2026: Writing Legends
The rate at which the Throwdown has grown is pretty unbelievable. Once again, 2026's LAN Final was held during UC Davis Picnic Day, and we saw an increase in attendance to over 2,800 across a comparatively much shorter day (3-0 series compared to last year's 5-game slug-fest). Notably, our friends over at Twitch were gracious enough to give us a 1-hour Front Page Carousel slot, which massively skyrocketed our viewership to over 1100 concurrent viewers, which we were able to hold above 400 for the rest of the show.
Thematically, MVT has reached a pretty stable state, with small tweaks to the brand to generally clean things up here and there. This year's catchphrase: Write Your Legend. The Throwdown provides a stage for collegiate players to experience a level of competition and professionalism that's hard to produce in the scene, and we hope our tournament helps players write the start of their own legends in competitive VALORANT.
A lot more names were involved in this year's Throwdown - before I get into more of the process, please take a look at our 2026 Throwdown Roll Call:
The graphic design this year centered around a more liberal use of bounding boxes, and increased frequency of Roboto Mono over Futura, a little reminiscent of 2022 League of Legends Worlds (hilariously enough, that's what the background flag renders are based off). For 3D assets, the flags from 2025 were reskinned. A short-lived attempt to create a liquid simulation render ultimately ended up being scrapped, but some of the still frames saw use in graphics for social media, since the individual frames themselves looked pretty nice. Check out some of the asset renders below:
New! Panels Added
With gracious support from Riot Games themselves, we were able to host Diego Varona, a Map Designer on the VALORANT team, for a 30-minute panel about his role. He discussed Map Design philosophy in VALORANT, and took questions about his craft and what it's generally like to work at Riot Games. Check out the recording below:
New! Orchestral Theme
The work of Jose Daniel Ruiz, Adam Gilberti, and Shireen Ghosh brought us the 2026 MVT Orchestral Theme, which is as far as we know, the first of its kind in Collegiate Esports. This was a massive undertaking for the better part of 8 months, and we're super proud to show it off to the world. In 2027, we hope to work with composers, producers, and singers to bring you even more original MVT music. Give the Orchestral Theme a listen here:
New! Production Comms
Ever wanted to know what it sounds like behind the scenes in an MVT production? Our new advanced recording system pulls audio tracks from production comms channels when we clip things, so now you can hear the production crew's reaction to big moments! Check out a sample below of Rusty's 1v4 clutch where the prod channel goes nuts (I swear we're normally more chill in there):
Adjusted: Trophy and Tables
As with last year, we built another trophy for our champions to take home. This year's trophy efforts were largely centered around refining the 2025 Trophy and reducing the cost to manufacture another one. Now that we're more experienced with resin casting and metalwork, we're hoping to create a more interesting design to produce in 2027.
Table covers were a big area of improvement for us this year. Last year's covers were printed onto large vinyl sheets which we had to wrap onto the foamcore boards covering the desks. This resulted in a lot of bubbles and misaligned vinyl panels. This year's team panels were printed as large sheets from a third party supplier, which surprisingly cost less than our old production process and looked about a thousand times better.
LAN Finals 2026: Holy Moly
I honestly thought that the 2025 turnout would be the peak of Throwdown attendance, and that we'd be maintaining those numbers going into 2026. I was proven wrong. Nearly 3,000 people came in to watch the maps, visit Diego's panel, and check out our wonderful sponsor booths. Additionally, nearly 25,000 unique viewers came by the Twitch stream with a peak concurrent viewership of 1,194 and over 100,000 minutes watched. The team was blown away by how far we've come since 2024's small-scale LAN in the Cruess Hall theater, and can't wait to cook up something amazing again in 2027.
On the broadcast side of things, we're always looking for more ways to connect the in-person audience with the Twitch audience. This year, we debuted a crowd mic that was meant to pick up big reactions from our in-person crowd. There are definitely some issues to work out with the system, but we hope to have better venue audio and more camera angles next year!
As is pretty much Throwdown tradition at this point, setup once again went well into the night, with part of the crew heading home at around 1:30 AM, while the last bits were wrapped up at 3:00 AM. Regardless, we were all back at 8:00 AM sharp the next morning, ready to absolutely kill it. Check out some highlights of the event photo reel as well as the broadcast VOD below (fun fact: this is the second year in a row an "UNC" team has made finals. UNK last year, UNC this year. Are the uncs just that goated?)
