Ahead of the launch of Season 17 of Overwatch 2, the Blizzard team has already confirmed what the next big collab for the game will be, taking fans by surprise in the process. Following in the wake of the Street Fighter 6 and Gundam Wing collabs, Overwatch 2 will roll out another team-up with Hasbro and this time bring the world of G.I. Joe to Overwatch 2. The Overwatch 2 x G.I. Joe collaboration will deliver brand new skins for players to purchase, and like many of their previous collabs it was born from major fans on the Overwatch 2 dev team that wanted to make it perfect.
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ComicBook had the opportunity to speak with two key members of the Overwatch 2 team ahead of the official reveal of the Overwatch 2 x G.I. Joe collaboration announcement, where they broke down each of the new skins and the design choices that went into making them. Players won’t be surprised to hear that there’s a lot of attention to detail on display in the Overwatch 2 x G.I. Joe skins, but after this, you’ll know. And knowing is half the battle…
The Overwatch 2 x G.I. Joe collaboration will bring five brand new skins to the shop for players to purchase, including Genji as Snake Eyes, the game’s newest character Freja as Scarlet, with Doomfist as Destro, Widowmaker as Baroness, and Reaper as, who else, Cobra Commander. Overwatch 2 Art Director Dion Rogers noted that this was “the fastest” the team has ever come up with which Overwatch 2 heroes would be getting skins in the collab.
“I’m a huge GI Joe fan,” Rogers said. “And so one day I sent a PDF to Aimee of the heroes I’d like to see be certain characters. And that’s where we began and it stuck.”
Aimee Dennett, the Associate Director of Product Management for Overwatch 2, added: “It was literally a five-slide PDF file with the Overwatch character and the G.I. Joe character and we were like, ‘Oh, ship it. This is great.’”
“A lot of us grew up watching the cartoon and collecting the action figures, so it’s just super fun to do this work,” Rogers added about working on the collab. “It’s inspiring, being able to work with the thing you grew up watching, so it gives a lot of passion to the team for the next thing.”
Overwatch 2 fans may be wondering how characters like Freja becoming Scarlett or Genji becoming Snake Eyes can really work for a collab since their base designs are already pretty close to the physical characteristics of the GI Joe characters to begin with. When it comes to Genji, the secret became really leaning more into the character that he’s cosplaying, Snake Eyes, though some elements of Genji’s base skin had to stay.
“(Genji’s) much less of a cyborg in this rendition of him, he has a lot more human elements to him that lean a bit more on Snake Eyes,” Rogers said. “But we retained his mechanical arms so that he could still do his cool shuriken reload animation and things like that. But that was some of the things when we were looking at some of the heroes, like how much did we need to capture from the G.I. Joe character versus the Overwatch hero.”
When it came to making these decisions for the character’s skins, the Overwatch 2 team had a secret weapon from Hasbro, who have decades of details about all of their characters that are collected. These files detail the pieces of the characters that have made them iconic and what makes them stand out, offering an easy guidepost for what to do. This came in handy especially for making Freja into Scarlett. Though the comparison between the two is easy to immediately identify, red-headed warriors that use crossbows, there’s a key difference in their design that had to be addressed, Freja’s cape. Despite many variants over the years, Scarlett has never worn a cape, so something had to be done
“You’ll see that the cape is actually slightly shorter than what Freja’s base skin would have,” Rogers said. “As you know, silhouettes are important in Overwatch, and a big part of Freja’s silhouette is her cape. But you can see here the design on the cape, especially on the back side. We were able to use a lot of the cues that Hasbro had for Scarlett. The team was able to incorporate that, so it feels like a cape that Scarlett would wear, if she did wear a cape…I think the team did a great job of combining the two.”
Any talk of G.I. Joe is incomplete without their villains, who outnumber the heroes in the Overwatch 2 collab. All three villain skins in the event, like the two heroes, feel perfectly suited for each other, but also show off the attention to detail that the team brought to the collab. Doomfist as Destro for example not only has the COBRA emblem on his actual fist gauntlet, but the logo for M.A.R.S. Industries on his jacket as well, a detail G.I. Joe fans will immediately clock.
