Zedd Releases ‘Ignite’ For The League of Legends Theme Song
In September 2016, Zedd released “Ignite,” the official theme song for the League of Legends 2016 World Championship — a commission that placed one of electronic music’s biggest producers at the center of the rapidly growing esports industry. The track debuted alongside a teaser from the League of Legends esports account that featured Zedd’s unmistakable “Z” logo behind the Worlds Championship branding, confirming weeks of fan speculation.
The Track
“Ignite” was a high-energy anthem built for the scale of the Worlds Championship stage. The track featured dramatic orchestral elements layered over Zedd’s signature clean, precision-engineered electronic production — soaring synths, driving percussion, and a build-and-drop structure designed to generate the kind of adrenaline rush that competitive gaming and live electronic music share in common. The vocals carried a motivational, almost cinematic quality that aligned with the tournament’s narrative of international competition and individual excellence.
The Worlds Championship Music Tradition
By 2016, Riot Games had established a tradition of commissioning major artists to create original music for the League of Legends World Championship. The practice had begun in 2014, when Imagine Dragons collaborated with Riot’s in-house music team to produce “Warriors” — a track that transcended the gaming world and became a mainstream hit. The success of “Warriors” demonstrated that esports events could generate music with genuine cultural reach, and it raised the bar for subsequent Worlds anthems.
Enlisting Zedd for 2016 was a natural evolution of that strategy. Zedd’s audience overlapped significantly with League of Legends’ player base — both skewed young, digitally native, and passionate about production quality. His background as both a classically trained musician and a Grammy-winning electronic producer made him uniquely suited to create music that worked in both a gaming context and as a standalone release.
EDM and Gaming’s Growing Partnership
“Ignite” was part of a broader convergence between electronic music and the gaming industry that accelerated throughout the mid-2010s. Electronic artists had long featured in gaming — from the FIFA soundtrack’s influence on dance music discovery to Deadmau5’s appearances in various game titles. But the esports partnership represented something more strategic: gaming companies were commissioning original music from top-tier producers, and the resulting tracks were generating hundreds of millions of streams.
For Zedd, the League of Legends commission came during a productive period that also included “Stay” with Alessia Cara and work toward his third album. The gaming world offered access to an audience of tens of millions of players and viewers who consumed content primarily through digital platforms — exactly the demographic that electronic music thrived with.
Impact
“Ignite” accumulated hundreds of millions of views and streams across platforms, boosted by the massive viewership of the 2016 World Championship broadcast. The track’s success reinforced Riot Games’ approach of treating Worlds music as a serious creative endeavor rather than an afterthought, paving the way for subsequent collaborations with artists including Jay Chou, Mako, and eventually the creation of virtual groups like K/DA and True Damage.
For the electronic music industry, “Ignite” was further evidence that gaming and esports represented one of the most lucrative and culturally aligned partnership opportunities available — a relationship that has only deepened in the years since, as artists from Marshmello to Porter Robinson have staged virtual performances inside game environments.
