BY THE EDITORS |
WATCH: Tribeca Brings You Inside MSG's League of Legends Summer Finals
If you've never experienced a League of Legends event, prepare to have your mind blown.
Riot Games, with an assist from Tribeca, hosted the League of Legends' Summer Finals - a two-day event, turning the home of the New York Knicks and Rangers into a haven for amped-up cosplayers and superstars with names like "ZionSpartan," "Aphromoo," "WildTurtle" and "Lustboy." For the audience, League of Legends demonstrated why it's as cinematic of a storytelling medium as any fantasy movie, complete with elaborate battles, life-or-death stakes and characters whose designs are a cross between George Lucas' imagination and World of Warcraft.
League of Legends, for the uninitiated, is a strategic war game pitting monsters, wizards and other supernatural entities against each other. Inside MSG, the enthusiastic audience clapped, cheered and gasped with every downed champion, explosion and "triple kill" seen on the giant screens set up inside the arena.
It's tough to compare a live League of Legends event to anything else. There's the fierce competitiveness and riled-up crowd dynamic of, say, an NFL game, and WWE-like production values include dramatic intro videos for each team. None of which, though, can sufficiently be explained through words. Experience it all for yourself in the exclusive video above, in which our TribecaFilm.com video team captures the scene both outside and inside MSG.