Some champions have a pretty smooth journey from concept to launch, skipping through the production pipeline with nary a blip or delay. Others, however… let’s just say there are a lot of traps on the road to champion-dom, and not all concepts manage to avoid them. Here’s the story of one such champion—a Living Forge who smoldered for almost four years before finally making his way to the Rift.

A Spark and a Dare

Four and a half years ago, Riot held an internal contest to create the next League of Legends champion. Anyone could submit a pitch; the best ideas would ascend to the top via an ongoing stream of upvote/downvote 1v1s. The top ten champs would then have a dev team assigned to them to explore the possibility of moving into production. We called it “Hot or Not.”

Player Support Lead Rammi “DigitalRam” Mohammed dared me to enter the contest and place in the top 10. With gusto, I came up with three champion pitches. One was really bad. Like single-digit-votes bad. Another almost cracked the top 10 barrier, but missed it by that much. My third entry endured two weeks of fierce voting, finally ending its run in second place. That idea? “Living Forge”—a warrior who crafts his own weapons.

A meeting was scheduled where designers, artists, programmers, writers, and I would meet up and discuss who and what this Living Forge could be. It was only after the meeting appeared on my calendar that I realized Living Forge was possibly the next greenlit champion in League, and that he might even launch in game within a few months. But the meeting was delayed, and rescheduled, and delayed, and rescheduled, and rescheduled… and delayed.

Finally, in late fall 2013, it happened. At the meeting, artists, designers, and writers threw out rapid-fire questions: Where did Living Forge come from? Who or what is Living Forge? What do we want him to do and be in the game? And, in what turned out to be a pivotal moment: How can we make him break League of Legends?

The answer to that last one was: “Make him a mobile shop.” At first it seemed absurd, but after much discussion, we solidified it into the cornerstone idea for a blacksmith-type character. Living Forge’s initial concepting meeting ended with a loose direction as to who and what he could be, and some hastily-written kit ideas. Nothing was set in stone yet, but we had good ideas on where to explore next.