Development
Riot Games was co-founded by Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill. They partnered with Steve "Guinsoo" Feak, the previous designer of the popular Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne custom map Defense of the Ancients, and Steve "Pendragon" Mescon, the administrator of the former official support base for the map (www.dota-allstars.com) to develop League Of Legends. Using the original DotA created by Eul (the original Defence of The Ancients map for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos) as a base, Guinsoo made DotA Allstars by inserting his own mix of content, greatly expanding the number of the heroes, and adding recipes, numerous items and various gameplay changes. Guinsoo then passed version 6 of the map on to a new developer, IceFrog.
The idea of a spiritual successor to Defense of the Ancients that would be its own stand-alone game with its own engine, rather than another Mod of Warcraft III began to materialize at the end of 2005. League of Legends was born "when a couple of very active DotA community members believed that the gameplay was so much fun and so innovative that it represented the spawning of a new genre and deserved to be its own professional game with significantly enhanced features and around-game services."
Riot Games officially opened its office in September 2006, and currently has about 100 people working on League of Legends, "including their robust technology platform to service and operate the game as well as a team dedicated to community relations."
According to Marc Merrill, when creating the various champions in the game, instead of leaving the champion creation to just a few people, they decided to open up the champion creation process to everyone in the company based upon a template where they could vote on which champions made it into the game.
The game was in a closed beta from April 10, 2009, to October 22, 2009. It then transitioned to open beta until release.
In March 2013, Riot Games released a beta version of an OS X client in addition to their Windows client.
Read more about this topic: League Of Legends
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