The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is a documentary that fundamentally changed my outlook on life. It’s a beautiful story, and one that deserves to be echoed for all eternity. The story and tribute to Mats Steen, a young man who suffered from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, helped many people, game players and not, learn that there is a world that is accepting of everyone. And that this world exists within the walls of our favorite electronics. I had the opportunity to speak with Debra and Hawken Miller of CureDuchenne.I learned about the success of the Reven Pack collaboration with World of Warcraft. But most importantly, I learned more about Duchenne, and how it has impacted their lives.Could you tell me a bit about CureDuchenne and what inspired you to start the organization? So, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy is a progressive muscle disease, usually diagnosed by 5 years old. Historically, it’s primarily boys that are affected because it’s an X-linked Chromosome. Historically, boys would lose the ability to walk between 10 to 12 years old, and back when Hawken was diagnosed 22 years ago, the life expectancy was about 18. And so fast-forward now, Hawken’s 28 years old and doing very well. The life expectancy over the past two decades has increased significantly, and the inspiration was Hawken! Both my husband and I were in business, sales and marketing positions, and Hawken was diagnosed in November of 2002. And we immediately went into action. We were just really surprised that people weren’t aware of this disease. And so little was being done. So we started CureDuchenne to really take the early stage academic science that was in the labs and academic institutions and move it into clinical trials. So we provide early funding to research projects to get the proof of concept, so they can get the funding to actually move into clinical trials. When it came to the collaboration between ‘World of Warcraft’ and CureDuchenne, did you approach them, or did they approach you with the idea to work together?Debra: So, it’s interesting. We met the Steen Family, Hawken, when was that?Hawken: In 2022.Debra: 2022. We had heard about them and we were in Europe, so we kind of did a detour and went to Oslo to meet with the family. And we had the privilege of seeing a rough cut, they’d already been working on the movie at that point. Then, we came back and we knew that there might be some involvement with World of Warcraft, with Blizzard. And so we, internally, were strategizing on how to approach them and figure out a good way to collaborate. During the Sundance Film Festival in 20….Hawken: January 2024Debra: 2024, Hawken went with Emily, our communications director, to the film festival, and just so happened to be standing in line next to the whole Blizzard crew. And Hawken, I’ll let you take it from there.Hawken: I think Emily kind of initially made the connection, and I was able to meet Holly Longdale, another Blizzard executive, and briefly introduce myself. We didn’t talk for very long, but I think that was kind of a seed that we planted there with them. And then the CureDuchenne team did a great job of following up and kind of continuing the conversation from there.Working with Blizzard Sounds Like A Joy, HonestlyDebra: And it was a lot of education on our part, with Blizzard, to help them learn about Duchenne, just like we had to learn. And don’t feel bad about not knowing about it, because before Hawken was diagnosed, we had never heard the word before. And so it took a long time, basically, and there was a lot of logistics involved between the Steen family and “Ibelin” and Blizzard and Netflix, and our Organization. Blizzard has done promotions like this before, and we were really proud that it turned out really well. I don’t want to compare to other promotions that they’ve done with other charities. But, I know that we did really well. Kudos to our team and Hawken for the job they did with Blizzard and Hawken helping to educate us.It was a little of the Blind leading the Blind, where you had 3 or 4 women internally at CureDuchenne working with Blizzard who knew nothing about video games. So, Hawken, which is one of your later questions, I know, we relied very heavily on Hawken to try and keep us from embarrassing ourselves.