League of Legends Lecture
League of Legends is a video game with 100 million players and the biggest eSport scene across the globe. However, it is also one of the hardest games to learn and master. Despite its popularity, it is difficult for new players to understand its complex game mechanics, roles, meta and individual champions. Fortunately, former LCS coach NicoThePico is here to help.
Before the millions of players and billions in revenue, before the esport tournaments with more than 100 million spectators, League of Legends existed as an idea rather than a finished product. In the year-long run up to its launch, co-founders Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck — both USC alumni with a shared love of video games — had no idea what they were doing.
Their first attempt, Onslaught, was a massive multiplayer online battleground with multiple maps and dozens of character classes. The game was released in Oct. 2008 and went into closed beta in April 2009. Merrill and Beck’s efforts to seek funding proved fruitful, and they landed $7 million from Benchmark and FirstMark Capital venture capital firms.
Six months before League of Legends was set to roll out, Jew and a small crew of artists and interns started playing the game for fun. They would play for hours a day, sometimes waking up to find themselves still playing after going to sleep at 2am. They did it out of a sense of obligation, but also a desire to see how far they could push the game forward.롤대리