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31 August 2026 / Culture

# Memories of Dota

Originally published at humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/08/31/memories-of-dota

Passing the baton

长江后浪推前浪;
青出于蓝而胜于蓝
-谚语

Waves press upon waves on the long river;
Blue is born of indigo, yet grows bluer still.
- Traditional Chinese proverb

It was vertiginous watching TI - Dota 2's biggest competition - this year. It left me with thoughts on succession, obsolescence, and what lies ahead.

Dota 2 is a free to play game, entertainment giant Valve's attempt at a successor to Dota, the open-source, user-created Warcraft 3 map that took the world by storm in the early 2000s. TI has been bringing Dota 2 teams around the world to compete for the biggest prize in eSports for 15 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZYMI1zB9s

This year, the 2 finalist teams - Team Vision and Team Spirit, were mostly in their early 20s, about the same age as Dota itself. And a star player of Team Vision - Satanic - was only 18, younger than the game of Dota itself and barely older than TI.

Dota has gotten old, even as I kept watching it. It does not escape me that I have been playing the game longer than some of these players have been in this world, and they have surpassed me in every way as a player, multiple times. The Chinese have a proverb for this that most secondary school students in Singapore may know - "长江后浪推前浪; 青出于蓝而胜于蓝" - describing how the younger generation pushes and surpasses the older through their efforts.

This year also saw the emotional retirement of Sumail, the youngest player ever to win The International, after his team was knocked out in the quarterfinals. Sumail took the world by storm in 2015, winning TI 5 on his first attempt in 2015 with Evil Geniuses, looking more like 10 years old than 16. Since then, he has been a journeyman between teams, looking to recapture that magic in a bottle.

Unfortunately, the years have not been kind to him. This is Dota retirement - which is rarely permanent - but this feels like an end of an era when the young wunderkind is himself retiring. It feels like yesterday when we just saw him show up as a fresh faced 15 year old, ready to take on the world, and now passing the baton on to the younger players who have surpassed him.

Interestingly, Sumail was one of the first humans to be overtaken by AI. Dota 2 was one of the earliest problems OpenAI challenged AI to solve - and an early limited version was 1v1 midlane Shadow Fiend. Sumail beat an earlier version a number of times, but was unable to prevail against an improved bot. The video of OpenAI's bot beating Sumail in 2017 is the 9th oldest video on OpenAI's Youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbaHI38Ewws

Nevertheless, TI continued, the spectacle unabating despite AI having overtaken humans on Dota 2. In his penultimate match before retirement, Sumail was still playing Shadow Fiend at TI.

The years, they keep going, but the Dota players, they stay the same age. The waves on the river keep coming, and the young keep surpassing the old, in every way.

In the beginning

Do not cite the deep magic to me Witch! I was there when it was written!
- Aslan, in the Disney adaptation of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

Back to the tournament - TI 2026 took place in Shanghai, the first city besides Seattle to host TI twice. Chinese teams won 3 of the first 6 editions of TI, and have made the finals numerous times. The Chinese teams were expected to do well this year, perhaps - even win the tournament after the decadal drought.

But alas, it was not to be.

None of the Chinese teams even made it past the group stage.

There was much discussion on the fall of Dota 2 in China.

But China is not the first country that won glory, then lost its touch for Dota. What has faded into real obscurity in the Dota scene is Singapore.

I have lived through this fading in Singapore.

In the beginning when Dota first came out in 2003, it was a modded Warcraft 3 map, played mainly in cybercafes and LAN shops. It found its place in Europe, South Asia and Southeast Asia. With LAN shops around every corner in Singapore in the early 2000s and a digitally savvy population, it was perhaps inevitable that Singapore would become an early home for Dota.

I first met the map in 2004, when 2 of my platoonmates in National Service introduced the rest of us to it. Our infrequent nights out from training became expeditions to kick the crap out of each other in 5v5 Dota, and after action reviews over instant noodles back in our bunk. We went from discussing infiltration tactics in real roads and jungles to combat strategies on the lanes and jungles of Dota, and spent many a night in the LAN shops of Bukit Timah, and for a few months, in a cybercafe in a Singapore Armed Forces training camp deep in the jungles of rural Thailand. All of us had different levels of aptitude or inaptitude, but it was a real bonding ritual.

Years after, in university, I continued playing on LAN with my friends, winning and losing to strangers in cybercafes. In every cybercafe in Singapore, Dota, Counterstrike and Battlefield games were brewing. Some of the earliest official Dota competitions took place in Singapore in 2005 at the World Cyber Games, with university interest groups playing a role in organizing their own feeder competitions.

And when Dota started going online as internet bandwidth and speeds increased, Singapore again, played a role. Tech giant SEA group , which today owns a giant eCommerce platform, a bank, and a football team, started life as Garena, a peer to peer online matchmaking platform for Dota that eventually became a digital games publisher. Dota appears nowhere on their wikipedia page now.

