In 2016, Rising Thunder developers Radiant Entertainment were bought by Riot Games. Three years later, now we have official confirmation that the developers which only has one game (not counting auto battler Team Fight Tactics) will be making another game. A fighting game. Of course.
At EVO 2019, in an interview with Tom Cannon, previously part of Radiant, now working at Riot, and also the co-founder of EVO, has finally confirmed this officially, dubbing it “the worst kept secret in the universe”.
In an extended clip of that interview, Cannon shed more light on Riot’s acquisition of Radiant and what this new fighting game they’re working on. The short answer: to continue doing what Rising Thunder attempted- make an approachable fighting game.
“The reason why we did Rising Thunder in the first place is because we felt like fighting games just deserved to be enjoyed by way more people,” he said.
“As big as things are, we think it has the potential to get bigger.”
When describing what sort of game they are making at Riot is, Cannon says that game will be what the “players here [at EVO] will be proud of. That everyone here will feel like ‘yeah, this is made for me'”.
Cannon offers no more details of Riot’s fighting game besides that, aside from acknowledging that making fighting games are hard. But it’s nice to hear confirmation that the Rising Thunder developers, which made one of the first games to introduce simpler inputs in fighting games as a core feature, was acquired to make a fighting game.
So will it be a proper release of Rising Thunder or a League Of Legends fighting game or a completely new IP? We will have to wait more until Riot is ready to share more info.