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GrandMA3 enables integration for “Honor of Kings”

The “Honor of Kings” Grand Finale at Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium included an opening ceremony featuring ten huge LED screens and over 5,000 luminaires, with integration of the whole via MA Lighting’s GrandMA3 system. With over 62,000 attendees, the event set a Guinness World Record for the largest ever live esports audience.

Esports’ popularity continues to accelerate worldwide, with the Asia-Pacific region as its powerhouse. No single event demonstrates its impact more than the Grand Finals of the King Pro League (KPL) for “Honor of Kings”, the world’s most-played multiplayer online battle arena game, developed by TiMi Studio Group.

This event featured a mix of live performance, choreography, lightshow, screen content and Augmented Reality (AR). Lighting design, supply and stadium-wide integration of all these elements was carried out by entertainment technology specialist and MA Lighting distributor ACE, tying everything together with the GrandMA3 lighting control system.

The production included a central stage with an LED floor spanning over 3,500 sq.m. Above, the ten dynamic, double-sided LED screens could move to switch between gameplay, performance and ceremonial formats, while around the stadium were over 5,000 lighting fixtures, including more than 1,800 moving head luminaires, plus LED strips, lasers and foggers. GrandMA3’s centralized show control integrated with media servers and timecode to drive the synchronized lighting, screens and effects across the stadium-scale canvas.

For this show, three lighting design directors - Zheng Zhaoliang, Bei Wen and Liu Yanyang - were supported by a team of programmers and assistants. To ensure control over the production’s 180,000 parameters, they used a GrandMA3 system of six Full-Size consoles, with parameter expansion from six GrandMA3 processing units XL and thirty-two GrandMA3 processing units M.

Lead designer Zheng Zhaoliang has been a user of MA Lighting systems since 2010, starting on GrandMA, before moving to GrandMA2 in 2011. This show was his very first use of GrandMA3. Of the transition, he says: “I wasn’t entirely familiar with the system, and that did affect my programming speed, but the access to new programming features compensated for that initial unfamiliarity.”

“Lighting design is an innovation-driven profession, and we need to use new control equipment to maximise and enrich our visuals capability”, he continues. “Having used GrandMA2 for many years, and with some of ACE’s shows already using GrandMA3, this was an excellent opportunity for us to use it on a large-scale event - and we felt confident in mastering it after preliminary training.”

Zheng Zhaoliang adds that GrandMA3 also helped streamline the team’s pre-programming work, which he says was a major plus with limited on-site programming time. “It helped us to avoid dividing effect programming among multiple designers and to present lighting visuals more efficiently and centrally within one system,” he explains.

At the same time, there was encouragement from peers and mentors. “Early in my career, I worked as an assistant for many lighting designers, such as the renowned Li Yangyang”, details Zheng Zhaoliang. “Since 2024, they have been using GrandMA3 for Zhang Jie’s tour concerts. During preparation, he advised me that with such a large number of fixtures in a massive venue, it was essential to use a console capable of handling so many parameters.”

The design was created in Wysiwyg, then imported into GrandMA3 and visualization software via the MVR (My Virtual Rig) file format. This event saw the installation of 1,028 pixel strobe bars to create a controllable ring of light throughout the stands, with pixel effects created via the GrandMA3. “Despite the vast scale and complexity of the show, our aim was to treat the stadium as an expanded version of a theatre”, concludes Zheng Zhaoliang. “The GrandMA3 facilitated that integration for us.”

(Photos: MA Lighting)

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