Overwatch and World of Warcraft art director Bill Petras has died.
The news was shared by Harley D. Huggins II, former cinematic projects director at Blizzard, who paid tribute to Petras on LinkedIn.
“Bill Petras, a game development legend has unexpectedly passed away. Billy was an amazingly gifted artist who worked at Blizzard Entertainment for almost two decades,” Huggins said.
“He was immensely proud of the work he did there, most notably as the Art Director for World of Warcraft and Overwatch.”
“Billy and I started at Blizzard the same week and were close friends for 28 years. I will miss our regular, long, rambling conversations about life, game dev, games, art, comic books, toys, monster movies and Conan.
“He will be deeply missed by me and all who knew him.”
Petras’ career began in the early ’90s on PC titles like BloodNet and Star Crusader.
He joined Blizzard in 1997, working on 1998’s StarCraft and its Brood War expansion. Petras was an artist on the best-selling real-time strategy game, and is also credited for its box and manual art.
Petras would later work on the RTS WarCraft III, and then World of Warcraft, where he was responsible for the highly influential art direction of the MMO upon its original launch in 2004.
Petras left Blizzard in 2005 to co-found the studio Red 5, which created the MMO Firefall.
He later returned to the company in 2010, working as Art Director for the successful shooter Overwatch, which emerged from the cancelled MMO project, Titan. He remained at Blizzard until 2021.