League of Legends' Original Investor Pitch Reveals Onslaught: War of the Immortals

League of Legends YouTuber Necrit and Riot's Paul "Pabro" Bellezza have revealed the original investor pitch for Onslaught: War of the Immortals, the early prototype that eventually evolved into the MOBA juggernaut we know today. Necrit uploaded the deep-dive video last Thursday, showcasing a treasure trove of video footage, design documents, lore breakdowns, and screenshots that Riot provided from their archives. For players who have spent years mastering Summoner's Rift, this glimpse into the game's primordial DNA is equal parts fascinating and surreal — a reminder that the polished competitive staple began as something radically different.

The pitch materials paint a picture of a game barely recognizable as League's ancestor. Rather than the symmetrical three-lane field players have memorized for over a decade, Onslaught took place in a cartoony cityscape divided between "order" and "chaos" worlds. Players would declare allegiance to one world when they began playing, locking them into realm-exclusive heroes — a faction system with real gameplay consequences that never made it to the live game. Customizable immortals served as temporary power spikes players could summon during climactic moments, suggesting a very different rhythm to matches than the steady scaling of modern League.

Onslaught's Cartoony Cityscape Map and Faction System

The most immediate difference hits you visually: a cartoony cityscape replaces the jungle-and-lane topology that has defined the MOBA genre for fifteen years. The order and chaos worlds split the map into distinct thematic halves, each presumably hosting its own roster of exclusive champions. This allegiance declaration when they began playing would have forced players to commit to a faction identity before the match even began, creating a meta where team composition was constrained by lore alignment rather than pure strategy. Customizable immortals add another layer — temporary, player-tailored powerhouses brought in during pivotal moments — suggesting matches were designed around dramatic swing turns rather than the incremental advantage-grinding of modern Summoner's Rift.

For a modern player, the implications are staggering. The current map's neutrality — where any champion can go any lane and faction allegiance is purely cosmetic — would not exist. World-exclusive heroes mean balancing becomes a nightmare of asymmetric design: if Order gets better tanks and Chaos gets better assassins, the faction choice when they began playing becomes a competitive disadvantage. The customizable immortal system, meanwhile, sounds like an early version of ultimates or perhaps a precursor to the elemental drake soul mechanics, but tied to player expression rather than map objectives. It is a design philosophy that prioritizes spectacle and player agency over the tight competitive balance Riot eventually chased.

Early Champion Designs: Xizun, Bearded Sion, and Zij

The champion roster reads like a distorted mirror of the current lineup. Lee Sin, one of the game's most iconic high-skill junglers, was originally named Xizun. The article author describes him as "Built like a brick wall on roids." That phrasing — raw, unpolished, and distinctly mid-2000s — captures an era when MOBA design language hadn't yet standardized. Sion, now a hulking undead juggernaut, apparently had a beard in this version, prompting the article author to exclaim, "Sion has a beard, for God's sake!" Annie retains her flaming teddy bear minion, a rare thread of continuity, while Singed appears largely unchanged visually but answers to the name Zij — a detail the author jokes about: "These days I only call him that if I have a really bad cold."

These aren't just cosmetic differences; they reflect fundamentally different design priorities. The author's description of Xizun suggests a tanky bruiser identity rather than the mobile, outplay-heavy kit Lee Sin players mastered. A bearded Sion implies a more human, perhaps barbaric warrior aesthetic before the undead Noxian general concept solidified. The name Zij for Singed hints at a different cultural or linguistic inspiration for the mad chemist. Annie's teddy bear surviving the transition speaks to how core that visual hook was — it anchored her identity as the "child with a dangerous toy" from day one. For players who main these champions, seeing their origins is like finding baby photos of a pro athlete: the raw talent is visible, but the refinement is years away.

League's Early Pitch Unearths Forgotten Immortal War

The narrative framework is where Onslaught feels most like a time capsule. The pitch describes a world where order and chaos coexisted neutrally until "an antichrirst of sorts" was born and tore a hole in reality, threatening to consume all existence. That phrasing — edgy, melodramatic, and unapologetically mid-2000s fantasy — sits in stark contrast to the cartoony cityscape art style. Riot's own logo appeared drenched in blood in the pitch video, a visual commitment to grit that the final game largely abandoned in favor of a broader, more accessible tone. The dissonance between the Saturday-morning-cartoon map and the reality-tearing antichrist narrative captures a studio still figuring out its identity.

Modern League players know Runeterra as a tapestry of distinct regions — Demacia, Noxus, Ionia, the Shadow Isles — each with nuanced politics and moral gray areas. Onslaught's binary order-versus-chaos setup, shattered by a singular cataclysmic figure, reads like a generic fantasy template the team hadn't yet transcended. The blood-drenched logo suggests Riot was pitching to investors who expected the grimdark aesthetic popularized by games like Warhammer 40,000 and Gears of War. That they pivoted toward a brighter, more stylized world speaks to a important early decision: League would compete on accessibility and readability, not atmospheric oppression. The antichrist figure never made it to live servers, but the concept of a reality-tearing cataclysm echoes in later lore events like the Ruination — proof that some narrative DNA persists even when the specifics are discarded.

LoL's Secret Unicorn Project Exposed

Seeing Onslaught: War of the Immortals in this detail reframes League of Legends Classic — Riot's recent limited-time return to an older game state — as a modest step rather than a true time machine. As the article author puts it: "We have not achieved true classic-ification until Sion has a highlighter-orange beard and nobody recognizes a single aspect of the game." The sentiment lands because Classic still operates on the Summoner's Rift foundation: three lanes, jungle camps, dragon pits, Baron Nashor. Onslaught represents a different genre branch entirely — one where faction allegiance gates champion pools, where the map is a city instead of a forest, where immortals drop in like superweapons. For the player curious about design history, this is the actual ur-text. For the competitive player, it's a reminder that the game's current elegance came from ruthless iteration, not divine inspiration.

The revelation also highlights how much Riot has embraced transparency around its own history. Providing Necrit and Bellezza with the full investor pitch — video, docs, screenshots, lore — suggests a confidence in the current product that doesn't need to hide its messy origins. Most studios bury their early pitches; Riot handed theirs to a content creator for public dissection. That openness serves the community well: modders, theorists, and historians now have primary sources instead of forum rumors. The next time someone claims a champion rework "betrays the original vision," they can be pointed to Xizun, bearded Sion, and the antichrist that tore reality asunder — and asked which original vision they mean.

The investor pitch for Onslaught: War of the Immortals stands as a remarkable artifact — not just for what it reveals about League's past, but for what it confirms about game development. Great games are rarely born great; they are carved from stranger, messier, more ambitious blocks of stone. Riot's willingness to share this particular block with the public, warts and blood-drenched logos and all, makes the final statue that much more impressive. Keep an eye on Necrit's channel for the full video breakdown, and perhaps temper expectations for any future "classic" modes — unless they come with highlighter-orange beards included.