It took over a year of planning across multiple disciplines and countries to put on the 2014 World Final. “We went to Korea to look for potential stadiums or arenas or venues in general,” explained Whalen Rozelle, Director of Esports at Riot Games. “We looked at indoor arenas. We looked at the Olympic Stadium. We looked at the World Cup Stadium. In this case, the World Cup Stadium was the place that we thought we could put on a really memorable event.” The process began in November 2013, almost directly after the Season 3 World Championship at the Staples Center, in Los Angeles. Internally, the esports team decided they wanted to go South Korea for the World Final in 2014, and the World Cup Stadium sparked an immediate sense of possibilities. 

“From the instant I walked in the venue, I knew we wanted to have a big wide screen and a stage that had some way to showcase the Summoner’s Cup in a more meaningful way,” said Ariel Horn, Global Head of Esports Content at Riot Games. “Our overarching goal was to have a screen that no one had ever seen before. Something that was massively cool.”

A Technological Behemoth

Of course, a big venue presents big challenges. Consider for a moment the massive scale difference between an arena show at the Staples Center and a stadium event at the World Cup Stadium. The stadium is more than two times as large. The furthest possible seats at Staples were basically mid-field for the 2014 World Championship. “Even when you’re looking at plan views, your brain can’t really simulate how large this really is,” mused Horn. With such a huge venue, the team knew they would need an absolutely gigantic screen to show off the games. “We started by looking at what was the largest possible screen,” said Horn. “We were really nervous about delivering a screen that would have the game large enough so that you could read all the different numbers and see all the intricate builds and everything.” 

The team landed on a screen that measured 73.5 meters. It was put together by programming thousands of LED panels to essentially create one giant television. The screen was then divided into five quadrants. Quadrants one, three, and five were 16:9 and were mostly meant to show fans what was happening in the venue during the ceremonies or to showcase important video on the center screen. Quadrants two and four were vertical pillars that connected the screens, and were meant mostly for scoreboards.

The screen was designed this way so that even if you were in the way far back, you could still view all of the action, champions, spells, and effects. Player cameras and critical elements like kills, gold, towers, and the score were all pulled out to the side quadrants to make them easier to see. “We had this huge grid of exactly, to the second, what was going to be on those screens at all times,” explained Horn. “Whether it was the whole screen that had the countdown clock, the huge Earth screen with the Summoner’s Cup, something during champion select, or a win moment. What is the fan going to see and how are we going to set that up? We had to carefully choreograph that.”

The gigantic three-pronged screen was supported via thousands and thousands of pieces of scaffold. And getting it all into the stadium and set up on time wasn’t easy. In fact, it was somewhat of an engineering and scheduling nightmare. “Originally, we wanted to have a lot of the stage come out onto the field because it actually would have be a lot easier to build on a flat surface than to build up into the stands,” said Horn. “But the problem was that because it’s an active soccer field, we weren’t allowed to place any heavy structures on top of the grass.”

That meant the team had to push the stage way up into the stands and have all that scaffold land on an incline, in between seats. This logistical nightmare was exacerbated by delayed load-in. The team prepared to have almost a full week to set everything up at the World Cup Stadium. But because there was a surprise soccer match to be played during the week leading up to the World Championship, they lost days of precious setup time. “We actually started setting up Tuesday at midnight,” said Rozelle. “Losing 36 hours of setup time at an event like that is crazy.” 

With hundreds of contractors working through multiple nights, the stage and screen came together just in time. “The second you actually got to go there with the thing set up, it was just indescribably cool,” remembers Horn with a smile.

Ready For Some Fireworks?

The crew did everything they could to take advantage of an outdoor stadium. Korean partners OGN even got control of a drone camera to capture the enormity of the event, allowing for the use of epic aerial shots of the almost 40,000 people in the stadium. And while a drone is cool and all, pyrotechnics are cooler. “Honestly, pyro is so tricky,” said Horn. “The last two years we were underwhelmed with pyro. So this year, we said we really need to do it well. The main thing I was concerned about with the pyro, aside from all of the safety requirements, was if any of it would cause too much smoke on the stage or if it would obscure the players.” 

There were about 20 different types of pyro all in, which is equivalent to what you’d find at a typical Super Bowl. The pyro in the day was completely different than the pyro at night. For the daytime, it was all smoke, color, spark, and flame-based. At night, you got bursts and rockets. “I had no idea we had that much pyro,” said Rozelle. “That was a ridiculous amount of pyro. That was the most I’ve ever seen and I was freaked out that we’d kill someone. But we didn’t! Thank goodness! It would have been sad to roast our World Champions. I thought it was awesome.”

