League of Legends is now 10 years old. This is the story of its birth.
October 27, 2019Before the millions of players, before the billions in revenue, before the esports tournaments that topped 100 million spectators, League of Legends was more of an idea than a game. And the game that did exist in the year-long lead up to its release wasn’t very good.
“The game really sucked for a long time,” said Riot Games producer Jeff Jew, who was an intern at the time. “Nobody [at Riot] wanted to play the game because it was really bad. But they forced us to.”
Jew and a small crew of interns and artists working on the game’s many characters often spent their time playing other games as they waited for the development team to catch up to the work they were doing. One of the team leads caught on and told them they had to play League of Legends every day. So they did, begrudgingly at first. But then something happened about six months before the game was set to roll out to the public: The playtesters and interns started playing League not because they had to, but because they wanted to.
“That was when we realized we had something that could work,” Jew said. “And it was pretty damn close to launching.”
That launch on Oct 27, 2009 was just one memorable moment in Riot Game’s 10-year journey down a road punctuated by terror, wild leaps of faith, and powered by an army of interns and a lot of luck.
Continue reading this article which first appeared in the Washington Post on Oct. 27, 2019.
