Riot’s Tom Cannon Confirms What We All Knew, Riot Are Working On A Fighting Game

You knew it, and I knew it, but the fact that Riot employee Tom Gannon has confirmed they are working on a fighting game is still great news.

Riot Games, developers of e-sports mega-hit League of Legends, are working on a fighting game. It is potentially the worst kept secret in the gaming industry, but today it has been confirmed. Confirmation came from Tom Gannon, Riot Employee and founder of Evo, during Evo 2019.

Breaking: EVO founder and Riot employee Tom Cannon has confirmed the worst kept secret in gaming – Riot is officially working on a fighting game, the first game outside of League of Legends for Riot pic.twitter.com/P3BGaVs4u4

— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) August 2, 2019

In many ways, the cat has been out of the bag for years now. Riot purchased Rising Thunder developers Radiant a few years back. Generally speaking, if you buy a developer that is working on a game, it is because you too want to work on the game. Or a similar game, at the very least. The game also fits perfectly into the Riot ethos. Radiant promised an easy to learn, difficult to master fighting game that was designed to appeal to as board a demographic as possible. The game was also planned to be free-to-play, once again fitting perfectly into Riot’s business model.

“Fighting games deserve to be enjoyed by way more people,” said Gannon. “As big as things are, we think they have the potential to get bigger.” He is not wrong about that. Games like Tekken, Street Fighter, and Smash Bros are titans of the fighting game scene, but there is always room for a new title in any genre that does the right things to attract new players.

There is zero detail out right now about what the game is actually like, how far it has strayed from the original vision of Rising Thunder, and when we might see more. Still, for it to be mentioned at all makes me think that Riot expects to have something coming down the pipe eventually.