Second Dinner, the company founded by several original Hearthstone team members, has announced two more members are joining their team!
- Bradley Crusco - Software Engineer. Previously held the same title on the Hearthstone team since June 2015.
- Tiffany Smart - Senior UI / UX Designer. Most recently worked on mobile games at Kung Fu Factory and MobilityWare.
These two pickups follow their announcements last month with Matt Wyble, John Zwicker, and Brenna Moore joining the team. All three had prior experience on the Hearthstone team.
- Matt Wyble - Head of Business. Worked as Business Director for Overwatch and Strategic Initiatives for Hearthstone (2013-2017!)
- John Zwicker - Principal Artist. Held the position of Sr. Artist at Blizzard for just over 8 years before joining the Second Dinner team.
- Brenna Moore - Infrastructure, Tools, Deployment. Credited with work across plenty of Blizzard titles, most recently with Battle.net Engineering. (Mobygames)
The company is working on its first game which is in partnership with Marvel. Considering the amount of talent on their team from Hearthstone, you really gotta wonder what their new game will feature.
Here's the welcome video, along with a view of their recently leased new office now that it is more moved-in. If you have ideas for their conference room names, hit them up on Twitter. Out of Cards sounds like a great name.
Comments
Why though? If he knows their skills first hand and considers them a good fit for the team i don't understand your comment.
Marvel multiverse card game incoming?
I am definitely looking forward to this game! I love Marvel and who doesn't love Ben Brode? A marvel card game or similar strategy game could be very interesting.
I am intrigued by their project, but while i don't mind Marvel franchises, i am not really a fan of them.
In the same way i feel attracted to HS exclusively because of WC lore and story, i don't feel compelled to commit to Ben's new creature, no matter how well designed it will be.
But competition's always healthy.
I basically feel the same way. However good the game is, it just feels like another Marvel licence game to me-- which I've personally grown tired of. Sure, games like Hearthstone are often based off of other existing universes, which I like, but they are generally made by the same company who makes the original game. This feels like Ben didn't have faith in an original idea for the team, so they just hitched on something already popular.
As someone who's worked in/with venture funding, I would bet at least $8 that it wasn't that BB wanted to build something new and couldn't so he "settled" for Marvel - it's that HE was approached BY Marvel who said "Hey, you've made an incredibly successful card game - want to jump ship and make one for us? You will be your own boss and by the way here's a big ol' sack of money for you/whichever of your Blizzard team you want to poach away."
The fact he announced a fully funded Marvel game what two months after announcing the company itself would strongly support that bet.
I agree though I'm pretty much exhausted from licensed Comic/Star Wars/Other Random Nerd Culture games & such so I expect I'll give whatever he makes a try, but doubt it's going to be good enough as a game to hold interest. And by that I mean: if you make a licensed game where - if you removed the license - the game would still be amazing, then your game is good (for example, if the Arkham games featured idk steampunk randos, the mechanics and setting would still make it a great game). If not and your game would die without the license, (Hi there Iron Man Xbox games!) then your game is bad.
There are Iron Man Xbox games? Also, very good points.
Consider yourself fortunate to have avoided them - they were compared (very justly) to Superman 64 in terms of just rank unplayability. Basically nothing in the games worked at all. The games were clearly just rushed out to capitalize on the success of the movies.