If I had cornflakes to choke on, I might have done just that this morning. Big, big news:

Online game startup Gazillion Entertainment is announcing today a major partnership with comic book king Marvel Entertainment to build a series of online game worlds with Marvel’s comic book characters.

The first game is a kid-oriented online world based on brand-new Marvel property Super Hero Squad. This show for kids will debut on the Cartoon Network in the fall and the game will debut sometime in 2010. Gazillion, based in San Mateo, Calif., has already been working on it for a year.

Heretofore unknown, Gazillion is unveiling itself as one of the most ambitious game startups in the world. It has 300 employees and is squarely focused as a pure play company developing online game worlds for the mass market, with game projects based on Marvel, LEGO, and its own original properties.

Why is this big? Hmm, well, how about this:

• Gazillion owns, outright, four development studios including NetDevil, Slipgate Ironworks, Gargantuan and The Amazing Society
• They have a 10-year deal with Marvel to produce “any number of games” based on their characters
• They already have a casual, browser-based Marvel game in production (at The Amazing Society)
• They already have Marvel Universe in production (at Gargantuan)
• They have LEGO Universe (at NetDevil)
• They have a John Romero-created MMO (at Slipgate Ironworks)
• They’re VC-funded… there’s no Marvel money flowing in here
• Did I mention they have 300 employees already? (Comparison: NCsoft Europe had about 150 at peak; NCI had just over 400 at one point I believe.)

In other words, it’s sort of like, say, Atari announcing “Oh by the way, we bought Cryptic, Flagship, Red 5 and 38 Studios in the last four years. We just didn’t think to mention it until now.”

Managing to keep something this big quiet for this long is impressive. I mean, being in ’stealth mode’ is almost standard operating procedure for startups these days… but still, it takes some damn good NDAs to keep this stuff secret. What impresses me more, though, is the long-term thinking.

Gazillion is obviously interested in working with very big IP, as well as original ideas, and two of the biggest and potentially most lucrative IPs out there right now are Marvel and LEGO. So at some point I guess they sat down and said “How do we get those two?”

Marvel, of course, has been in the MMO space before: Marvel and Cryptic announced Marvel Universe Online in 2006, but it got cancelled in 2007, and remade into Champions Online. Obviously somewhere between 2007 and now, Marvel changed their gameplan a bit (or, were convinced by Gazillion to change it).

What seemed to change is that Marvel realised (or were told) that the browser-based casual market for online games is growing rapidly, thanks to the low cost of entry and high accessibility.

So why not take something Marvel had already created – Marvel Super Hero Squad – then launch an online game to coincide with an action figure range, Cartoon Network show and single-player game from THQ. Talk about your marketing synergies.

From there, assuming all goes well, they can take the potentially phat cash you get from a game based on Marvel’s characters and put it into the real long-term money maker – a subscription-based (perhaps) Marvel MMO for consoles and PCs. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

As for LEGO, well, if you’ve got the cash why not just buy NetDevil? That way you get the LEGO Universe MMO, which has the potential to be the user-generated content colossus that LittleBigPlanet didn’t quite manage (yet).

That is what you call long-term thinking, folks. That is very smart long-term thinking. And that’s why I think you’re going to hear a lot more from Gazillion in the next few years….