Riot Games new title Legends of Runeterra has been in development for nine years.

In an interview on LeStream’s livestream, which was translated by Millenium, the company’s CEO Nicolo Laurent revealed the card game had been cancelled and restarted since its inception in 2010, even the team working on it was changed.

The game’s current version has been in development for four years.

“I'd say that the first game genre we tried to develop was the card game,” said Laurent.

“We started working on it really early, then we cancelled it, and started it again. We changed the game, the team, the model. That’s pretty much the history of this game. That’s the first genre we started to work on, from 2010.”

Legends of Runeterra - which was announced as part of the League of Legends tenth anniversary event - has proven to be popular amongst fans already. The free-to-play card game had already racked up 2.5 million hours of viewership on Twitch within one day of launch, a figure that has risen to 10.2m in its first five days. 

Last month the firm revealed League of Legends had broken its record for total concurrent players, hitting eight million peak players daily. In light of the recent Blizzard protests, courtesy of its banning of Hearthstone player Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai, Riot Games has asked the pro players for its MOBA to stay out of politics.