Player Hacks Overwatch To Play In-Game Piano With A Real Piano

You’ve probably heard by now that Overwatch’s new Paris map has a fully playable piano.

You might have even heard somebody play “All Star” by Smash Mouth on it, because that song—a shimmering monument to the idea of unearned confidence—will outlive us all. Now, one player has taken things a step further.

Overwatch fan Zbnone rigged up a MIDI keyboard so that it can play the Paris map’s in-game piano key-for-key. It’s pretty impressive:

Given that Overwatch is a first-person shooter in which players can only directly interact with objects in the environment using their weapons, you might be wondering how Zbnone did this. It involves what they’ve taken to calling a “PianoAimBot.”

“I wrote the ‘PianoAimBot’ in Python,” they said on Reddit. “You can actually play anything you want live on it (no macros). You can also load and play midi files.”

They added that you have to be standing almost perfectly in the middle of the in-game piano for it to work, but it has a calibration feature to make that less of a headache.

It’s an inventive setup, but there’s just one problem: it might technically count as cheating. Blizzard explicitly forbids “using third-party programs to automate any facet of the game,” and this is an aimbot, meaning that it automates aim.

Unless the game’s next hero is a sentient piano (fingers crossed), I don’t see this program conferring an unfair advantage, so hopefully Blizzard lets it slide.