A brand new fighting game is on its way from Riot Games and Tom Cannon and Tony Cannon of Radiant Entertainment.
EVO has begun, and with it comes the second worst-kept secret in the fighting game industry (nothing will ever top the leaky ship Capcom): Riot bought Radiant Entertainment to make a fighting game. The League of Legends developer is, cancellation pending, finally going to be putting out a second official video game. This news came from the mouth of Tom Cannon himself, live onstream at EVO.
The Cannon brothers are a pretty big deal in the Fighting Game Community; they, alongside Joey “Mr. Wizard” Cuellar, founded EVO itself. The Cannons went on to invent the massively influential news/forum site Shoryuken, as well as GGPO netcode, the rollback netcode that made the online fighting game experience not just tolerable, but truly great. They founded Radiant Entertainment and released the first alpha of the easy-execution fighter Rising Thunder in 2015, then got bought out in 2016. In 2018, they officially released an open-source version of Rising Thunder online.
“At Riot, what we’re really trying to do is make something that players here can really be proud of. That everyone here will feel like, ‘Yeah. This was made for me,'” explained Cannon today.
We have no further hints as to what the game is or when it will be done, but we know it’s coming. Hopefully, with Riot’s resources and Radiant’s talent, knowledge, and consumer-friendly attitude, something that will greatly benefit the contextually struggling fighting game scene will come about. A lot of other easy-execution fighters, like Fantasy Strike and Granblue Fantasy Versus, have come and gone in the meantime, so Radiant will at least have the benefit of intel if they take that route again. In the meantime, we’ll be sure to keep you up to date on the rest of the news that emerges from this year’s EVO.
