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There is a $30,000,000 Prize for Playing a Video Game You Never Heard of

Every year, a bunch of the best gather to instantly become multi-millionaires

Anthony Andranik Moumjian
4 min readAug 7, 2020
Source: Dota 2 International 2019 Twitter. This is what the venue for the tournament looks like each year.

I’ve played DoTa for almost two decades now. It’s the most difficult, elegant, misery-inducing, and gratifying experience I have ever known.

A million iterations of this game have existed — with each change, a birth and re-birth have occurred.

Defense of the Ancients didn’t start as a standalone game — it started in the idea lab of Blizzard’s Starcraft engine. It was a modification of the actual game. That game was eventually known as DoTa when the concept was ported over into Warcraft 3.

The best analog for DoTa is a chess game on steroids where your moves, instead of sequential and turn-based, are in real-time and split-second.

DoTa stayed as a modification on the Warcraft 3 engine for many years before Valve began to develop Dota 2, a standalone version which became the popular entity it is today.

Dota 2 is heavily complex.

The game involves ten heroes chosen between two teams. Two sides will fight along a map that looks like this for resources, gold, kills on enemy players, and objectives.

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Anthony Andranik Moumjian
Anthony Andranik Moumjian

Written by Anthony Andranik Moumjian

Los Angeles. Long-time runner. Top writer on Quora, 100M+ total content views. New to Medium. Inquiries: Moumj@berkeley.edu

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