‘Arcane’: How the expensive show ‘League of Legends’ became a hit

• Arcane, a TV adaptation of Riot Games’ League of Legends, is back on Netflix.
• The series was created by Christopher Linke and Alexander Yee, two Riot vets with no TV experience.
• “Arcane” came with a reported hefty price tag — but sat well with fans and critics.

In 2010, Arcane co-creator Christian Linke needed to make a change.

The German-born musician had spent years playing bass in the German rock band Panik and working as a composer and producer. But by 2010, he was beginning to have doubts about the music business—and in turn, the longevity of his career—as he observed musicians using personal computers to produce their songs.

So he quit music, packed up his life and moved to Los Angeles. When he arrived, he landed a customer support job he found on Craigslist. Although he didn’t know it at the time, this job set him on a career path that would lead to his first Emmy Award 12 years later.

The gig was at Riot Games, a fledgling video game company founded in 2006 that had launched its debut title “League of Legends” the year before. These days, “League” is one of the most played PC games in the world, with Riot announcing that it had hit 180 million monthly active players in 2021. But back then, Riot was small and “League” was still a title young. . And luckily for Linke, an early League of Legends player, he had thousands of unanswered German-language customer support tickets languishing in the queue.

“Somehow they hired me,” Linke told Business Insider. “I think, of all the people they interviewed, I was the only one who spoke German.”

Fourteen years later, the now creative director has graduated from answering tickets to directing one of the most successful video game adaptations on TV. “Arcane,” which Linke created with his longtime Rioter partner Alexander Yee, premiered on Netflix in November 2021. By the time its first season finished airing, it had amassed millions of viewing hours and was first in Netflix’s global top 10 English-language TV list.

It wasn’t much of a surprise when Netflix announced it had renewed “Arcane” for a second season, minutes into the first season. In addition to winning four Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Animated Program, it received near-universal critical acclaim. For good reason: The focused, character-driven story and distinct visual identity, courtesy of French animation studio Fortiche, make it accessible and compelling television for both newcomers and long-time “League” fans alike. .

But before the show became a hit, it was a passion project that Linke and Yee began working on in 2015 — one born out of their stints at Riot and the relative creative freedom they were afforded while building the company.

“When we started the project, there was no adaptation that had ever succeeded,” Linke told BI of his and Yee’s plan to create a series based on the game. “But that didn’t really matter because the desire was always very clear. It was like, ‘We want this to exist.’

Linke has worn many hats at Riot and has grown his career with the company

When Linke started at Riot in 2010, his duties quickly expanded past customer support. After a stint in the billing department, he eventually moved into data analysis, working cross-functionally on various teams.

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But in 2011, he saw an opportunity for the company to invest more in music projects — think character songs, music videos and bands inspired by “League” — and in turn, tap into his creative background. .

“No one was looking for him,” Linke said, but no one was stopping him either. By 2015, Linke had built a team under him and proven himself within the company. What he lacked was a challenge.

The same was true for Yee, who had focused on creative design at the company. Together, after years of playing in various creative sandboxes within the League universe, they began to conceive the TV show that would become Arcane.

It was an unprecedented job at Riot, which at the time had yet to expand into any traditional TV or film projects.

“We really had to take baby steps,” Linke said. “We had to build not only the creative, but also how to convince leaders who had never worked on a TV show and invested in a TV show. So a lot of them were just starting with the basics.”

This included animation and dialogue tests — “We’d never heard our characters speak,” Linke said — in addition to crafting the show’s story. After about a year and a half of work, the company committed to making a pilot episode in 2016 — and clearly, it worked out well in the end.

Still, Linke and Yee took risks along the way, chief among them betting on French production studio Fortiche. Prior to Arcane, the studio had worked on music videos and promotional material for Riot and artists such as Gorillaz, as well as several television projects. But none matched the scale of what “Arcane” would become: nine episodes in its first season, animated in a quality reminiscent of film rather than television.

“People were very worried about it, but what Fortice had that you can’t fix with money is passion,” Linke said. “I knew they were going to put their lives on hold to do the biggest thing of their career with this project, and I’ve worked with other animation studios where that’s just not the case. It’s a gig, but Fortiche had something to try.”

‘Arcane’ was an expensive labor of love that Riot hasn’t replicated yet – but it’s a great proof of concept

Nine years after Linke and Yee began working on “Arcane” in 2015, the series is ending after two nine-episode seasons. The project did not come without significant expense: Fortice’s high-quality animation meant that production moved at a slower pace, more typical of animated film than animated television.

Citing sources familiar with the production, Variety recently reported that the show’s first season cost over $80 million and the second close to $100 million. (Riot did not immediately respond to BI’s request for comment about Arcane’s reported cost.)

Even if Riot doesn’t directly turn a profit on the series, that may not be the company’s main goal, anyway. Film and television are not Riot Games’ core business; video games like “League of Legends” are. A really good TV series like “Arcane” not only engages current players who can spend money on in-game cosmetics, but brings new views to the franchise. Real-life cosmetics, like season two’s “Arcane” with Fenty Beauty, probably don’t hurt.

Arcane remains Riot’s best and only successful adaptation. By putting the first major adaptation of “The League” in the hands of the people who knew it best and cared about getting it right, “Arcane” sets a precedent for how to make something beloved by fans and critics alike. High production costs and a long timeline reportedly gave them the time and space to do so — even if, as Linke told The Washington Post before the first season, it meant burning a “massive hole in the wallet of Riot”.

Ultimately, Linke says, the show was a product of “selfish desire.” The fact that it’s motivated by passion, rather than pragmatism, is why it’s so good.

“For us, we love the game,” he said. “We wanted to see those characters come to life. That’s it. That’s enough to say that this has to exist for us.”

“Arcane” season two, “Act One” is currently airing Netflix. The second part premieres on Saturday, November 16.