League of Legends Origins

-This is MissZammer. -This is SummerGypsy.

-My name is EzekielChaos. -SparklyPancakes.

TaylorSwift.

-I play Top. -And I play Jungle these days.

-I like to support as Teemo. -I fight for Demacia.

Oh, yeah, we're playing LoL .

I was like, "What's LoL ?" He's like, "Laugh Out Loud?"

I was like, "No, fool! That's League of Legends !"

Holy crud, did this suck us in and get us connected.

-We're raging at each other. -We're raging. We're laughing.

League is something that is not as much of a game,

but more of a place where we can be ourselves

and enjoy what we do and who we do it with.

You guys ready?

- Yeah. - Yup.

- Queue it. - Let's do it.

- Here we go . -

- All right we're queuing up. -

GLHF, everybody.

- -

-I wasn't ready. -I can do it.

We got to gank real quick.

There's always been that parent to child stigma

of whatever you don't understand is obviously not valuable.

A lot of parents or society saw people as being antisocial.

"Hey, this kid is holed up in his room playing games

and it's totally ruining society."

- -

I don't think gaming is as niche and isolated

as a lot of people think it is.

There are these really strong human stories.

He started playing and I found out he liked me.

We've only known each other about a year.

Give or take.

Give or take and we're just like brothers, so...

The game is all done through the word of mouth.

85 percent of the people who come is through a friend.

League of Legends has over 100 million players actively playing every month.

That's over one percent of people on Earth.

The nerds are coming together. We will dominate this world.

Competition and player versus player engagement

is as old as video games have been around.

-We don't get that competitive. -Not a single one of us is competitive.

We swear.

It's a giant guerilla warfare scenario

and only the smartest, strongest and best players come out alive.

- He got it! - Oh, my God, he wins the game!

The finals drew in 36 million.

That's more than the Stanley Cup Finals,

the World Series and the NBA finals combined.

I've been playing games my whole life.

I started playing PC games when I was about seven years old

and I thought it was like a magic puzzle.

It just felt like a whole new world opening up

because I had a huge passion for games like Dungeons & Dragons

and role-playing games in general.

The most powerful game experience that I ever had,

even to this day,

was in a text based multi-user game called Dragon Realms .

You could sort of boot up the computer, log in,

and be surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people

from all around the world simultaneously logged in,

living out adventures in a world with seemingly limitless possibilities.

My parents were pretty anti -game.

They were big on academics and sports.

So we had pretty strict rules in the house.

For me, it was a bit of an escape.

I wasn't the best student and when I was really into games,

it became a huge source of conflict and clashing.

Let's take a look at League of Legends ,

it is one of the most popular video games out there.

It is raking in billions in revenue.

Riot Games is the company behind it

and today the company is front and center on the cover of Inc. magazine.

Joining us now for a CNBC Power Lunch exclusive

are Riot Games co-founders Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill.

Brandon and Marc, welcome. Good to have you both here.

I think one of the great delicious ironies here

and either one of you can pick up on this

is that neither of your parents were all that thrilled

at the amount of time you spent gaming as young guys.

What are you-- What do they say now? How do you like me now?

Yeah, exactly. You know, uh,

actually my first Nintendo was something that I won

at my first grade school raffle

because my parents were so anti-video games

and so, you know, we'd sort of think about it.

It was fate, couldn't keep us away.

Marc and I met at a summer program

right before college. I was younger than him.

So I was one of the young kids in the program.

I was like, 16.

I think he was 17 or 18, he was about to go to USC.

And I'm like, "Oh, you're from L .A. Oh, cool, well, me too."

And "Oh, you like video games," and we instantly sort of hit it off.

Marc had this dichotomy of like, an Eagle Scout

who was captain of the football team

and crushing it in school and like, tabletop D&D nerd.

Brandon was a business major and the consummate business guy,

even from a really young age, he was just really thoughtful about opportunities.

Marc and I were playing tons and tons of games.

