Last month, Ariel Horn won the first Sports Emmy in esports when Riot’s broadcast of League of Legends Worlds was awarded the prize for Live Graphic Design. That was Horn’s fourth Sports Emmy, having won three with NBC for Live Event Turnaround at the Olympic Games in Sydney, Salt Lake City, and Athens.

In the opening ceremony at Beijing’s National Stadium–the Bird’s Nest–swords were flipped, traditional Chinese drums were played and an augmented reality dragon flew around the stadium. This was a start fitting of an international showcase of top-level talent. But this wasn’t the Beijing Olympics; this was at League of Legends Worlds.

Horn is now the executive producer of the League Championship Series (LCS) and the global head of esports content for Riot Games, the developer of League of Legends. He’s been at Riot for five years. Before that, he worked as an associate producer on NBC’s Olympics coverage.

“For me, there are more ways traditional sports are similar to esports. The core motivation is the same,” Horn said. “The clutch putt, the last second free throws, those are similar to last second base races in League of Legends. For me, it wasn’t trying to do things differently, but embracing what the past 50+ years of sports broadcasting has done and bringing that to esports.”

Horn took his experience with the human drama of the Olympics and translated it to esports. In 2009, when he first began to work in the space—first at Blizzcon and now at Riot—he saw the potential for esports events but felt that the production was lacking.

“I was pulled in by the sports themes, but the production was fairly simple. It seemed like it had been borne from YouTube content creators. Consistency, starting a show on time wasn’t common. The audio and lighting were off. At times athletes were in booths or not in the room at all,” Horn said. “But, overall, I thought it was incredibly exciting. To get this to the next level, we would need to introduce more tech, better storytelling. It wasn’t that anything was missing, it just wasn’t refined.”

The first thing Horn wanted to do was build up the emotional connection of the fan to the gamer on stage. He did that two main ways. The first was developing features that gave viewers the background of the people behind their onscreen avatars. The second was introducing player cams on every monitor.

“Young people weren’t used to being on camera. They would hide behind their monitors. I felt like I couldn’t identify with them as much,” Horn said. “One of the first things we did was invest in POV cameras that enable us to see them. They needed to own that stardom.”

While esports and sports share plenty of the same themes and even the same drama, from a broadcast perspective, there are some key differences. In sports, the play and the athlete are the same shot, the same moment. In esports, there has to be a balance between what is happening in the game and how the players are reacting.

Potentially the biggest change is the broadcast platform. Creating a show for traditional television versus one for online streaming can change the approach significantly.

“On terrestrial linear [TV] it’s easy to think of the audience as far away. In esports, we want to bring people closer,” Horn said. “You start from the perspective of this is entirely digital. That allows us to connect with the audience better.”

Esports broadcasts go as far as to reward in-game skins and items to people watching on Twitch. That would be the equivalent of watching the NBA finals and getting awarded a LeBron jersey.

Since Horn started, esports production has come a long way. In winning the Sports Emmy, Riot Games was up against the NBA Finals, the NBA All-Star Game, College Basketball, and fellow esports event CS:GO’s ELEAGUE on TBS. But Horn had an augmented reality dragon.

“We want people to remember where they were when the dragon flew around the Bird’s Nest,” Horn said. “We didn’t want it to just be perched on the side of the stadium, but to actually come in and affect the show.

“We wanted to find an authentic way to elevate the moment. If you are telling your friend about the Elder Dragon in the Bird’s Nest in ten years, then I think we have succeeded.”