What is Marvel Heroes, the Diablo-style Marvel RPG?

Marvel Heroes was a free-to-play massively multiplayer online action role-playing game from Gazillion Entertainment and Secret Identity Studios. It launched on June 4, 2013 for Microsoft Windows, with an OS X version following in November 2014. You did not create a character. You played Marvel's characters themselves, heroes such as Iron Man, Captain America, Wolverine, and Deadpool, in an original story written by comics writer Brian Michael Bendis, in which Doctor Doom seizes the Cosmic Cube.

The man in charge was David Brevik, co-creator of Diablo and Diablo II. Brevik's own account of the job, given when he left in January 2016, is the cleanest record of his role: "Almost 7 years ago, I joined Gazillion to be the Creative Director on Marvel Heroes. Along the way, I was promoted often and eventually became the CEO around 3 years ago." Contemporary reporting fills in the middle step: he was named the company's president and chief operating officer in early 2011. One correction this Library insists on: Brevik did not found Gazillion, which Rob Hutter founded in 2005. He joined it to build this game, and ended up running the company.

The Diablo lineage was stated, not implied. At a 2012 demo, Brevik told the press: "It's a Diablo-like game. We're taking a Diablo-like game and making it into an MMO." The roster did the work of Diablo's classes, the levels were randomly generated, and the loot loop was the point. The game then lived the live-service life its model promised: renamed Marvel Heroes 2015 in 2014 and Marvel Heroes 2016 in 2016, rebuilt until its review average climbed from 58 to 81 on Metacritic, and finally relaunched on consoles as Marvel Heroes Omega for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on June 30, 2017. It was shut down that November. The next two pages in this cluster take up what Brevik changed, and how it ended.