“Doomfist and Destro both share a similar personality,” Rogers said. “They’re kind of calm and in a lot of ways like Destro respects G.I. Joe because they’re a pretty strong organization. He’s just like, ‘You waste your talents.’ So Doomfist has a very similar mindset when it comes to what motivates him. So the two of them click really well together and it was super fun to design the fist.”
The Widowmaker as Baroness skin is slightly surprising too as it marks not only the second collab skin in a row for Overwatch 2’s resident sniper, but also her second in a row with a totally different hue than players are used to seeing. Widowmaker’s Baroness skin has the character in a regular skin tone and not her trademark purple. The skin also naturally includes the COBRA branding on her weapon, which players will see modeled on her scope as she prepares to take a shot.
Finally, the Overwatch 2 x G.I. Joe collab will give fans one of the most perfect pairings they’ve ever created, Reaper as Cobra Commander. Players will immediately notice in the trailer that Reaper has a bit of a stylization to his voice for the Cobra voicelines, while this probably could have been done with a filter to give him that trademark Cobra Commander speaking voice, it actually came from Reaper’s voice actor, Keith Ferguson.
“He had fun with it,” Rogers said of Ferguson channeling Cobra Commander in the recording booth. “The characters are cosplaying so we want Reaper, but do a couple of the quips and the funny sayings that Cobra uses in the show. So he’s still actually maintaining how Reaper speaks but layering in Cobra Commander style.”
“A lot of fun Reaper voice lines on this one,” Dennett added. “I would say some of my favorites we’ve ever done. There’s a lot of voice lines in general but I think we gave him the most of those. There’s just so much to work with.”
Players familiar with the previous Overwatch 2 collabs may think that G.I. Joe sticks out somewhat from others that arrived with a large, international appeal. The likes of My Hero Academia and LE SSERAFIM stand out as Overwatch 2 collabs where the fandom is found across the globe. What the Overwatch 2 x G.I. Joe collaboration reveals, and which Dennett confirmed, is that the team is more focused on securing partnerships that feel like a right fit rather than what is the most popular worldwide.
“For every collaboration, it’s not that we’re trying to appeal to the most people possible, sometimes we’ll work with IPs that we know are globally really popular, but the thing that is important to us is that we pick partners that have really passionate fans,” Dennett confirmed. “We want them to feel like if your thing is G.I. Joe, we want you to be the most excited about this than anything ever. So it’s less about how do we appeal to the most people possible and more how do we get these people where this is their thing, make them the happiest.”
Players may also be wondering about the frequency that Overwatch 2 collabs have been happening in recent days. In 2023, when they began, there were only three Overwatch 2 collaborations for the entire year, but in 2024 they grew to about one per season. Now halfway into 2025 the team is averaging two per season. As both Rogers and Dennett point out, this growth year over year was made possible not by the team getting bigger, but just getting better at making the collabs. Currently though the strategy doesn’t dictate a specific amount per season, and comes down to one key factor.
“There’s, of course, a strategy that we want to be doing more than three in a year, the year prior to this we had about one per season. Now it’s really just whatever we think is cool, let’s do it,” Dennett said. “It’s just like anything with the game, if there’s a really cool non-collab game idea, we go for it. Sometimes it works great. Sometimes there’s other stuff that we could have done to improve it. But in this case, we’re certainly doing more, but it’s all still rooted in, ‘Gosh, this is really cool and we want this fandom to get themselves represented.’”
This will end up being very clear for the G.I. Joe fans that dive into the new Overwatch 2 collaboration, as they will find deep cut Easter eggs not only in the skins, but the voice lines, the key art, and the sprays.
“We love putting in more niche references that only like the true big fans would get,” Dennett teased. “There’s a band that Cobra Commander put together called Cold Slither, so we have a Cold Slither spray in the game that I’m particularly fond of.”
The Overwatch 2 x G.I. Joe collaboration will launch in game on Tuesday, July 1 and be available through Monday, July 14th.
