Thanks to fourteen years of updates, League of Legends has come a long way from what it was and how it looked at launch, but it’s entirely unrecognisable from the racing game that its earliest incarnation started life as.
Speaking at SXSW Sydney earliet this month, Kjartan Arsaelsson, Riot’s VP of operations for League Studio, was asked to elaborate on the challenges of dealing with tech debt and legacy code for a live-service title as old as League of Legends. His answer revealed new insights into the origins of the world’s most popular MOBA.
Asked to elaborate on this nugget of behind-the-scenes lore, Riot’s senior vice president and studio head Andrei 'Meddler' van Roon explained that back in 2006, the newly-founded Riot games faced a challenge that's not uncommon to most modern startups, especially game developers. It had to find a way to bridge its big ambitions with a comparatively small amount of venture capital funding.
To keep costs low, the company opted to take an off-the-shelf driving game engine and retooled it to build out the first version of what would later become the studio’s breakout hit. Over the years, some savvy fans have gone so far as to connect the dots and speculate that this may have been the same engine used for what is widely considered one of the worst driving games ever made.
The reason why? Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing producer Sergey Titov was the technical director at Riot around the time that this prototype would have been built. A Riot representative declined to confirm or deny this theory. However, back in 2021, unverified screenshots of a debug build of the MOBA playing nice with maps imported from Big Rigs did the rounds on Twitter.
If you’re unfamiliar with the ins and outs of game development, the idea that League of Legends began life as a driving game might sound strange. However, it’s more common than you’d think.
Speaking to Reviews.org, Hojo Studio director Rick Salter (The Godfeather) said that especially in the case of games like DOTA 2 and League of Legends – both of which came out of the Warcraft 3 mapmaking scene – everything in game development is built on the bones of something else.
“I think that with something like League of Legends, it would just come down to the fact that the amount of work that would be involved building mechanics and testing the game and putting in assets and all of that kind of stuff and then on top of that there’s the amount of work building a rendering engine – something that will render the models and have shaders and allow you to quickly turn ray tracing on and off and all of these kinds of things,” he said.
For any independent studio, he said that the ability to save years of development time on those more technical aspects of game development is the main reason that developers opt for an engine like Unity or Unreal.
“Those aren’t things you that necessarily want to be doing yourself unless you have a spare three or four years to do that work before you’ve even started making your game,” he said.
If you do have the luxury of time though, there are a few upsides to building an engine from scratch rather than using an off-the-rack option.
“The main reason that someone would build an engine from scratch is so that it could be 100% lightweight and optimised for the game that you’re building so that there’s no fat in it and it runs as fast as possible on the devices,” he said.
Back in the old days, the ability to do more with the hardware was what separated console gaming classics like Jak 2 from everything else. These days though, Salter said that the hardware is so powerful that “you can pretty much ignore some of the optimisation stuff and get away with it.”
Unless you’re looking to develop for the Nintendo Switch anyway.
“The Switch is the last battleground for this kind of discussion because it’s a hugely underpowered console as far as the hardware is concerned,” he explained.
He pointed to the difference in performance of titles like Cult of the Lamb and Super Mario Wonder as an example.
“Any first-party title from Nintendo is more of a built-from-scratch situation and that’s why it runs so well because it just talks directly to the hardware whereas if you run it through middleware likely Unity it has to convert it to an assembly and then that assembly has to be translated into how the Switch understands things at a kernel level and there’s a bit of wastage there.”
In any case, the thrifty origins of the first prototype for League of Legends makes a stark contrast to the juggernaut that Riot Games is today.
Reporting by Forbes indicates that League of Legends alone has brought in over $20 million in revenues for the developer as of 2019 and in the year's since then Riot has expanded its roster to include both new first-party titles like Valorant and Legends of Runeterra and third-party projects like Song of Nunu and The Ruined King.
As for League of Legends itself, Arsaelsson said that “work continues on improving the engine and bringing it up to modern standards and trying to keep up with the right amount of VFX graphics and all that stuff.”
Asked whether a sequel-sized update akin to Overwatch 2 or Counter-Strike 2 was something that Riot would look to emulate or avoid, Riot’s Senior Vice President and Studio Head of League Studio Andrei 'Meddler' van Roon played coy.
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