Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) - Videogame History #42 - Retro Review
There is a genre within the world of videogames which reached this great market recently, besides being well received by the community, it is currently known as Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA), which has left a great mark in the area of videogames in recent years, however many people do not know how it was created or what was the first game that was designed with this new gameplay, through this post we will make a small trip to the past where we will know the origins of this great genre that has revolutionized in a very arrogant way in video games.
Many players claim that the first video game based on this genre was Riot Games, others indicate that it was Valve, this is something completely false, everything goes back in 1998, a company called Blizzard brings to market one of the time strategy titles Most famous real, the great Starcraft, this video game had a program which allowed the user to design their own maps within the game, many video players made a number of maps by publishing them on the internet for anyone wishing to try them, this program was known as StarEdit.
Of so many customized maps or levels created, one of them became very famous, had the name of Aeon of Strife (AOS), designed by a modder called AEON64, in this map the player controlled a character which was identified as "hero "Which could perform certain actions on a map which had 3 main lines, the objective here was to completely destroy the enemy base that was at the opposite pole from ours.
After Starcraft, a new title of the great Blizzard would come to the hands of gamers, the great Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos released in 2002 for the PC platform, this video game like Starcraft included a map editor, but much more complete, giving modders many tools to create their own worlds or campaigns, a modder named Eul based his map on the famous Starcraft mod (AOS), adapting it and improving it in a very striking way, this gave it the name of Defense of the Ancients (DOTA).
From that moment DOTA was becoming very popular, but had a problem, the interconnection between people was something that was not programmed, because it used all the resources of Warcraft III, this caused a variety of developers to devise a program solving this great problem, having the possibility of creating LAN networks but virtual among many people worldwide, one of the best known was Garena, which had a large community of DOTA within one of its channels.
This boosted in an impressive way all the players at that time of Warcraft III to try the well-known mod called DOTA, then in 2003 Blizzard launches Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne which had many additional characters than the previous one, a modder named Meian together with Feak Guinsoo they made a great variant of the map of DOTA taking advantage of all the resources of this new Warcraft, they added more characters, this new mod was released with the name of DOTA All Stars, a year later both modders left the project a veteran modder named Ice Frog who implemented various tools and updates to DOTA All Star which were well received throughout the community.
DOTA All Stars had become a very addictive and competitive game, reached a figure of 1 million users and was one of the first which was recognized worldwide, given all these games we can see that really the genre MOBA was not invented by a company , it was really the users of the community who with the help of tools from the Blizzard games were able to establish, under their own updates, a totally different genre from the rest of the games.
By 2008, the videogame industry was struck by the figures that DOTA All Star was generating with respect to the masses of users that were connecting daily, and finally one of the recognized modifiers Feak Guinsoo created some of the most recognized MOBAs worldwide, League of Legends (LoL) by the company Riot Gamer in 2009, it was they who made known the name "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena" as they announced it specifically when they launched their videogame to the market.
In 2010 Ice Frog that was still keeping active the DOTA All Stars was hired by the company Valve, to make a game with a sequel to the map which he dominated leaving behind his previous mod, turning it into a video game totally separated from Warcraft, receiving the name of DOTA 2, in this way Valve assured all the rights of this name completely separating it from the great Blizzard.
After seeing the success that Valve and Riot Games achieved, many companies were interested in making their own MOBA, even the same Blizzard that ignored for many years the mod that was based on Warcraft III released its own derivative of this genre, all these events made that the MOBA became one of the game modes that has had the most impact in the history of videogames, it is curious to see how a small mod of a user in 1998 became 10 years later in an explosive wave among the players, Although Blizzard never had a direct development in any MOBA, it has a great merit because thanks to its videogames and its tools a lot of mods users had the imagination and skill to create a totally original and funny videogame.
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