HERE COMES A NEW CHALLENGER

Does Riot have what it takes to shake up the fighting game scene with 2XKO?

- ADAM STARKEY

The genesis of 2XKO can be traced back to 2015 and a mostly forgotten game called Rising Thunder.

Despite a strong gimmick, whereby complex moves were mapped to simple inputs, and a playable alpha, when developer Radiant Entertainment was bought by Riot Games in 2016, Rising Thunder fell by the wayside. Radiant was gone, but its founders, Tony and Tom Cannon, who also created Evo, the world's biggest fighting game tournament, still had ambitions. Now employees of Riot, they wanted a new challenge.

The result was Project L, a fighting game based on Riot's immensely successful MOBA, League Of Legends. On paper it was an exciting prospect, one of the world's biggest and most established developers experimenting with a different genre. But Project L's first public showing failed to set the fighter world on fire. It had the characters from LOL, but it was essentially a standard-issue 1v1 battler, another variation on Tekken, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Tom Cannon, Project L's producer, hoped that people would be "jumping out of their chairs". Instead, in his words, the response was more like "interesting – I'll keep an eye on it". Unsettled but undeterred, Riot and the Cannons went back to the lab.