The League of Legends Balatro homage I thought I'd never see again is back, thanks to a major MOBA preservation win

Earlier this year, League of Legends developer Riot unveiled its latest minigame, a Balatro-style homage called The Demon's Hand, as part of a character update. I enjoyed it at the time, but bemoaned the fact that despite how accurate it felt, it would inevitably be consigned to the ether when Riot moved on, rendering it unplayable after just a few weeks in the client. But all of a sudden, it's back from the dead, along with several other similar projects.

Early this morning, League of Legends wiki stalwart Spideraxe said the community-run site was now able to house motion comics and minigames, meaning that players could now "experience them all indefinitely." The Demon's Hand was part of that initial rollout, along with Jinx Fixes Everything, which was added to the client late last year as part of Riot's in-game celebrations around Arcane Season 2.

Spideraxe said that some more recent projects, including the Battle of Koeshin event, are also on their way to the wiki. Whether older games will ever be included isn't totally clear just yet - asked about a visual novel from 2022, Spideraxe said, "We're going to see what we can do there for older metagames; they need a bit more work since they were made with different tech."

The good news there is that while those projects "might need some Riot help" to get running on the wiki, that help seems likely to be forthcoming. Spideraxe mentioned that Brian Cearns, Riot's director of content strategy, had previously offered support for this preservation project, suggesting that while things might be a bit janky (and "pretty memory intensive"), there's a good chance they'll work eventually.

Quite how far back the wiki will eventually go remains to be seen. But my personal highlight would be 2013's one-day-only April Fool's Day offering, Cho'gath Eats the World. Loosely styled on the Rampage game series, it's not been seen in more than a decade. Whether anyone can even find the code seems unlikely, but perhaps one day it'll find its way back to the land of the living.

At this rate, the only way I might ever get to play the LoL MMO is in the wiki.