posted by Sun_Tzu,
WARNING: This is not your average interview. This is not for the faint of heart, for those of fleeting fancies and short attention spans. This is a 40 minute long look into the past 10 years of the lives of dk Jacob 'Maelk' Toft-Andersen of us Evil Geniuses and de Kai 'H4nn1' Hanbueckers of eu Fnatic.EU as they grew up playing Dota, and the scene grew up around them.

Like a good game of Dota, it will engage you beyond a fleeting moment. It is worth it. You should watch it.
This video has been shot and edited during DreamHack Summer 2013


This all started with a very simple idea. Take two players, put them infront of a camera and allow them to be themselves. The players we chose were two who've spent almost a decade within e-Sports, and who started out their journey together before diverging and taking quite different paths. Maelk kept playing dota, joined Evil Geniuses and eventually became their manager. H4nn1 left Dota for a while, joined up with Fnatic and made a triumphant return less than a year ago. We never could have imagined how well this pairing would work out.

We started this with a direction in mind, a narrative that first harkened back to the days of dk Meet Your Makers, long before the days of Chinese dominance, when the European scene was at the center of the DotA world. But by the time we got to the end of the first question we simply decided to surrender to the flow of the discussion set by these two charismatic personalities, committing us to follow the road they set before us.

And so all of us involved lost track of time, the outside world melted away and there was just these two people telling us a story of their lives within a world while it grew up and changed around them. We went from the early days of European Dota to discussing the stalling of the North American scene, the rise of my KingSurf and cn For The Dream (who eventually became the legendary cn LGD of 2009) and how the East and West diverged, up until modern days and beyond.

When we were done, a solid 55 minutes after we had started, we knew that the interview was no longer simply the part of a greater whole that we had intended, but an entity in it's own right and one which we had to release to you as soon as possible. We spent the rest of the evening editing this mammoth down to a still massive 40 minutes. But it's a 40 minutes you'll want to watch, because it will draw you in.

Maelk and H4nn1 have spent what amounts to a lifetime within our scene. This is a glimpse into their world, their story.

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