One Overwatch player has managed to make a Workshop mode that uses bots to play piano on Paris, and they showed off its capabilities with a little music from Pokémon Red and Blue.
Shortly after Paris was added to the game in early 2019, players discovered the pianos located across the map were 100% playable.
Since then some players have even built Workshop modes and even bots focused on playing even more intricate songs on the in-game instruments.
But a recent clip from Reddit user Wengzan may take the prize as the most impressive Overwatch musical performance we’ve ever seen.
“I made a workshop gamemode that plays songs on the Paris piano with dummy bots,” Wengzan explained. “With it, I wrote a program that can convert MIDI files into arrays that the gamemode can read.”
To show off the capabilities of their fully-functional dummy bot music machine Wengzan went with a bit of classical video game music: the trainer battle theme from Pokémon Red and Blue.
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Though the game mode to play MIDI only works on the PTR at the moment, but Wengzan confirmed that “theoretically” any MIDI file would be playable in the game mode.
“The mode can only play up to 11 pitches at the same time,” they wrote in the comments. “There’s also a script size limit that most songs exceed after a few minutes, preventing you from playing anything longer than that.”
To play your own songs in the workshop mode, you first need to get the code for the base piano playing game mode, which is: DZ372.
After that, you’ll need to input the song itself, which is done using a converter that takes an MIDI file and gives you workshop settings, that you can then copy and paste into Overwatch to have your very own concert in Paris.
There are several codes provided by Wengzan in the comments for people to try out on the PTR but might not want to go through making their own mode. The one for the trainer battle music is MZ4C8.
With the option for invisible Symmetra’s turned on, this game mode seems more like Piano Simulator 2020 than anything we should be able to recognize as Overwatch.
It’s wild how one little easter egg has inspired so much creativity from Overwatch players, and with three new Workshop maps currently on the PTR, it will be interesting to see what they come up with next.