All Your History: DOTA Part 1 – The Pebble That Started The Avalance

It’s become one of the unlikeliest forces in gaming, a genre that came from nowhere with no corporate backing, no advertising campaign, and no business model.  It’s worth millions of dollars, yet only a handful of studios have done any work with it.  It’s a genre, except it’s a game, except there are dozens of them, except it’s just a mod.  It’s a brand new word, except it’s an acronym, that’s trying to be trademarked by its founder, except there is no founder.  It’s been called MOBA, it’s been called Action-RTS, but to the millions of gamers around the world who play it, it’s just Dota.  And now, everybody from the enthusiasts who made it to the biggest companies in gaming are trying to seize control of something that began as a Starcraft map that nobody played.

The Pebble that Started the Avalanche

Since much of what follows was never documented at the time it was made, some of the early history here is somewhat vague, or passed by word of mouth through the community.  What is known is that the entire phenomenon can be traced back to a user-generated map from Blizzard Entertainment’s hugely popular Starcraft.  Starcraft itself was a seminal Real-Time Strategy game, in which players must harvest resources to build bases and produce units that they can command against enemy players.  But one player decided to change things up a bit.  Modifying, or ‘modding,’ the game into a custom map, he created a streamlined version of the Starcraft experience.  Taking out all the resources and base building, he focused the game down to a handful of powerful units.  A few players would form a team, take control of the character of their choice, and then assault the opposing team, which was controlled by the computer.  Each team would have a single structure at their base; the goal was, simply, to destroy the other team’s structure.  However, supporting both teams would be endless waves of computer-controlled units, making just a few players feel like they were fighting alongside great armies.

And that was basically it.  In many ways the gameplay of this custom map, called Aeon of Strife, was closer to that of an Action Role-Playing Game, much like Blizzard’s own Diablo series.  The innovation was to map that gameplay into a competitive format, with RTS-scale battles thrown in.  The custom map found a small audience, but left no lasting impression on the community.

In Two Thousand Two, Blizzard released their newest RTS game, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos.  Not too long afterwards, Aeon of Strife fans decided to recreate the mod in Warcraft’s engine.  One of these modders, who went by the name Eul, called his particular variant: Defense of the Ancients, or Dota for short.  The switch to Warcraft allowed for the classic Strife gameplay to be improved a bit.  For one thing, the hero characters that the gamers played as could now level up as the round progressed, meaning they could unlock better abilities and powers over time.  This gave the match a more dynamic feel.  Dota’s players could further customize their heroes with items, allowing for players to try out wildly different combinations and styles from round to round to round.

Dota, like Aeon of Strife before it, found a dedicated audience, although only a small one.  Then in Two Thousand Three, Blizzard released an expansion pack to Warcraft III called The Frozen Throne.  Critically, with the expansion they also released a more powerful World Editor for modders to play with.  Armed with this tool, the Dota fan base began making a myriad of variants and offshoots of the original Dota.  Eventually, there were tons of good Dota games, each with its own set of distinct hero characters.  So one modder, going by the name of Meian, decided to simply collect all the best heroes together into one mod, that he called Defense of the Ancients Allstars.  This was meant to be a kind of “best of” mod, with nothing really new of its own.

It appears that this was the extent of Meian’s ambitions.  His work complete, he moved on.  But yet another player-slash-modder wasn’t satisfied.  Steve Feak [Feek], who went by the name Guinsoo [Gin-su], wanted to rebalance the game to be more fun.  He always thought that the Dota gamestyle was a great idea that had never been refined enough.  So that he and his buddies could have a good time, he began to tweak the Dota Allstars mod, and put them up on the internet for public use.

Keep in mind, the only way to play any of these mods was to find them on the internet, download them, install them correctly, and then play them through the Warcraft III program itself.  Given the difficulty of finding, installing, and then playing any of these mods, and the fact the players had to own Warcraft already, it was tough for any of them to break out into anything like mainstream popularity.  For the most part, they were all niche communities.

Dota Allstars would be the one that broke the mold, and in spectacular fashion.  Guinsoo proved to have an uncanny talent for zeroing in on what made Dota fun, and then remaking the game to emphasize that aspect.  First, he realized that the endless options of heroes, abilities, and items was what allowed hardcore players to spend countless rounds experimenting with new combinations.  So, Guinsoo dramatically increased all of these options.  He revamped the progression system to give players a greater sense of reward as the round evolved, while also ensuring that no player could possibly acquire every item by the end of the round.  It forced players to choose a strategy from the beginning and stick to it, but be rewarded for it in the process.  Guinsoo then shifted the game’s focus away from fighting against the endless computer-controlled units, and towards fighting against other human players.  This made Dota Allstars more of a team vs team game than the other Dota variants.

And his instincts were right on the money.  As time went by, the audience for Dota Allstars expanded dramatically, soon dwarfing the playerbase for every other Dota variant.  At the same time, many of these players offered to help on the mod, and soon Guinsoo was at the head of a dozens-strong development team.  Every one of them was working on their own time, for free; that’s how much they loved the mod.  This had its pros and cons.  On the plus side, updates, patches, and bug fixes were frequent, sometimes happening within the same day.  On the downside, no matter how hard they worked, no one could change the fact that Dota was a mod inside of somebody else’s game.  That meant that they couldn’t create their own graphics, they couldn’t make a matchmaking service, and they couldn’t build a tutorial.  Effectively, this meant that unless they knew someone who could tell them the rules and help them get better, newcomers were left out to dry.

Yet the newcomers kept coming, and in droves.  By Two Thousand Five, barely two years since Dota Allstars began, no less than Blizzard itself chose to host a Dota tournament at their very first BlizzCon event.  Blizzard was one of the biggest and most respected game developers in the world, and Warcraft III itself was already a tournament staple.  For them to take time from their own convention just to show off Dota was unbelievable, but that’s how big and how passionate the Dota audience had become.

Though numbers for a manually-downloaded and community-distributed mod are impossible to know, it is estimated that ten million people have tried Dota Allstars at one point or another.  If those were the numbers for a commercially-released studio game, that would be a massive smash hit.  Dota did it purely by word of mouth, in a game that could only be played inside of someone else’s game.

No one factor can explain its popularity, but at its core, Dota is a game that is social, highly competitive, relatively quick (although rounds can go long), strategically complex, fast-paced, and instantly rewarding.  That is a devastating combination.  All told, Dota is often cited as the most popular mod of all time, considered by some to be even bigger than the legendary Counter-Strike mod for Valve Software’s Half-Life.

But even as Dota was tearing up BlizzCon in Two Thousand Five, its world was about to be turned upside down.  Guinsoo, having put so many hours of his life into the project, chose to pass the torch.  Stepping aside, he gave lead development duties to another member of the modding team, who went by the name of IceFrog.  Little did anyone know that this would kick off the most intense Dota round of them all, as the fan-driven mod would soon explode into big money for big companies, with all the legal problems that come with it.

Tune in next time to see Dota become a battleground

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