When Ben Brode, previous Hearthstone Game Director, and Yong Woo, previous Hearthstone Production Director, left Blizzard to create the indie game company Second Dinner, it was a heavy blow for Blizzard fans. Woo and Brode were popular (and visible) figures in the Hearthstone community and their impact on game was unmistakable. 

Now, after months of under-the-radar work, the team at Second Dinner (comprised of 3 other Blizzard veterans with decades of experienced) released the following video on Twitter. The video showcases their new offices in Irvine, California and also reveals details about the first game they will create thanks to a reported $30M in funding from Marvel and NetEase.

A Mobile Marvel Game

While it is easy to assume that a team lead by former Hearthstone employees would be some sort of digital card game, no hints on the nature or genre of the game have been revealed. All that we know now is that the game will indeed take place in the Marvel universe and, per Brode, they have been working on it for about 6 months now.

When you read through seconddinner.com, it is easy to imagine that the team who left Blizzard yearned to return to small team environment working on cool games for the sake of making a cool game. They commonly refer to the "creative freedom" Second Dinner provides to them and, in the wake of some seriously negative Blizzard PR and a growing list of veterans leaving the company, many fans are praising the 5 founders of Second Dinner for their prophetic decision to leave their former company.

Below is the full transcript of the official posted announcement on the seconddinner.com:

Hi! Second Dinner is a small, sleek, and absurdly vigorous new game studio. (If you think you might be interested, check out our careers page here!

We may be small, but we've got BIG DREAMS! We want to make fun video games! Games with depth and pizzazz! Games for you. Games for us!

Starting up a new studio is a bit scary, but we’ve assembled a top-notch founding team (see?) and have secured funding (see our press release if you want the gory details) that should take us all the way through shipping our first game. And that’s money in hand with no need to sing and dance for milestone payments or desperately try to find new investors along the way.

Which means that we are entirely masters of our own destiny; our glorious ascension or tragic (but still glorious!) downfall is entirely up to us! We've been lucky to have helped make a huge impact on the games industry through our work on Hearthstone™, World of Warcraft™, Halo™ (and more!); and we're going to do it again. Almost definitely.

But wait! There’s more!

We’re partnering with Marvel on our first game. I know what you’re thinking: “WHAAAT?!!? You get to make a game with Hellcow the vampiric cow and Throg, the Mighty Frog of Thunder??”

Yes. Yes we do. Also Spider-Man and the Avengers and the X-Men. We’re working on the prototype already and we think it might just be the most fun thing ever in the history of fun.

Stay tuned for more news on our various doings and shenanigans. Not like right away, but there will be more at some point. We promise!

Yours Truly,

Second Dinner