Small update and some precisations now that I dispelled some doubts that didn’t make sense.

See my previous guesses.

Fact #1 – Dungeon Runners is being developed in Austin and not in Cali. As someone remarked in the comments.

Fact #2 – Remember Blizzard’s devs leaving to join NCSoft? Well, these guys ARE NOT working on Dungeon Runners.

Fact #3 – Dungeon Runners was being developed by another company (Realm Interactive) with another title (“Exarch”, which also came from “Trade Wars: Dark Millennium”). For various reasons it passed to NCSoft who is reworking it substantially (I guess the release isn’t so soon as I thought).

Fact #4 – The Blizzard’s guys have really their own studio in Orange Country (known as “NCOC”), but working on something that is still unannounced.

It seems that Dungeon Runners went through many reiterations. See this three years old interview with the lead designer and notice how those screenshots resemble to those from Dungeon Runners. It looks like Joe Madureira followed the project all along as someone smartly noticed.

In its first incarnation (Trade Wars) the game was planned for a Q1 2002 release (and was a RTS). Wow, that’s four years ago. I originally thought the game had been quickly hacked together in a few months, it seems I couldn’t have been more wrong. It had a twisted, long history.

No idea if we’ll know more about all this at the E3. As Lum wrote in the link above, he isn’t working for any of those projects.