Riot CEO reveals Legends of Runeterra has been in development for nine years

Riot's CEO says that development for their new card game Legends of Runeterra began back in 2010

Nicolo Laurent

The CEO of Riot Games, Nicolo Laurent, has revealed that their new card game Legends of Runeterra has been in the works for almost a decade.

In a live interview with LeStream on October 18 that was translated by the folks at Millenium, Laurent was asked which of the new games that were announced by Riot this week has been in development the longest.

“I’d say the first genre we tried to develop was the card game,” Laurent reveals in the video. “We started on it really early, then we cancelled it, then we started again. We changed the game, changed the team, changed the model… That’s pretty much the history of the game. That was the first genre we worked on… From 2010.” After some astonishment from the interviewers, Laurent clarified that that was the total time from its inception and that in the games current form it has taken between three and four years to develop.

Legends of Runeterra has been massively popular since it was released by Riot on Wednesday as part of their 10th anniversary celebrations. The card game has been well received by fans and has consistently been one of the top streamed games on Twitch. It looks like it was nine years well spent.

Laurent also confirmed that as well as the titles announced this week, there are even more games currently in development at Riot.

“We haven’t announced everything,” he says. “There are games in development that are much newer, trying to create new genres. ”

He does, however, warn that just because a game is in development don’t always mean it get released and didn’t want to put a guarantee on it.

It appears as if Riot really are going for total domination in the gaming world. There are exciting times ahead.