What would happen if you blended together the platform brawling of Super Smash Bros. with the character roster of League of Legends? You would have a cancelled game project, apparently: Insider sources reporting to a former journalist for The Washington Post confirm that Riot Games was working on just such a title, but it got axed before it ever got off of the ground.
The platform fighter, called Pool Party, first started off as a more hardcore fighting game but eventually evolved into a more casual-friendly direction, and it was being angled as a title that would encourage and support a major esports scene. About 80 employees at Riot were working on the prototype, but the project was cancelled internally after MultiVersus pulled its open beta offline – a move that was perceived by Riot execs as a sign that Pool Party would ultimately be a failure.
While this news might be disappointing for some fans, Riot’s senior comms director Joe Hixson calls this part of the studio’s day-to-day. “We always have a number of projects in various phases of R&D, and spinning projects up and down happens multiple times a year,” he confirmed in a statement.
We further point out that some of Riot’s side projects for LoL do see fruition, such as the digital CCG Teamfight Tactics, the 2v2 tag fighter 2XKO, or the presumably still-gestating Riot MMO, though layoffs at the studio in January and the team’s announced radio silence in March have cast doubts over that project’s life.
As for those employees working on Pool Party, most of them either were reassigned to other teams or sought new positions within the company’s internal job postings, while roughly 10 were presumably either laid off or left the studio.
