So at the time, like 2012-ish,
collectable card games primarily existed in paper format.
There weren't that many digital card games.
Hearthstone hadn't even been released yet.
There were some digital card games, but those were very literal translation
of the physical experience as much as possible.
And so, we thought, ok this is a really good opportunity
to make a League of Legends card game
that had mechanics that wouldn't show up in a paper card game
because they were too challenging to pull off.
Imagine if, you had a Warwick card,
and you would see Warwick climbing up to the top of the deck towards the top
as he caused damage and it was something you couldn't pull off in physical.
You couldn't know where Warwick is in the deck
and then move him up.
But in digital, all those rules can be done by the computer in the background.
So, we were really trying to play off the transition from paper to digital
and to make a really good strategy game.
At the time, when we were working on
what we fondly referred to as Bacon,
because we perceived there to be this great opportunity,
our assumption was that other people also saw that same opportunity.
And maybe six months towards shipping the game,
Hearthstone was announced.
We were at PAX East, the day they announced Hearthstone.
You know, in my head, honestly I was hoping
it wasn't good, which is a terrible thing to say,
but I was really nervous like,
hey, we worked on this for a couple years,
I think we got something that's not quite there yet.
I was hoping that it didn't blow us out of the water.
And we sat down,
and as I played the game,
the thing that stood out to me was,
just, wow! This game looks and feels amazing.
There was just this level of polish and care there
that made it feel like a physical board game.
And, more importantly, even those unfamiliar with the card game genre could
get into it really quickly and understand it and have fun with right off the bat.
Our game, quite frankly, was complicated to learn
because it was actually made to be
a similar complexity card game to the paper ones.
We all realized, man, it's going to be a huge jump
to go from a game like that to ours.
We felt overtime that
that wouldn't be acceptable in this new age of
digital card games that we're going for.
So that was a pretty big self identity crisis
for the old Bacon team where,
the thing we were going after, we realize, might not be
the right thing for players at that time anymore.
And so, basically we decided to icebox
the existing version of the game and just started from scratch.
After that, we bought every conceivable board game and
card game that we could get our hands on.
And what we did was just dissected what made a great turn based game.
And then, we started to make prototypes.
What we would do is for every prototype we made,
we would put a little blurb underneath it about what we learned.
And we called it the Great Wall of Bacon.
One of my favorite ones included a
prototype called Fighter.
Where one player was a champion
and his cards represented abilities just of that champion.
But it was more of a splashy summer game,
that would have been pretty hype,
not so much a game you're gonna invest your life into.
And I think that was the sense made approach
that if we were interested in making a game
that players really think about as a lifestyle,
what are the characteristics of that game that really help make that possible?
Not just with card games, but a lot of that appeal is actually
a deck building experience.
When we look back on our childhoods, playing these card games,
you don't have a lot of spending power,
and you don't really know what's good or what's bad.
You're mostly playing with what you opened
and whatever, the one pack you got.
We called that Kitchen Table Magic.
If you played card games, everyone has a story
where they made some super janky deck,
and pulled off a win or made something crazy happen,
and that's the beauty of the deck building experience.
I would say, at a high level, for Legends of Runeterra,
we wanted all players to be able to experiment,
allowing them to feel like these Heimerdinger mad scientists.
Where they have a well funded lab
full of cards and they can make crazy creations to their hearts' desire.
And so, we brought that thesis with us for future prototypes.
And one of them actually was the earliest version of
Legends of Runeterra.
This prototype had what we called Interactive Strategy.
Where it's almost like you're having a conversation.
Where like, I say something
take my turn and you say something,
you take your turn.
We found that we were missing that back and forth,
when we played digital versions of these strategy turn based games.
I think the moment we realized that
the prototype was the one we were going to move forward with was
when people on the team wanted to build decks
and try to win the monthly Bacon tournament.
Seriously, people were brewing decks,
but not trying to show their decks to other people.
And we watched and saw how much strategy and back and forth play
that was when we started to realize that we had something cool
because at that point, the game's not even pretty.
But if you see people playing games for fun,
you know you've got something special.
So if we can unlock that gameplay experience,
that's one way we can have really high confidence
that the game has an infinite level skill and depth.
When I look back on our decision to make a reset
it's not something I regret at all.
We could have shipped that other game,
and it probably would have done ok,
and it probably would have faded away.
And it probably would never had had the chance
to go the distance like Legends of Runeterra does.
While those moments were painful and we had to learn alot from them,
I think they obviously led us to where we are today.
As somebody who knows alot more about the future of the game,
I'm also still very much excited to show players the game that it's going to become.
Because that's our goal,
is to bring players a better and better experience
that they could not have had imagined from this genre.