Mike Snider | USA TODAY

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Evan Vucci, AP

Before Steve Bannon oversaw the conservative Breitbart News Network and, subsequently, joined then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign, the chief political strategist became a player in Hollywood and ... World of Warcraft.

Bannon's migration from banker at Goldman Sachs to his current post in Trump's inner circle is chronicled in the new book Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, out Tuesday, by Joshua Green, a reporter with Bloomberg Businessweek.

You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump. Steven Bannon

In 2005, Bannon secured $60 million in funding from Goldman Sachs and other investors for Internet Gaming Entertainment, a Hong Kong-based company. IGE did not make games, but instead employed "low-wage Chinese workers" to play online multiplayer game World of Warcraft and earn in-game gold that could be traded for virtual goods, which in turn could be resold to players of the hugely popular PC game for real money, Green writes. At the time, the game published by Blizzard Entertainment, had about 10 million subscribers.

Blizzard

Some players fancied the idea of paying for goods that would take hours of grinding through the game to earn. But other players "considered it a form of cheating," Green writes, and many posted "anti-Chinese vitriol" on bulletin boards.

Eventually, Blizzard shut down accounts used by virtual "gold farmers" and IGE became the target of a class-action suit by a player who said the company's practices were "substantially impairing" players' enjoyment of the game.

Bannon took control of the company from Brock Pierce, a child actor who appeared in The Mighty Ducks films and, according to Internet Movie Database, was a consultant on an episode of HBO series Silicon Valley.

Even though the business plan was a flop, Bannon became intrigued by the game's online community dynamics. In describing gamers, Bannon said, "These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power. ... It was the pre-reddit. It's the same guys on (one of a trio of online message boards owned by IGE) Thottbot who were [later] on reddit" and other online message boards where the alt-right flourished, Bannon said.

Green postulates that Bannon's time at IGE was "one that introduced him to a hidden world, burrowed deep into his psyche, and provided a kind of conceptual framework that he would later draw on to build up the audience for Breitbart News, and then to help marshal the online armies of trolls and activists that overran national politicians and helped give rise to Donald Trump," Green writes.

After taking over in 2012 at the Breitbart News Network — it was founded five years earlier by Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012 — Bannon recruited Milo Yiannopoulos to handle technology coverage.

Like Andrew Breitbart, Yiannopoulos "just had that 'it' factor," Bannon says in the book. "The difference was, Andrew had a very strong moral universe, and Milo is an amoral nihilist."

Yiannopoulos devoted much of Bretibart's tech coverage to cultural issues, particularly Gamergate, a long-running online argument over gaming culture that peaked in 2014. And that helped fuel an online alt-right movement sparked by Breitbart News.

"I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away," Bannon told Green. "You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump."

My book 'Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump + the Storming of the Presidency' is out now. RTs appreciated! https://t.co/9KN7AwYYpi — Joshua Green (@JoshuaGreen) July 18, 2017