Riot Games Co-founder Marc Merrill has said that Steve 'Pendragon' Mescon was wrongly blamed by the Dota community for the shutdown of fansite DotA-Allstars.com.
Finally speaking up on a very old piece of lore, Merrill made the claims on the Lemonade Stand podcast, after one of the show's hosts asked him about a story that had circulated among Dota fans for years. The host, who had previously worked on Dota events at production company Beyond the Summit, said the version told in the Dota space was that Merrill and fellow Co-founder Brandon Beck had taken the site down. According to that story, the site's forums and community data disappeared and were replaced by an advertisement for League of Legends.
"First of all, that's not exactly at all what happened," Merrill replied. He went on to say that when a story built on a false premise is repeated online and never corrected, "the legend grows in the telling."
For those unfamiliar with the history, Defense of the Ancients (DotA) Allstars was a fan-made mod for the strategy game Warcraft III, and DotA-Allstars.com served as its main community hub, with forums and information on the game's characters. Merrill said he and Beck played the mod and saw it as the start of a new genre, which they named MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena). He added that Dota helped inspire League of Legends, the first game Riot Games set out to build.
How DotA-Allstars.com started
According to Merrill, Pendragon was a teenager when he built DotA-Allstars.com. Pendragon had approached Steve 'Guinsoo' Feak, the creator of DotA Allstars, and offered to build a website for the mod. Merrill also credited Guinsoo with creating the game's item combination system, and the naming of Roshan.
Merrill said Pendragon spent dozens of hours a week volunteering on the site as it grew, with some of its servers donated by community members, including a Google employee. Guinsoo later handed the map over to IceFrog, who Merrill said did "an incredible job" of growing Dota. Pendragon and IceFrog then worked together to guide the community, in a period Merrill placed roughly between 2004 and 2007.
Merrill's account of the split
Riot hired Guinsoo as an associate designer in late 2006, after Merrill tracked him down online while he was a student at the University of Wisconsin. Merrill said it took three attempts to find the real Guinsoo, as one person in Brazil had been impersonating him. Once he joined, Guinsoo suggested that Riot get in touch with Pendragon.
Merrill said Pendragon was uncomfortable with Riot making a game inspired by Dota, and turned down the offer to join the company. At the time, he explained, several developers had approached figures in the community about turning Dota into a commercial product, naming Demigod and S2 Games, which was working on Heroes of Newerth.
Merrill claimed that Pendragon then learned IceFrog was working at S2 Games on Heroes of Newerth. He said IceFrog offered to buy DotA-Allstars.com for $25,000, telling Pendragon the money had been left to him by his grandmother, and would not confirm whether he was working with the studio. Merrill accepted that the full picture was unclear, saying: "I don't know. You don't know. We don't know."
According to Merrill, Pendragon felt "betrayed" once he confirmed IceFrog's involvement, and he refused to sell the site. Merrill said IceFrog went on to build his own website and cast Pendragon as the one in the wrong, after which Pendragon agreed to join Riot.
'Let them have their hero'
Merrill said the dispute split the community and that Pendragon received "lots of hate and lots of death threats" for many years afterwards. Rather than defend himself in public, Pendragon decided it was better for Dota if he took the site down and moved on. Merrill said Pendragon told him at the time to "let them have their hero."
"I was like, dude, it's full-on Dark Knight," Merrill said. He added that he wrote a letter in Pendragon's defence that he had hoped to publish around 2010, and that he has "never corrected the record, despite the fact that it burns me up inside."
Looking back, Merrill said the outcome worked for both sides. "In the long run, it worked out for everybody, right? Both games were successful," he said. "That's why I'm actually saying this now 20 years later or whatever because I think Pendragon's an awesome person."
Merrill presented the shutdown as Pendragon stepping aside for the good of Dota, while the letter pointed to his lack of time, his fading interest in the game and the drop in traffic. Neither account includes IceFrog's side of the story, and Merrill said in the interview that he would not go into every detail of the discussions between the pair.
