Riot Games: Battle of Baron

Client:

Riot Games

Agency:

BBH Singapore

Production:

UNIT9

Role:

Creative Director

Year:

2021

For the global launch of Wild Rift, we turned YouTube itself into a live multiplayer game. Built in five weeks, and played by 50,070 people at the same time.

The mechanic was simple: viewers controlled the game by typing commands in the comments. Baron Nashor, one of the most iconic enemies in League of Legends, appeared live on screen, and the entire YouTube audience became a single raid party trying to defeat him together. No app download. Just a comment.

1.65 million comments in ten minutes. 450,000 views in the first week. Wild Rift hit number one in the app store across multiple regions on launch day.

Results

1.65M

Comments

in 10 minutes

50,070

Simultaneous Players

450K

Views

on week one

Awards

Clios

Gold

UK Creative Circle

Silver

Webby

Honoree

FWA

FWA of the Day

Drum Awards

Best Technology-led Innovation

Campaign Tech

Best Audience Engagement

How was it made?

Building three worlds at once

The project ran across three parallel workstreams that had to converge perfectly on a single live broadcast, with no second chance.

Riot Games supplied original game assets, but everything had to be rebuilt from scratch to run in Unity. All the modelling, lighting, and animation was redone by a dedicated team of 3D artists and animators.

The assets existed, but making them perform in real time at broadcast quality was an entirely separate body of work.

Weaponizing the YouTube chat

The second workstream was the game mechanics: engineering the systems that read YouTube Live comments and translated them into live in-game actions fast enough to feel immediate and reactive.

Not spam. The community giving it all.

The third was the most unpredictable. Pulling tens of thousands of comments per minute from a live stream looked, from YouTube's perspective, indistinguishable from a spam attack.

We had to work directly with YouTube to raise the comment threshold and guarantee the platform wouldn't flag or block the stream mid-broadcast.

A call to the global community

Before the battle itself, a global social campaign showed Baron appearing around the world and rampaging across social channels, priming the community for what was coming.

On the night, after a close fight that had players on Discord screaming, fans unlocked the ability to summon Wild Rift champions to their aid, and finally brought Baron down.

Gallery

Zlaten del Castillo

Creative Director

London, UK

Brussels, Belgium

Available globally

All work shown with permission. All rights belong to the respective clients and production companies.