Aeon of Strife was a custom game from StarCraft which many cite as the first predecessor for a now famous genre of games: MOBAs. It was released the same year as StarCraft Brood War, 1998.
World famous, DOTA 2 has the largest international championship prize pool of any gaming series. Its rival, League of Legends, was at one point the most popular game in the world. The fundamental core of five versus five gameplay remains the same across several new titles spawning in this genre. Surprisingly, Blizzard, the company which created the games and custom tools available to create Aeon of Strife and Defense of the Ancients, remains outside of the MOBA market despite attempts like Heroes of the Storm.
Counter Strike is a custom game modified from Half-Life, widely considered one of the best competitive first person shooters series of all time. Counter Strike 1.6 was first released in 2000, 2 years after Half-Life.
The Team Fortress series started out as a mod of Quake. It popularized a class based system in shooters and was the only popular game of its genre for nearly 20 years.
Holding the record for the most ambitious esports league of all time, Overwatch changed the face of shooters. With franchising fees of upwards of $7.5M, the broadcasting and sponsorship rights overshadowed even the enormous million dollar plus prize pools. While reception of the Overwatch League was mixed, the breakthroughs in viewership and sponsorships were history defining. Hero shooters would become increasingly popular, with additions like Apex Legends and Valorant.
Released in the first month of 2019, AutoChess came seemingly out of nowhere to capture a huge audience overnight and spawn a new genre of gaming. AutoChess seemed to capture chess, mahjong, dota, tower defense, and king of the hill gameplay designs all in one game. Created by Drodo Studios, the same custom game creator of Gem TD in Warcraft III, AutoChess would become completely overshadowed within its genre by its competitors.
Within months, Valve had created a short-lived competitor named Dota Underlords and Riot had created Teamfight Tactics. Even Hearthstone, a collectible card game by Blizzard, created a custom mode to replicate the themes of an auto battler.
Day Z was a mod for Arma 2, released in 2012. Custom servers for Minecraft supporting Hunger Games began springing up around this time as a result of the pop culture film of the same name. The Battle Royale genre was born. Games like H1Z1 rose in popularity, even hosting leagues of its own, before becoming entirely overshadowed by games like PUBG or Fortnite.
The popularity of Fortnite cannot be understated. Becoming immensely popular with kids and teenagers alike, Fortnite capitalized on not only the popularity and rise in shooters, but also the popularity of games like Minecraft or Roblox which rewarded creativity and building. The trending popularity of the game was best captured by a developer supported custom event with Travis Scott, the same year he had a slew of deals with McDonalds, Sonny, and Tesla.
These examples illustrate games embraced by their community or developers. Player made content is crowd sourced content, which will always have more creativity and range, given time and passion. With each new experimentation of games comes the possibility of a new genre of gaming, from MOBAs, to Hero Shooters, to Auto Battlers, to Battle Royales, and more. In a future post, I’ll cover different developer attitudes towards player content, as well as why new genres of gaming become popular when they do in accordance to game history.
Leadership, Design, Writing 