Riot Games‘ President and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), Mark Merrill, has recently outed Icefrog’s name on Reddit. (And while that name is out there, we will not be revealing it here.)
Icefrog is one of the co-creators of DotA, which originally was a Warcraft 3 mod. They were then hired by Valve to be the lead developer working on DotA 2. Icefrog has always aimed to keep their identity private, a move which has left many skeptical about Icefrog even being real. With their name confirmed, you now know that Icefrog is a very real person indeed.
What’s up with that?
Now, I’m not going to slam anyone for being a terrible person, and I urge everyone to refrain from verbally attacking anyone. I’m wondering what spurred this act from Merrill — was it in a jealous rage at how DotA 2 is seemingly gaining ground on LoL, or was it more simply a slip of the tongue?
Icefrog is someone who has tried very hard to keep their identity a secret, which is possible because of their role in creating MOBAs, which are notorious for being very toxic online. But Merrill, seemingly without care, has thrown Icefrog’s true name out there for all to see — even those dark and toxic corners of the MOBA community.
Merrill leaked Icefrog’s name via a Reddit post made a few days ago. The post has been all but deleted by Reddit moderators, but one Reddit user managed to take screenshots of the post before the cleanup — though here all references to Icefrog’s name have been blurred out.
Click for a larger image.
Whether or not this was simply a slip of the finger, or a malicious attempt by Merrill is entirely unclear. We do know that Riot has been under a lot of strain recently when they removed solo queue from League of Legends in favor of a dynamic queue.
The only question now is…what happens to Icefrog now that his identity has been revealed?