We're playing the heck out of Counter-Strike and Starcraft

and World of Warcraft at the time were sort of our main games.

But, ultimately, our favorite game at the time was DOTA .

DOTA was a custom mod for Warcraft 3 .

When Blizzard shipped Warcraft 3 they shipped it with a map editor

and people would use the map editor

to make different scenarios that you could play on.

It really pioneered a new sub-genre of real time strategy games

by focusing on one particular unit that was really powerful and interesting

and then working with a team of other people.

It's come to this!

Five players was really a lot of coordination.

That was really fun and exciting.

But it loaded really slow.

And there was a strong lack of matchmaking,

so you could be playing

with someone who was ten times better than you were.

First blood!

You had to kind of beat your head against the wall at every step

from hearing about the game to getting the installation done

to downloading the map to getting into the game for the first time.

Even though it left a lot to be desired from a service standpoint,

DOTA demonstrated that games as a service

was something that could work.

We felt like a lot of game companies

weren't really focused on gamers like us.

We don't want to buy a box, play a game and be done 30 hours later.

If the online multiplayer arena of the game was compelling enough,

we want to spend hundreds of hours in it, thousands of hours in it.

We wanted to compete as part of a community over and over again.

We then started to ask,

"What does the future game company look like?"

And how can we potentially build that?

We spent nine months putting together a plan,

trying to talk ourselves out of it, really.

We wanted to build a company that unapologetically embraced

the hardcore gamers that might be considered niche

or a small slice of the audience.

We had a feeling that this isn't a particularly small niche

and there is a lot of us and there is a lot of pain points

that we could solve as a company

that really cared about that type of player experience.

So Marc and I pulled the trigger

and we started Riot Games in 2006 in West Los Angeles.

It's like the gaming company version

of like, The Mighty Ducks.

We were in this tiny office with this stained floor

and we had one conference room and the ceiling leaked.

I guess from the investor perspective

it would have been described as "capital efficient," which, you know,

I think that in the common vernacular that means "shitty."

We essentially had some really passionate, really smart, really inexperienced interns

and a couple of industry vets, who hadn't had a lot of career success.

We had to learn everything we didn't know

and do it with a very young team

and we were really nervous because it was months before we had a big demo

and key milestone for the company.

Marc and Brandon demoed the game to me

on the street in San Francisco.

He put the laptop on a newsstand and we proceed to play

this really crude tech demo, like the game play.

And I saw the game and I just thought, "Oh, God, what have I gotten myself into."

That map is awful.

It was like the-- It was so terrible, so cheesy looking.

It was clunky. The interface was really bad.

The art was really bad.

But they'd managed to do more in three months

than some of these other companies that were paying stupid sums of money.

And I was just like, "Wow! This is actually pretty compelling."

It was so ambitious. The amount of software

that they wanted to write was crazy.

We built matchmaking. We built your inventory, champ select.

We were building everything outside of the game.

The engine was an absolute mess.

It barely ran. You know, you can't expect that much

of a company that's never shipped a game,

with a President and CEO that have never shipped a game.

There was a lot of pressure. We have one shot at this.

The real problem to solve is you have to make a game that's fun,

that all these people that love DOTA and love Warcraft

and love strategy and love hardcore games, are going to want to play.

The game was about characters.

We basically scoured pop culture and built mood boards of awesome art

and things that captured powerful archetypes

from history and from folk tales and from fables.

We took the ones that we thought were the most compelling

and kind of added our kind of pop fantasy spin to them

to bring them to life and to show a face to them

players have never seen before.

They'll be tattooed and badass and they're kind of renegades.

And so, we needed to make 40 champions in a year and a half.

And make sure that we covered a wide cast

so that any player that came in could say like,

"That one's awesome, I wanna play that one,"

then have a good time. That was the goal.

Welcome to Summoner's Rift.

League of Legends is a five -on-five game that's played across 20 to 45 minutes.

In it, you cooperate with your team of four other players

to try to storm the base of your opponent's