Marvel Rivals has brought back the joys of Overwatch in its heyday: goofy hero interactions, legendary plays, and, of course, critical mistakes that cost the entire match. Overwatch’s infamous “C9” meme has made a comeback and one of the former esports players responsible for it wishes it didn’t.
“MARVEL RIVALS’ BOOMING POPULARITY MEANS A TON OF NEW PLAYERS ARE LEARNING WHAT A ‘C9’ [IS] AND THAT I CREATED IT. LET ME MOVE ON PLEASE,” Lucas “Mendo” Håkansson wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Håkansson played on Cloud9’s Overwatch team in 2017 and was partially responsible for popularizing a term thrown around in the community to this day. The C9 meme was born in a match during Overwatch Apex Season 2 where Håkansson’s team failed to touch the objective and lost the round despite decisively winning the fight. And then they made the same mistake three more times, prompting people to spam “C9 LUL” in Twitch chat. Håkansson happened to be the obvious culprit in the third round when he ignored the point to pull off an ultimate on Soldier: 76, but the meme was a team effort.
C9 is the first thing you see in chat whenever Overwatch players are too distracted with getting kills to touch the objective, and it’s starting to appear in Marvel Rivals now, too. It doesn’t help that payloads in Marvel Rivals keep moving based on the team that touched them last, which makes C9s surprisingly common. It’s the curse of team-based games, where so much else is going on that it’s easy to assume someone else will handle the objective for you. It’s just ten times more embarrassing when you’re on a pro team and nobody takes responsibility.
Even when the exact definition is still debated in Reddit threads (does it count if the point is too dangerous to step on?), Marvel Rivals proves that as long as there’s an objective to ignore, there will be a C9.
