When you’re browsing through social media, you’d sometimes stumble upon news of people winning video game tournaments and raking in mad cash. Now if you’re behind the times you’d probably think to yourself, what the hell is that it’s exactly what it says on the tin video games as sports aka eSports.
eSports, you say aren’t these dudes just wasting their time, trying to be good at a video game. I mean trying to be good at certain video games can help you start your own livelihood. The highest paid eSports players raking millions of dollars in prize money and sponsorships, they even have infrastructure like actual sports with coaches, schedules, diets, and exercises to make sure that they play at their fullest.
eSports can come in many different forms like any other sport there are team games, games for individuals that are point based and others that are played out until there’s a clear winner. This also comes in different genres such as shooters, multiplayer battle arenas, fighting games and even freaking Tetris. The scope for what can be competitive is limitless and that’s what makes it amazing as said before this form of sport has reached tights. We’ve never seen before in terms of money earned and the amount of people that watch. An example would be dota 2’s equivalent of the world cup, the international which held a prize pool of over 34 million dollars last year. Another figure of how big its is would be the league of legends world championship which had a viewership that reached a peak of 3.9 million all around the world. These are merely two games in an industry with so many titles genres and fan bases technology are amazing isn’t it aside from that esports has reached the mainstream with players like ninja getting massive, sponsored deals and even appearing in new year countdown parties in southeast Asia. The c games had it in the lineup of sports showing recognition that these supposed nerds are now athletes. It’s also reported that the 2024 Olympics will include esports which means it’s all stepping into the right direction for this amazing phenomenon but where did it all start.
Did it start off in basements and lan parties back in the 90s?
Did communities just suddenly pop up and decide they wanted to make video games more competitive than usual?
Did it start all the way in the dawn of early video games back in the 1950s?
We’ll answer these questions and more in this article, so let’s take a look at the history of esports,
- In the 1950s computer scientist alexander shafto douglas created a version of tic-tac-toe to see how US people would interact with computers.
- In the spirit of playing and competing, this showed the first sign of how video games can be in the same vein of sports having one winner and one loser.
- In 1958, tennis for two was made, this allowed two humans to play with each other via a video game. The first multiplayer game if you will more video game milestones happened in between that year in 1972, which leads us to the first true pit stop for esports.
The laboratory of artificial intelligence at stanford university invited many people for the first ever recorded esports tournament.
This was for a game called space war and while the prize was merely a year-long subscription to the rolling stones magazine. It was a precursor for beautiful things to come our way further ahead through the years. Home consoles were then introduced to the public, which meant everyone could play video games at the comfort of their humble abode.
This meant a bigger scope of players in competitions outside universities and similar institutions where the technology was housed in back then 1980 then gave us a competition of an unknown game.
Have you heard of space invaders?
I’m not so sure whether that’s a classic game but who knows jokes aside that year, held atari’s never heard before space invaders championship which attracted over 10000 players. It brought video games to the mainstream away from just the geek’s hobby and into the general public’s eye 1980 also introduced twin galaxies, an organization founded by walter day that kept records. In this video game history, think of it as a Guinness book of world records but for like mega nerds in fact they are honored by the famous world records book time passes by and records are being broken by gamer billy Mitchell. He’s the one dude in the 80s, who’s broken records in all kinds of video games from donkey kong to pac-man. It then started a craze in which a lot of people would try to break these records on live television in both America and Bryn with players being pitted against each other. To do so during this decade, the competitive spirit was birthed, and the following decade made it blossom. This was the golden age of video games, and the seeds were planted for esports to start flourishing over the next few decades.