This genre includes Heroes of Newerth, Demigod, in-development StarCraft 2 mod Blizzard DOTA, League of Legends and the forthcoming Dota 2 from the mighty Valve. Those millions are now the target of two of the biggest game developers in the world: Valve and Blizzard. What began as a hybrid of real-time strategy and role-playing game elements, stitched together by a talented team of modders, has become a dominant online game type with millions of players. It's not often that we get to declare that there's a new gaming genre in town. This article was originally published on 16th August 2011, so some facts and figures are now out of date, but it still tells an interesting back-story and provides a snapshot of the genre's progress at that time, back when Dota 2 was a barely known quantity.

Valve announced The International 2014 for Dota 2 this week, so we thought we'd revisit Paul Dean's piece on the origins of the MOBA genre. Every Sunday, we dust off an article from the Eurogamer archive that you may have missed at the time or may enjoy again.

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