The base of a Dance Dance Revolution machine is in pieces on the floor, flocks of rolling white boards are being escorted across the quad, and over 280 teams of Rioters are huddled together in offices around the world. Thunderdome is in full swing.
In LA, there’s a wide range of projects in motion at once. In one room a team mixes paints to coat 3D printed 2XKO figurines while their neighbors think through the logistics of a coffee-shop based cozy game. There’s a team improving an internal process to the left, another making a new streaming extension to the right, and a bunch of devs finding common purpose in fixing a small little detail that has irked each of them individually for years.
“Thunderdome is our version of a hackathon. In the games industry, some people would call this a game jam,” said Eric “Riot Dankatron” Danker, Riot’s Head of Technology who pitched the idea for our first Thunderdome over a decade ago. “But with a game jam, the explicit outcome is to make games. At Thunderdome, we try to leave it more open ended. Some people might work on a game or a game idea while others try, for example, to improve the workflow in finance. The goal is to make somebody’s life better with your project. Whether that’s player's lives or other Rioters' lives, you can kinda do whatever you want as long as you can show how it accomplishes that goal.”
“When we pitched the idea of Thunderdome, it was the early days of League and we were crazy busy shipping champion after champion,” Riot Dankatron continued. “We had some engineers that couldn't get some problems done in the backlog because they were too busy day to day. They're like, ‘hey, we're going to come in on our off hours and we're going to hack.’ While that intention is great, devs shouldn’t need to come in on their off hours to fix things. So we wanted to see what this would look like if we really committed to it as a company. We made the pitch in 2012, Marc and Brandon signed off on it and 150 Rioters spent two and a half days just hacking on stuff.”
It’s come a long way since then. Danker’s best estimate is that this is our 14th Thunderdome–and our biggest one yet. Over 1500+ Rioters from our 20+ offices are on Thunderdome teams. Some made the trip out to Los Angeles. Others got together in regional hubs like Dublin and Singapore to collaborate in person. But it begs the question–why do we do it?
The Reasons for Thunderdome
It’s a chance to fix something. It’s a great way to unlock creativity. Hell, it’s just plain fun. Ask ten people and you may get ten different answers. But what’s important to note is that the reason we Thunderdome is not to ship a bunch of new things directly to our games. That doesn’t mean we won’t– because Thunderdome has absolutely led to some really cool things.
The most famous example is Proving Grounds which became Howling Abyss, aka the ‘AM’ in ARAM. There have been Champion skins, a minigame, and map skins that all have roots in Thunderdome projects. But, if the only focus is shipping something, that narrows down the scope too much from what Thunderdome is really all about.
“We have all sorts of outcomes at the end of a Thunderdome,” Riot Dankatron said. “Sometimes it was a fun but ultimately unsuccessful experiment, so what did you learn in that process? Then there are the ideas that ship almost exactly as they were conceived. But there are also so many things that eventually become a reality because a little spark of an idea started all those years ago, and it just marinated and eventually turned into something else.”
It’s impossible to track creativity. And that’s what Thunderdome is, creativity on shimmer. But no purple veins, please. Get some rest during those 48 hours.
“Creativity is a cornerstone of Riot,” said Ahmed Sidky, whose team is designing a high-level product strategy course that all Rioters will eventually be able to take. “I hope that Thunderdome reignites that creative desire and gives people a little space to dream and connect with others. It doesn’t always have to be a “full day workshop” to get creative; just having a conversation with other Rioters and hammering out an idea can unlock a ton of creativity. That’s what Thunderdome is all about. We start with an idea and in 48 hours we have to deliver something. To do that, you need to collaborate, you need to think creatively.”
On the third day of Thunderdome, technically 51 hours from when the light turned green, the presentations begin. We call it a science fair. It’s exactly what you’re picturing, just without the baking soda volcanoes. Teams hang around their whiteboards and computer monitors presenting what they’ve spent the last two days jamming on. They share successes, roadblocks, and learnings with the rest of Riot.
This year we even had awards celebrating the creativity, passion, and dedication shown by the teams over the course of the event.
While we aren’t going to be able to share the specifics on a bunch of projects we worked on this year, just know that any project you see in the coming years may very well have started from an idea that popped up over the last 48 hours. And, if you come to Riot’s campus and are able to play POP/STARS on our in-house DDR machine, then you’ll know a team spent their 48 hours well.
Edit: We've removed a purely hypothetical two paragraphs about 2XKO to prevent confusion...We've still got next, though.
