Lauri “Cyanide” Happonen has died at 31, leaving League of Legends with one of its earliest and most recognizable champions. The former Fnatic jungler won the 2011 World Championship and remained the youngest player ever to lift the trophy.
That record is part of why his name still carries weight. Cyanide began his professional career at 15, reached the top of the Season 1 ladder, and then teamed with Enrique “xPeke” Cedeño Martínez at oSk Gaming before the pair later joined myRevenge with Maciej “Shushei” Ratuszniak and others. From there, they moved to Fnatic, and the team won the Riot Season 1 Championship in June 2011.
Fnatic built on that start by finishing third at IEM Season VI – Global Challenge Cologne and then winning IEM Season VI – Global Challenge New York later in 2011. The team stayed near the top in 2013 with Spring and Summer split titles before reaching the semifinals of the 2013 World Championship, where Royal Club stopped them. In 2014, Fnatic won Spring again, then lost to SK Telecom T1 in the semifinals of All-Star 2014 in Paris, fell to Alliance in the EU LCS Summer final, and still qualified for the 2014 Worlds.
That final run ended in the group stage after losses to Oh My God and Samsung White, and it was the last tournament of Cyanide’s career. He had already peaked earlier than almost anyone in the game, lifting the world title at 16 after turning professional at 15. The timeline makes the loss more striking: a player who arrived so young and helped define Fnatic’s first great era is gone just as the generation he helped inspire has long since moved on. His former teammate Shushei died in late April 2025 at 36, underscoring how much of that early core is now being remembered in the past tense.
What remains is the record, the title, and the absence. The cause of death has not been made public, and that is the unanswered fact hanging over one of League of Legends’ defining early careers.
