Being a giant, beloved video game blog has its downsides. For example, we sometimes neglect to give independent developers our coverage love (or loverage, if you will) as we get caught up in AAA, AAAA or the rare quintuple-A titles. To remedy that, we're giving indies the chance to create their own loverage and sell you, the fans, on their studios and products. This week we talk with Riot Games co-founder and president Marc Merrill about how he and his team turned their passion for a Warcraft III mod into a full-fledged game.

How did your company get started?

The idea to create League of Legends and open Riot Games both started around the end of 2005. We had been playing DotA (Defense of the Ancients, a user-created mod of a popular Warcraft III map) and been very active in the community for a while and believed that the gameplay was so fun and innovative that it represented the spawning of a new genre and deserved to be its own professional game with significantly enhanced features.

Riot's CEO Brandon Beck and I co-founded Riot and partnered with some of the key creative minds behind the creation of DotA-Allstars - Steve "Guinsoo" Feak and Steve "Pendragon" Mescon to accomplish this mission - and League of Legends was born. It took almost a year to get Riot off the ground and open our initial office in September of 2006, which is really when we began to build the team to start on development.