It’s that time of the year again – the hype for the League of Legends World Championship is reaching bursting point and the Worlds song for 2021 has dropped.
This time the track is ‘Burn It All Down’ by P4RIS. It follows a similar formula to past songs, it’s fast, frantic, with electronic melodies and beats to bop to.
This time around, the animations seem a lot more fluid and frenetic as some of the top LoL players in the world from the past few years do battle.
Riot even managed to sneak in an LEC meme into the Worlds 2021 music video, which was made by London-based animation studio The Line.
There’s a scene at the 1:26 mark where Wunder is upgrading a weapon for Rekkles (RIP, both players aren’t playing at Worlds as G2 surprisingly failed to qualify from the LEC Summer 2021 playoffs).
If you look carefully at the top-right, there’s Mad Lions’ meme image, the Glad Lions picture, as a piece of grafitti on the wall. The image is often shared on social media when Mad does well – it looks to be inspired by the Jin Air Greenwings GladPlane meme.
Mad Lions spotted the Easter egg and posted it on Twitter:
Mad Lions players Carzzy and Armut were also featured in the video, with British head coach James ‘Mac’ MacCormack saying: “Honestly it’s an absolute dream come true to have two of my players featured in the worlds song, what an honour.
“Everyone freaking out with the video and I am here grateful that it did not show how Armut threw us out of the play ins.”
There’s a host of players in the video, which Ashley Kang has broken down nicely in this Twitter thread.
British LPL caster Munchables made the point that players on top right now weren’t reflected in the video:
However, work began on the video much earlier in the year, before teams were decided and the Worlds 2021 group draw concluded.
Riot Game’s Carrie Dunn explained to Spotify around their Worlds interactive experience: “For Worlds 2021, we really grounded ourselves in this idea of ‘make/break’. It’s the dichotomy of Worlds that makes the competition so utterly compelling; for every stunning victory, there is a crushing loss.
“In order to make the future, you have to be willing to break from the past. We took that to heart, both in the stories we’re telling and in the way we chose to tell them.
“We wanted fans to think they knew where this song was going. Then, as we hit that chorus and our protagonist decides to “burn it all down”, we leave the past behind. We move into the explosive, energetic, modern chorus that can’t be contained.”
There are other easter eggs in the Burnt It All Down video, as outlined in this Reddit post.
You can check out the Worlds 2021 music video, ‘Burn It All Down’, below.
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Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
