhere, even on studio property because of controversies over the fact he’s an omnic director. You don’t assign a squad of bodyguards to someone unless they’ve received death threats.
It’s safe to assume the threats comes from humans with anti-omnic views. I’m sure there’s the human equivalent of Null Sector out there. To appease tensions, it seems like the movie studio has set up a system of “mandatory human hiring quotas”, which isn’t to Glitchbot’s liking. Dude is really vocal about how much he dislikes humans, calling them “lazy bums” and mocking his own audience/fanbase for having horrible taste in movies (ironic self burn), which is probably why people want to hurt him.
I know I do.
A bottle of water in Hollywood costs 600$ as seen here :
This crazy inflation on prices suggests that the global economy is hurting real bad. Probably because millions of omnics have replaced millions of humans in the workforce, to the point where this “mandatory human hiring quotas” system could actually be applied in all countries to guarantee some degree of human employment and avoid riots. But what is there left for a human to do when there’s an actual army of job-stealing tin cans already doing everything better than humans ever could? Maybe hopeless governments are down to make laws forcing some/most companies to hire humans even if there’s no tasks left for them to perform, paying people to do nothing all day or having them do bullshit work to keep them busy like in labor camps, that’s one sure way to create inflation, and have people unhappy. If the government makes sure everyone has a well-paying job and all sectors are in great shape, then money’s not worth anything anymore and cost of life goes through the roof. I guess. I’m no economics expert ... and it shows x)
Regular humans can’t compete with omnics. And that may be why a very loud, human-hating, influential, rich, arrogant asshole like Glitchbot is receiving death threats and needs protection (but so far we have no proof of any death threats, it’s just, very, very, very likely).
A bottle of water being worth 600$ when food seems cheap in comparison could either be a joke on how inexplicably expensive bottles are in real life, or indicate that clean drinking water has become a bit of a luxury item in the 2070s, which might very well be the case. Mass pollution and overpopulation being the likely culprits.
The device used in The Naked Gun : From the Files of Police Academy to control someone’s mind and have them want to kill someone they love, care about or at least have no reason to hurt (at the end of the movie, when the bad guy is beaten, the device is accidentally used on the detective’s love interest and it takes an emotional speech to have her snap out of it) makes me think about how Talon brainwashed Amélie Lacroix into killing her husband Gérard, also a detective, of sorts (more like a spy, or someone in charge of a surveillance agency, maybe the Schengen Intelligence System).
It’s also very similar to how Anubis takes control of nearby omnics in Pharah’s comic Mission Statement.
Now I know that the Naked Gun series didn’t invent the concept of mind control x). But it’s interesting to note that the Overwatch team put a reference to it in a map like Hollywood. Talon being the OW Universe counterpart of the unnamed international terrorist organization from The Naked Gun, the licence plate could be a hint that Talon will eventually try to assassinate HAL-fred Glitchbot using a similar device to take control of the mind of someone close to him. Like Doomfist says, they have a war to start and they value people like Katya Volskaya who can “keep the fight going”. Assassinating Glitchbot and making it look like humans from an anti-omnic extremist group did it, that would be a good way to start a war.
...
Am I reading too much into this?
Most definitely.
But crazy speculations are fun, aren’t they? Not as fun as getting actual lore but, y’ know, second best thing !
If you’re open minded and if you enjoy wasting time hunting for the many obscure things the devs have put in the world of Overwatch, I have an all new discord server :D
https://discord.gg/Eg8pZdn
(free tin foil hat for all new members)
As a bonus and reward for scrolling so far, here’s something from the game files of Hollywood :
:3