These are questions I get asked a lot, so thought it would be fun to provide a little more context into how we work in some of the world’s most famous arenas and plan our year’s biggest events. First off, planning for events covers multiple teams, hundreds of folks (within Riot and external partners) and begins in earnest about a year ahead. It wasn’t always this way. Each year we have managed to push our planning out further and grow to support these big team efforts better. The last time we were at the Staples Center in 2013, for example, we probably planned the event in under 6 months!

There are multiple factors that go into narrowing down a venue, including tech capability, availability, location etc. Generally speaking, though, we want to be in great venues that will excite players and teams involved. This can present problems, however, because there tends to be an inverse relationship between the prestige of a venue and the amount of time we are given to load in and rehearse before that show time. This is because they have professional sports teams playing in them multiple times a week, so it’s not like we can say, “Hey, can we have the Lakers and Kings play away games for a week so we can have more time to set up our show?” Booking these venues also means committing to them between 12-18 months in advance and working with their in-house labor and equipment.

In the case of this year’s Final at Staples, we had 30 hours from the first truck’s arrival to the Opening Ceremony. This only gave us two or three hours of rehearsal time before we had to take it live at 4pm! So with such a small margin of error and complicated effects and choreography, we needed to employ some extreme measures.