Dota was a foundational part of my growing up years in Singapore, as with many other millennials around my age. The game changed rapidly as we grew. In 2004, when I first started playing, the game version was already 5.84c, and the game continued its rapid evolution as we went back every few weeks and discovered new heroes and strategies. My friends and I were already playing when version 6.00 was launched - bringing with it now iconic new heroes such as Shadow Fiend, Earthshaker and Phantom Lancer, and my personal favorite, the Gambler. Today, more than two decades later, the growth has plateaued - Dota 2 is still at 7.41e.

In Free to Play, Valve's documentary about the first TI in Cologne, three players were featured - Dendi from Ukraine, Fear from the United States, and hyhy from Singapore. The first two have won TI.

hyhy has faded into obscurity on the Dota 2 scene.

And so too, has Singapore. While Singapore has sent teams to the first 3 TIs and took third place at the very first TI, we have not qualified since 2013. When TI 2022 was held in Singapore, there was not a single Singaporean player in the entire tournament. Even iceiceice, the greatest Dota 2 player from Singapore, who played for top Chinese and US teams on the world's biggest stages after Singaporean Dota faded, could only watch from the sidelines.

What happened? Our perennial excuse is our small population, but to put it frankly, I think Singaporeans just had other things to do.

One of my best friends from high school and university, after totaling up the time he had spent on Dota after losing yet another game to strangers in a LAN shop, simply decided never to touch the game again. Another, self-aware, told me that there were 2 outcomes from playing Dota - (1) If you won, you would want to play again to recapture the high, and (2) If you lost, you would want to play again to avenge the loss. Without physical tiredness like a physical sport, it is a never-ending cycle.

My friends gradually stopped playing as we got busy with work and family. Some acquaintances wanted to turn professional, but as far as I know, none succeeded. For most of us, I think we realized that our relative competitive advantages existed in areas outside Dota. The chairman of the eSports club in university now runs supply chain and innovation for a major pharmaceutical company in Singapore. I do sales.

And for hyhy, last I heard of him, he was making a name for himself in crypto.

We live in a small island with immense competitive pressures, good risk-adjusted economic opportunities, and a practical mindset. So maybe it's not a huge loss that we faded into irrelevance in the Dota world, and passed the baton as is the nature of things of this world.

But it pains me sometimes though that we didn't even contribute to Dota culture like other smaller countries like Sweden or the Philippines, despite being one of the earliest homes for Dota.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTsaS1Tm-Ic&list=RDqTsaS1Tm-Ic&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qviwrhYTuVw

It would have been nice to have a cultural artifact to shout about who we were, at the beginning of this World... Of Warcraft.

What comes after

长江后浪推前浪;
浮事新人换旧人
-宋代刘斧

Waves press upon waves on the long river;
In the affairs of this floating world the young replace the old.
- Liu Fu of the Song Dynasty

青出于蓝而胜于蓝
-战国荀子

Blue is born of indigo, yet grows bluer still
- Xun Zi of the Warring States

Something struck me when I was doing research for the proverb that started this article. "长江后浪推前浪; 青出于蓝而胜于蓝 " is a proverb that almost every schoolboy studying Chinese knows about the new surpassing the old / the student surpassing the teacher. Useful phrase to refer to with regards to both Dota 2 and our age of AI.

I wanted to know who first said it. It was only then I realized that we don't know who did. And in fact, that it was 2 phrases cobbled elegantly together.

The first - "长江后浪推前浪" - about waves pressing onto each other on the long river of Chinese civilization - was first attributed to Liu Fu, a writer in the Song Dynasty almost a thousand years ago. He continued with a somewhat explanatory line - "浮事新人换旧人", about how the young replace the old in this world.

But evidently this second line was not distinctive enough, and in popular usage it was replaced. But what replaced the second line in popular usage (in Singapore Chinese, at least) was even more interesting - "青出于蓝而胜于蓝" - about how blue dye extracted from the indigo plant was bluer than indigo itself, a metaphor for the student surpassing the teacher.

This phrase turned out to have even deeper roots, from Xunzi, a philosopher from the Warring States of China, more than two thousand years ago.

It turns out that the true things that we say do echo, if not for eternity, at least for centuries, and may possibly even improve over time.

And while the young will replace the old in the affairs of this floating world, and we will pass the baton to those who surpass us, there is a chance that what we say, what we write, what we produce will be preserved and remixed in the cultures, human and non-human, that will succeed us.

Dota was itself a remix of Warcraft 3 that stuck, and was remixed itself by Valve into Dota 2.

As Shakespeare says in Sonnet 18:

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

That is a comforting thought.

But perhaps that is why it also rankles me that there is no notable Dota song from Singapore. It would have been nice to have a song to sing about who we were at the beginning of things.