League of Legends spinoff Arcane was a commercial hit for Netflix and Riot Games, topping charts worldwide, and has now put the cherry on the cake by becoming the first streaming show and the first based on a videogame to scoop a bunch of Emmys.
The big award was for Outstanding Animated Program, and given out at the Emmys’ Creative Arts ceremony, and Arcane won over a shortlist that featured Bob’s Burgers, Rick and Morty, The Simpsons and Marvel’s What If…?
The show’s co-creator Christian Linke picked up the award on behalf of the creative team.
“Thank you for this,” said Linke per Deadline. “It’s a big deal for us as we come from video games. It’s been amazing to see the world embrace our characters and our stories so thanks to Netflix who believed in us from the beginning, thanks to Riot Games, who worked on the whole IP… and to all the people that have been with our game and League of Legends for the last 12 years or so who helped make it as big as it is now.”
The Emmy joins three three Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation Emmys, which earlier this year were given to individual episodes (‘The Boy Savior’, ‘Happy Progress Day’ and ‘When These Walls Come Tumbling Down’).
The Arcane account later tweeted out a nice pic of the creatives picking up the gong, and don’t they look pleased about it:
Honored doesn’t even begin to describe how we feel about winning the #Emmy for 𝑶𝒖𝒕𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑨𝒏𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒅 𝑷𝒓𝒐𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒎.Thank you to our incredible team at @RiotGames and Fortiche, the @TelevisionAcad, and the greatest fans (yes, you) for making this possible. pic.twitter.com/xFNWt4eNc7September 4, 2022
As they should be. Well before the Emmy, Arcane had proven its chops, being quickly confirmed for a second season before Riot straight-up bought a chunk of the animation studio behind it. It’s also recently released ‘Bridging the Rift’, a documentary about the making of the show (the first episode is at the top of the article).
Incidentally, there is an argument that the Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch could be considered the first videogame Emmy winner in 2019, with its alt-history of a doomed game development and multiple-choice structure, but I reckon Black Mirror is its own thing and not really a videogame show. It certainly ain’t a League of Legends spinoff.
The Emmy joins the nine (!) Annie Awards already in Arcane’s trophy cabinet, and expect to be hearing a lot more about the show in the future. The second season doesn’t yet have a release date, but here’s everything we know about it.
