League of Legends is turning 17 later this year, and Riot Games is marking the occasion with something the community has demanded for years. League of Legends Classic launches July 29, and executive producer Paul Bellezza has now explained exactly how the project went from a long-running internal debate to a fully staffed development effort.
From a week-long hackathon to a full team
The origin story is a good one. Riot runs an internal hackathon called Thunderdome, where teams get a week to build whatever they want. Last summer, a group of passionate developers used that window to resurrect a playable version of League from around the 2013 season 3 era. The prototype launched with roughly 9 or 10 champions, a deliberately small roster, but it answered two questions Riot had been sitting on for years: was it technically possible, and would it actually be fun?
Both answers came back yes.
That Thunderdome build attracted 45 contributors, which tells you everything about the level of internal excitement. Veteran designers including CertainlyT (Thresh), FeralPony (Hecarim), and Matthew Leung-Harrison were among those who jumped in. After the prototype proved the concept, Riot assembled a dedicated Classic team in September, starting at around 10 people and growing to 25 to 30 by launch.
Why season 3 specifically
Here's the thing: picking a single era for a nostalgia project covering a game that launched in different regions at different times is genuinely tricky. League hit North America in 2009, Europe shortly after, Korea at the end of 2011, and China around the same period. Season 1 would have excluded a huge portion of the global playerbase who simply weren't around yet.
Season 3 landed differently. Bellezza points to it as the era when competitive play was taking shape, referencing how Alex Ich and Moscow Five demonstrated that jungle pathing was a real role. The meta was still two top, two bottom, one mid, which feels foreign now but was the standard at the time. Season 3 was also when the game started to coalesce into something recognizable across every major region.
That said, Classic is not a strict recreation. Bellezza describes it as a "greatest hits" collection. Items like Zz'Rot Portal from around 2015 and Heart of Gold will appear alongside the season 3 framework. The roster launches with 60 champions, featuring earlier versions of characters like Sion, Akali, and Katarina before their modern redesigns.
Rebuilding the past with modern tools
The technical side was messier than it sounds. Riot's engine has evolved significantly over 17 years, and some original assets were degraded or simply missing from the codebase. The team had to rebuild the Summoners Rift map entirely using modern tools, reassembling art assets and testing to make sure the feel matched memory rather than just the files.
The old Sion model existed in the code but rendered at roughly 10 pixels when loaded. The team had to extract him, rebuild his skeleton rig, and recode his original kit. Bellezza notes that took about a day, because those older champion designs were far simpler than anything being built today.
The UI gets a similar treatment. Modern quality-of-life features carry over, but the visual design has been reskinned to match the classic iconography. Jungle timers are not currently in the game, though Bellezza left the door open for that to change before launch.
What most players miss about projects like this is that there is rarely one big technical problem to solve. Bellezza put it plainly: it was a thousand small things, not one large one.
Check out the full breakdown of every confirmed champion and item coming to Classic before the July 29 launch, and if you want to stay sharp on the current game in the meantime, the League of Legends strategy guides cover everything from vision control to the latest seasonal changes.
