Play Nice by Jason Schreier

Author:Jason Schreier [SCHREIER, JASON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2024-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

THIRD PLACE

Back in 1995, Blizzard decided to stick a map editor into Warcraft II, allowing players to use the same tools as the developers to create their own wild scenarios. For StarCraft, Blizzard implemented scripts that made it possible to construct levels just as elaborate as the ones in the official campaign. Players concocted all sorts of absurd creations, from epic recreations of Final Fantasy scenes to color-coded battle royales with characters named after The Simpsons.

Many of these custom maps were silly gags, but some were inventive and genuinely fun. One of the most popular maps, called Aeon of Strife, featured two large armies waging war on a battlefield that was divided into three narrow lanes. Rather than commanding an entire army, each player would control a single, hyper-powerful unit. These matches required less multitasking than a standard game of StarCraft but proved just as exciting because an individual player’s actions could turn the tide of any battle. When Warcraft III came out, players flocked to another map, Defense of the Ancients (DOTA), which took the old formula and made it five-on-five, allowing for more teamwork and competitive strategy.

By 2005, Blizzard had noticed that hundreds of thousands of people were playing DOTA and its spinoffs, and the company’s top executives wondered if they should embrace the trend. They discussed creating an official version of DOTA for Warcraft III or even developing a sequel in-house, then tracked down the main architect of the popular variant DOTA All-Stars, who went by the handle Icefrog, and flew him to Irvine for a meeting. But Icefrog, a reclusive designer who avoided using his real name, arrived with a list of requests that Blizzard’s executives considered unreasonable. “He wanted full creative control,” said Richard Khoo, a designer on Team 1. Plus, World of Warcraft demanded everybody’s attention, so DOTA seemed like a trend they could safely ignore. “My recollection is that Blizzard wasn’t in a place to start building the game at the time,” said Icefrog in a statement through his agent, “so discussions never really got far at all.”

At the same time, two business consultants in California named Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck were playing a whole lot of DOTA and talking about starting their own video game company. By the fall of 2006 they had established Riot Games, with the goal of creating a single game that could be played endlessly. “We’d play thousands of hours of StarCraft, Warcraft III, you name it,” said Merrill. “And so we wanted to build games for players like us who really wanted that sort of incredible depth.” The pair teamed up with another top DOTA modder, Steve Feak, to come up with a new game based on the map they’d all spent so much time playing.

The result was League of Legends, which came out in October 2009. It played exactly like DOTA, but it was a standalone product with frictionless matchmaking and a huge roster of original heroes. Merrill and Beck also made it free to

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