Heroes of Newerth 2010

About this game

Built on Defense of the Ancients, the Warcraft III mod, this 2010 PC game was sold outright at first. The Legion and the Hellbourne, five a side, fight down lanes toward the World Tree or the Sacrificial Shrine, with heroes carried over from the mod and new ones beside them, 139 by 2018. Its edge in 2010 was the plumbing: statistics tracked per player, voice chat in the game, matchmaking, a way back into a match after a dropped connection, penalties for leaving and ban lists. It went free in 2011, peaked at 150,000 players at once in 2013 and passed to new hands in 2015, and its servers closed in June 2022, when a community project, KONGOR, rebuilt them. The design is arcane and hard to enter, but the mechanics are solid, and that community project keeps it running today.