Netflix rolled out a new anime today and even revived a face longtime DOTA fans may remember well.
DOTA: Dragon’s Blood tells the story of Davion, a renowned Dragon Knight set out to rid the world of the scourge terrorizing the land. To coincide with today’s release, Netflix brought in Swedish DJ and producer Basshunter to dust off the original anthem for the game with a short video. This video could mean nothing to you and you are very confused or you are like me and feeling the mid-2000s nostalgia kicking into overdrive.
I didn’t think I’d be writing an article about Basshunter in 2021, but here I am and excited to do so. Thank you Netflix for reigniting my childhood fanboy for a moment.
Who is Basshunter?
Basshunter became an internet sensation in 2006 when he released Boten Anna. The song details his discovery of realizing what he thought was a computer bot helping to moderate a channel he ran was actually a real woman. This song blew up. It later received an official music video, but I prefer the original music video. I’ll link the official video here too in case you want to compare them.
The song’s popularity led to a record deal for Basshunter which in turn meant a new album. This album was titled LOL and released in 2008. It featured a number of hits as well as the very catchy song DOTA. It originally was titled Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA which translates to “We’re sitting in Ventrilo, playing DotA.” Ventrilo was a voice chat software that was very popular at the time. That also happens to be the sole point of the song. The song became another massive hit for Basshunter and one of my favorite songs at the time. I listened to it several times a day and remember thinking how awesome it was to have a song about a video game be so popular. It also helped the music video featured a lot of attractive girls dancing to it.
I spent enough time retelling my childhood love for Basshunter. Back to talking about the anime.
As for the anime, it is based on the DOTA video game franchise, specifically Valve’s DOTA 2 which released in 2013. Another history lesson, DOTA originally started off as a community created mod in the Blizzard’s Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos. This is why Basshunter’s song predates DOTA 2. The mod developed such a large fan base, that several game developers decided to create their own version. This led to the release of several titles including League of Legends and DOTA 2.
