League of Legend Developer Turns Super Smash Brother Characters into LoL Champs

I don’t often report on fan projects, largely because I prefer to focus on industry news. But when a fan project just happens to be amazing AND come from a person in the industry, well, hands tied.

Riot Games, the developer behind League of Legends, is currently doing an in-company event called the Thunderdome—where employees team up and just work on whatever project grabs their fancy for three days, and show off their work to each other. It’s little more than a fun little event for employees, and rarely do the products of the Thunderdome ever make it to the public (but it has happened), but sometimes we get glimpses of some very cool stuff: like this Super Smash Brothers mod that turns Nintnedo’s iconic characters into champions from League of Legends.

This comes to us from a reddit post where three blurry pictures of the modded game were posted, giving us a quick, dissatisfying taste of how the mod actually plays. I’ve included them below.







It looks really cool, and apparently it’s not just the models that are different; according to a Riot Employee on the reddit thread, move-sets were swapped as well, so characters had attacks that more closely matched their in-game move set. An example: Garen’s model uses Ike’s basic frame, but he has meta-knight’s tornado attack to simulate his iconic spin-to-win, and his neutral B causes a giant sword to fall from the sky.

Super cool, right? Well, sadly, it’s overwhelmingly likely that these blurry pictures are all we’ll get. Riot Games said the project was “just for fun”, and the legal issues of a riot employee releasing a mod like this on a Nintendo game to the public would be a mess, certainty not worth the risk. Still, it looks cool, and who knows? Maybe it’ll inspire fans to do the same—and the public can have a version that’s less legally controversial.

Either way, it’s awful neat.