A Brief History of Dota

By Zhenyi Tan

A screenshot of the original "Defense of the Ancients" (Dota), a custom game for Warcraft 3. It shows various units and structures on a green battlefield, along with information about the Pit Lord hero.

Blizzard has bundled a map editor program with their RTS games since Warcraft 2 and StarCraft, allowing users to create custom maps with their own rules. These maps could be shared on battle.net for everyone to download and play.

The mapmaker scene took off with Warcraft 3 because it introduced hero units and a much more powerful editor. Heroes can level up, carry items, and learn skills, making custom games more interesting. Players preferred controlling a single hero over managing multiple armies and bases, leading to a surge in the popularity of custom games over the standard 1v1 format.

One custom map called Defense of the Ancients (DotA) became very popular. This map, based on an older map from StarCraft, had players control a hero unit to help destroy the other team’s base with weaker computer-controlled units. DotA became a big hit on battle.net, then esports competitions started including DotA in their events, and professional teams started to form around it.

Seeing DotA’s success, companies like Riot and Valve decided to make their own games based on it. Valve even hired the then-maintainer of the DotA map to be the lead designer of their game, which they also named Dota.

Blizzard wasn’t happy about this. They created Warcraft 3 and the map editor, so they felt it wasn’t fair for Valve to take the game’s name, the mapmaker, and the community away. This led to a lawsuit, and eventually, Blizzard and Valve reached a deal that let Valve take the Dota trademark.

Following the lawsuit, Blizzard learned a valuable lesson. With the release of StarCraft 2, the mapmaker community discovered that Blizzard had added a clause to their map editor terms and conditions stating that everything created using the editor program was considered Blizzard’s intellectual property.

This disappointed many mapmakers, leading to a decline in custom maps for StarCraft 2. As a result, custom games never really gained popularity in StarCraft 2, even at its peak.

Blizzard eventually released Blizzard Dota (later renamed Heroes of the Storm), their own official version of Dota featuring popular characters from their games. But it was too little and too late, then the game flopped.

It’s ironic that the tighter Blizzard tries to grip their community, the more it slips away. Maybe the real lesson here for platform owners is to allow creativity and community to flourish naturally.