League of Legends Classic Is Live, and the Old Rift Is Staying

League of Legends Classic opened worldwide on 29 July with Patch 26.15. Riot did not ship it as a two-week event. The old Summoner’s Rift now sits in the mode picker as a permanent queue, inside the client you already have.

Heart of Gold is buyable. Deathfire Grasp still ends games in one rotation. AP Yi is a legal build again.

Launch times by region

Riot opened every server at once, breaking from the usual region-by-region patch rollout:

• North America: 8:00 AM PT on 29 July
• Central Europe: 5:00 PM CEST on 29 July
• Korea and Japan: midnight, so most players there queued on the 30th

Riot confirmed the reasoning in the Classic FAQ before launch. No region gets it early.

Riot mixed the eras on purpose, and the shop gives it away

Season 3 was the anchor, not the specification. Executive Producer Paul “Pabro” Bellezza described the process on the MSI broadcast: start with Season 3, then pull in anything else that fits the feeling.

The item shop makes it obvious. Heart of Gold left the game in patch V1.0.0.152, the very first update of the Season 3 preseason. Deathfire Grasp survived long past it. Neither item ever sat in the other’s shop. Both are in League of Legends Classic.

If you turn up expecting a period-accurate 2013 build, you will spot inconsistencies inside ten minutes. They are all deliberate. Riot picked emotional recognition over archive accuracy and has been open about it since the reveal.

What Riot had to rebuild

Classic runs as a Featured Game Mode on the modern engine, the same architecture behind Arena and URF. Getting there meant resurrecting systems Riot had deleted:

• Pre-rework champion kits, including kits that had been gone for a decade
• Tier-based runes, with Marks, Seals, Glyphs and Quintessences
• The three-branch mastery tree, Offense, Defense and Utility, 30 points to spend
• Removed items, restored to a shop database that had not carried them since Season 3

The Rift itself got the same treatment. Wraiths are back, buffs have friends again, and camps respawn much faster than they do in live League. Riot did rework lighting, shadows and textures, because a 2013 map on a 2026 monitor is unreadable in a teamfight.

Progression sits in its own database. Your live rank, Blue Essence and MMR stay untouched, and nothing you do in Classic leaks back into them. Champion ownership is the only bridge.

Two videos landed with the launch

The cinematic is called “Welcome Back, Summoners”. It walks a returning player through the era before dropping into gameplay, and the gameplay half is the part worth watching twice: AP Sion using Enrage, Ryze with every ability targeted, Fiddlesticks bouncing crows off a wall with Dark Wind. Masteries, purchasable rune pages and long-deleted items all get screen time.

The developer Riot’s lawyers shut down helped build it

Classic started as a prototype at Thunderdome, Riot’s internal hackathon. Dataminers pulled the assets off the PBE in late June, and Riot got ahead of the leak with the “200 Years of Experience” teaser on 26 June before giving the full reveal at the MSI 2026 Finals in Daejeon.

One name in the credits is worth stopping on. An engineer known as Norak spent close to five years reverse-engineering old League for a fan project called Chronoshift. In April 2021, Riot’s legal team sent a cease-and-desist and demanded the source code. The team refused, Riot escalated, and Chronoshift closed.

Riot hired him afterwards. He is one of the engineers who shipped the official version.

What is missing on day one

Classic opened with Draft Queue, Co-op vs AI and custom games. No ranked. No timeline for ranked either.

The bigger gap is the missing public API, and it will split the audience. No third-party site can build a Classic tier list, a win-rate tracker or a matchup optimiser, because there is no data feed to build on. Riot says the pre-analytics culture of early League is part of what people asked for, and that the API would kill it.

That argument holds. It also means the first month of League of Legends Classic runs on rumour, and a fair amount of that rumour will be wrong. Some players enjoy exactly that. Anyone who checks a tier list before locking in has nothing to check.

What Riot has committed to next

Eight champions are confirmed for later waves, all drawn from the same 2009 to 2013 window. Beyond that, Riot handed part of the roadmap to The Council, a voting system running in the client and on Riot Mobile, where players decide which champions, items and systems come back.

Riot has said the long-term scope depends on how many people are still queueing in a few months. The full system breakdown sits in the League of Legends Classic post.