A Labor of Love

On the creative side, the team was challenged to deliver authentic Opening and Closing Ceremonies, in addition to a musical act that would resonate with League of Legends players. “Less than in the past where it was solely music and video, we really wanted the Opening Ceremony to be something that had cultural relevance to Korea, the home and birthplace of esports,” said Horn. League of Legends composer Christian Linke has helped plan every World Championship, but found this one particularly difficult. “I’m pretty proud of what our team was able to put together, because there were a lot of challenges to this one. There was also some stuff to learn, like what music works well, how much do you focus on the performance in comparison to what it means for the esports event? How do you establish an artist and a song well for an esports event?” 

 He’s of course referring to Riot Games’ collaboration with Imagine Dragons for the 2014 World Championship anthem, “Warriors.” Linke and his team learned about a year and a half ago that the guys in Imagine Dragons are huge League of Legends players and wanted to collaborate together on something powerful. “They were never worried about anything you would think a big artist would be worried about,” said Linke. “We’d say, ‘Hey let’s put League of Legends sound effects into this song,’ and some artists think that’s cheesy or not cool enough, but the Imagine Dragons were like, ‘Hell yeah, that’s awesome!’ because they love the game. (Three League of Legends sound effects are in the song: the game invitation sound, the horn-call sound from champion select, and the sound effect when you enter champion select.) It’s more than just choreography and music that the teams had to consider, too.

Literally everything shown on-screen had to be carefully designed. Linke explained some of the moving parts in the Opening Ceremony, including: “What are the drummers going to do performance wise? How many are there? Which drums or instruments do they play? How do we set up the microphones for them? Where do we put Imagine Dragons? Which instruments of theirs do we put on a riser? When is the riser coming out? Do we have enough space on the stage? How do we position the drummers so the riser has enough space to fit behind them when Imagine Dragons comes out? When do the players come out? What are the count-ins and the tracks everyone hears in their ears? When does the pyro go off? What is the camera work when all this happens? What does the video team do? How do we decide if we show the video or the camera work of the stage? How many sound effects do we use? What do the drummers wear? Which colors should they be wearing?” 

 Due to scheduling and stage delays, the only time to do a proper dress rehearsal was the night before the World Final. And the teams couldn’t even do it properly since they weren’t allowed to run sound checks due to noise ordinances. In fact, Imagine Dragons performed “Warriors” for the first time ever live in front of the packed World Final audience. As for the Closing Ceremony, the team knew they had an obligation to League players to deliver a well-choreographed, well-executed, and most importantly, “non-cringey” performance. “We heard very clear feedback from the community overall that we hadn’t nailed our Closing Ceremonies,” said Rozelle. “We wanted to achieve a pretty solid Closing Ceremony that was both non-cringey, but more than non-cringey, we wanted it to be interesting.” 

Every aspect of the Closing Ceremony was scripted except for the emotional moment when Samsung White won the World Championship and held up the Summoner’s Cup. “A lot of our creative drive was towards connecting these big moments for the show, and making it so it was a seamless experience instead of having a lot of starts and stops,” said Horn. “So our dream was that it would be an exciting win moment, and we’d have some great pyro right there, then they’d go for the Summoner’s Cup right away. Hopefully it would be a really emotional moment for them and we’d let that just breathe for as long as it takes.” “After that, we would bring the host back up and the delegates would be there, but it would be more of a moment where it’s just an honest congratulatory thing, which I think worked out,” said Horn. “Our goal then was to bring back Imagine Dragons, but to have the focus still be on the champions.” “I think the Closing Ceremony went really well,” said Linke. “It’s a huge, huge process. And a huge undertaking. But it’s really worth it because we really wanted to create something awesome for our players.”

Don’t Turn Away Now

Producing all of Worlds in Asia was hard. While the majority of the crew was on the road for over a month, yet another crew was back in Los Angeles working side by side on the production. Bouncing between venues, changing hotels every week, dealing with a different local crew every week, working in new venues that had more or less technology and flaws in power, trying to make these shows with a vast array of regional partners and trying to deal with the details of all of their different needs was a lot for the team. But the payoff was worth it. “We are so excited by the fan reaction, that this really, honestly, keeps us so excited to continue innovating,” said Rozelle. “That’s what makes it so fun. Is that we have immediate reaction and direct touch with so many different passionate fans. That our players are so supportive. They give us amazing, direct feedback all the time. They notice everything. That keeps us on our toes.”

“There were a lot of people who put a lot of stuff on hold because this is what we’re passionate about and this is what we love, and we’re fans too. This is what we live for.”