A little hack that turned into a big thing
It’s 2016 and ESPN has an esports section. Sports purists will sneer, but for a real contingent of the gaming and enthusiast community, this is recognition of a trend that has been growing for a long time.
There has been a lot written about the rise of esports and even more money poured into it over the past several years; I’m not going to focus on that for right now. Instead, let’s go back about 6 years. This is a short story about League of Legend’s first spectator system, also known as Observer Mode.
League of Legends (LoL) officially launched in fall of 2009 and after several years of hard work, tears, late nights, endless amount of feedback sessions over Ventrilo, a multi-month hailmary to rebuild our store from scratch, and countless other things that I can’t remember, we finally saw the first glimpse of success: people were playing and paying. I don’t think that any of us knew just how succcessful LoL would turn out, but when the first successful credit card transactions came up on the console, the energy and relief that poured out was not something I’ll ever forget.
This validation meant that we could start to look more deeply at other opportunities in 2010 besides surviving. Call it finding product-market fit if you want; no one called it that back then.
In addition to believing that a high quality free to play game could succeed, Marc, Brandon and many of us at Riot were interested in esports. In order to build the kindling for esports amibition, Riot had secured space in the now defunct World Cyber Games but there was a problem: we didn’t have any way to broadcast the game from a third-person omniscient viewpoint in order to do a proper live broadcast for the audience.
Startup resources are always precious and every decision has a tradeoff. LoL had a fun core gameplay experience, but there were many parts of the product that really needed attention and every bit of engineer time had real opportunity cost against revenue producing content, platform stability and scale, onboarding, future featured development that was critical to retaining players and countless other options.
A MVP Spectator mode was estimated at around 9–12 months. It was already spring and WCG was in September. Uh oh.
We had to figure out another option. Moving up the timeline with additional engineers simply wasn’t going to work. We had massive user growth that needed constant care to scale the platform and a host of other must have items to build that couldn’t be substituted in favor of an opportunity that wasn’t a sure thing.
And then I had a crazy idea.
For all of its official history, League of Legends has had 5 players on each team. In friends and family Alpha, League of Legends had 4 players. Before that, it actually had 6 players at one point in time. This was back when denying was still in the game, around fall of 2008, and you had to boot up a server via command line and there was no interface to select a character or otherwise play the game in the normal sense.
When we went into Beta, we were pretty set on having 5 players and as the game continue to gain steam, that was the accepted player count and most of the code, UX, and other services were built around 5v5 from that point forward. But I still remembered when 6v6 was an option.
What if we brought back 6v6 and we just added another player to one of the teams? They would be able to control a camera and if the player stayed in the base, that would solve the hardest part of the problem.
Everyone thought it just wouldnt work. Code had been refactored a bunch of different times and there was “no way” that it could support 6v6 any more. Still, I had a weird hunch that if we removed the a few restrictions it might just work.
So after a few eye rolls and a couple of pizzas or beers that I pledged to buy, Kevin (aka Kbo) helped to change a few areas in the code, run a build (which took hours at the time) and help me setup a dev environment to test it.
We put 5 players on each team, I dropped in as the 6th, could see the lobby but not myself and someone hit START. And in typical early League of Legend’s style, someone crashed.
But it wasnt the team with 6. Everyone loaded in just fine, I could see the map. We tried it again and this time everyone loaded in correctly. There were a lot of looks of disbelief but we had solved the hardest part of the problem.
A few days later, I worked with a Kbo and Richard (aka Brackhar) to get a special spell coded up that would give a player full vision of the map, which was just named Observer. It turned the character invisible, and turned off fog of war for that player only.
In two hacks and a few code changes, we had our first spectator feature that was aptly titled “Observer Mode”
Observed Mode would last for around a year and a half and would eventually be replaced by the much more robust and player facing “Spectator Mode”, as all great hacks should eventually be replaced by real features.
Every time that I go to ESPN and see esports in the headlines, I wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t built Observer Mode. Obviously LoL wasnt the first esport and there were other things happening in the esports world so maybe it would have grown by itself. And maybe it would have just delayed LoL’s first esports broadcast to 2011 instead of 2010. Or maybe it wouldnt have mattered at all.
But I think rolling the first snowball down the hill makes a difference. And everytime I see people watching and talking about esports, I’m reminded of a little hack that turned into a big thing.