“We have a lot of confidence they’re going to build something fantastic,” said Brandon Beck, the chief executive and co-founder of Riot Games. “They’re pretty uncompromising when it comes to quality.”

For now, Mr. Pardo says he is focused entirely on hiring people to begin generating ideas and making game prototypes. Min Kim, a former executive with Nexon, an Asian game developer, and several former colleagues from Blizzard joined him as members of Bonfire’s founding team. He wants Bonfire’s games to recreate the social connections that many players formed when banding together in clans in World of Warcraft, a game that allows players to fraternize with one another online.

“We don’t want to be constrained by genre,” Mr. Pardo said. “We really want to create games that help us make those deeper connections with each other.”

After leaving Blizzard, Mr. Pardo spent time designing another project, a custom home he now lives in with his family in Irvine. Allusions to geek culture are sprinkled throughout the home. There are side-by-side men’s and women’s bathrooms labeled Horde and Alliance after the two character factions in World of Warcraft, and wooden floors inlaid with Tetris blocks.

Mr. Pardo said his inspiration for creating a start-up with a small development team occurred while at Blizzard, during the making of Hearthstone, a digital card game that was a huge hit for the studio. At Blizzard, most game development teams were so large that some of the greatest challenges for Mr. Pardo, Blizzard’s former chief creative officer, were management oriented.

The original team that created Hearthstone was unorthodox by Blizzard standards, consisting of a little over a dozen people. That relatively small size eliminated management layers that could make communication difficult and make some employees feel as if they did not have a stake in the project, Mr. Pardo said.

“Everyone got to be completely involved in game design,” he said. “I feel like that team’s culture was one of the strongest.”