On 9th September, Riot Games’ fighting game 2XKO will release into its closed beta. The game, first announced officially in February 2024, would appear to the layperson as a quick turnaround. The reality for those who have kept their eyes peeled for any crumb of info about the game couldn’t be further from the truth.
Back in March 2016, Riot Games acquired Radiant Entertainment, developers of forward-thinking fighter Rising Thunder. It’s here that whispers about a Riot fighting game first circulated. Then, in 2019, Riot Games revealed the then-called Project L as part of the publisher’s 10th anniversary. This 1v1 fighter would later be scrapped, with development restarting towards the 2v2 duo play fighting game we have today.
The consequence of this timeline is that for the ultra dedicated 2XKO fans, this game has been almost a ten years in the waiting. For those with a decent memory, six years and counting. As such a perception has risen among a portion of the fighting game fanbase, one of impatience and general confusion as to why things have taken so long.
At Evo 2025, I sat down with both 2XKO executive producer Tom Cannon and game director Shaun Rivera, and asked whether the game was revealed too early, and the conflict between what the team considers the ‘proper reveal’ versus the ‘perceived reveal’ of a game a decade in the making. Would they go back and re-think the reveal of Project L if they could?
“I don’t know that I would,” says Tom Cannon. “For sure, there was a cost to doing that. It puts a clock in player’s minds, now the meme is [that there’s been] nine years of development. The reality was that we were deep in R&D when we showed that. But we needed the player’s reaction to that announcement to sort of kick us in the butt, and inspire us to make something that was… special and different.”
Cannon continues: “On the timeline when we don’t do that, I don’t know if we end up with this game. There were costs for sure, but y’know, when we showed that we paid a lot of attention to how fighting game fans were reacting. The reaction we got was ‘oh wow, that looks interesting, I’ll check it out’. We wanted people jumping out of their chairs! We didn’t get that reaction, so we had to do better and take it back to the shop.”
Rivera shares Cannon’s lack of regret on the matter, pointing to the openness of the development process as a strength of 2XKO, and Riot Games in general: “For our team, we haven’t spent decades making a fighting game. We’re learning as we go. One of the things that I really love about working at Riot – I just celebrated my 13th anniversary – this company really encourages all their developers working there to talk to players. When I think back to myself when I played fighting games a long time ago, I wanted to know what the developers were thinking.
“The fact we have this opportunity to put this game in front of players like in Alpha Lab 1 and 2, and at Evo, it’s something I’m pumped about. To your point, hey, has it been too long? I think people just want to play the game. But we’re learning as we go through, and we have this date now: 9th September.”
While, these days, information and play tests for 2XKO are abundant, those early years were often islands composed of teases separated by oceans of radio silence. Can anything be done about the perceived development time for Riot’s fighting game? Rivera doesn’t believe so.
“Not really. Honestly, once Radiant was acquired, there’s a lot of amazing folks who worked on Rising Thunder who are still on our team today – Tom and Tony included. We’re sitting at Evo, right? Once people hear that and go, ‘cool, fighting game when?’ With the first 1v1 version of the game we tested with players before my time, there was a feeling that it was cool, but that it wasn’t good enough.
“I’ve been on the project for five years, we made the choice to make a 2v2 duo play game. It’s a big difference, right? This version of the game has not been the full length of time, but there’s no way to avoid that acquisition.”
When asked if this perception versus reality is a problem, he concluded by stating there’s only one thing the team can do about it: get the game in front of people and build from there.
“Sometimes you’ve just got to deal with it, you know. This is one of those instances where there was a lot of love for Rising Thunder, Tom and Tony. It’s no surprise that there’s excitement around that. It’s something we’ve got to push through, and at the end of the day the way you solve it is by getting the game in front of players and keep making it better over time.”
With 2XKO, Riot aims to make a beginner-friendly fighting game, and taking this long in development is a key aspect of that plan. We’re going to have to wait just a little bit longer, though, to see whether that decision – and the cost of the notably early reveal – will bear any fruit.
