Chu was getting calls from an ex-Blizzard employee named Jay Ong, now head of gaming at the comic book giant Marvel, who said that if Chu left Blizzard and started a new company, he could work on a Marvel video game. Chu went to Ben Brode, who was now the director of Hearthstone and who had also grown frustrated with the changes at Blizzard, to gauge his interest in a partnership. Brode was an easy sell, both because he would follow Chu anywhere and because he had missed spending his days developing games rather than sitting in meetings. “I’d lost touch with the product,” Brode said. “The idea
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