Ex-Overwatch Pro Urges Marvel Rivals Gamers to Quit Using ‘C9’ Term

Marvel Rivals has brought back the thrilling chaos of Overwatch’s glory days with its quirky hero interactions, epic moments, and those all-too-familiar blunders that can ruin a game. The infamous “C9” meme from Overwatch is making its return, much to the chagrin of one former esports player who wishes to leave it in the past.

“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,” wrote Lucas “Mendo” Håkansson on X, the platform we previously knew as Twitter.

Back in 2017, Håkansson was part of Cloud9’s Overwatch team, and he played a key role in popularizing a term that the community still tosses around. The C9 meme emerged during an Overwatch Apex Season 2 match, when his team failed to contest the objective and lost, even though they were dominating the fight. This mistake happened three more times, prompting the Twitch chat to flood with “C9 LUL.” Håkansson became the scapegoat in the third round as he abandoned the objective to go for an ultimate on Soldier: 76, although, in reality, it was truly a team-wide blunder.

Nowadays, whenever Overwatch players prioritize kills over objectives, “C9” pops up in chat, and it’s sneaking its way into Marvel Rivals, too. The constant movement of payloads in Marvel Rivals based on the last team to touch them makes these C9 incidents quite frequent. It’s the classic dilemma of team-based games—there’s so much going on, it’s easy to assume someone else will cover the objective. It’s even more mortifying when a professional team makes that mistake, with no one stepping up to own it.

Although the precise criteria for a C9 is still being debated on platforms like Reddit (Does it count if it’s too risky to step on the point?), Marvel Rivals shows that as long as there’s an objective to overlook, the C9 lives on.