Esports/Electronic Sports/Competitive Gaming is a competition between gamers who compete against one another in certain areas of gaming where there is only 1 winner. Like most competitions, there is always just a single winner, but usually the other teams who compete also get something for competing. The most popular genres are:
MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas)
RTS (Real-time strategies)
FPS (First Person Shooters).
The first ever recorded Esports tournament was held at the Standford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in October 1972, which hosted 24 students who competed against one another playing a game called SpaceWar. SpaceWar is a game that uses the Newtonian physics which causes the 2 human operated ships to continue to move even after accelerating, the objective of the game is to destroy the opponents ship, but they have a limited amount of fuel and torpedoes. The ships are destroyed by either being hit by a torpedo, hitting the star or colliding with one another. Even though the rewards were not quite what they are today, the winning student won a year subscription with the Rolling Stone magazine. Conveniently, the Esport even was also covered with the Rolling Stone magazine, so even the winning student could read about their own achievement.
In 1980 there was another eSport event held by Atari, it included over 10,000 players with only 1 winner. The event was based around the game Space Invaders, which is still known and played today.
During most of the 1980s, more companies and countries were focusing on promoting games and tournaments, also trying to break records too. Twin Galaxies was one the biggest companies founded to make gaming an essential part to the current economic strata.
Around 1997, competitive gaming had reached a whole new level with the release of Quake. Quake was one of the first FPS games to be developed, it was released in 1996, which followed on from the well-known Doom series. The single player aspect of the game required the player to walk around dark and gothic like levels and look for the exit, running into monsters and traps etc. The multiplayer aspect of Quake was developed to allow players to play against or with each other. 2 game modes were also made which included Deathmatch and Free for All. The tournament was hosted by Red Annihilation, with the winner getting a Ferrari for coming first. After that tournament, the first ever gaming league was formed or the CPL (Cyberathlete Professional League is a professional sports tournament organisation which specializes in computer and console video game competitions), which then later went on to host tournaments where first place could win around $15,000. Most games around this time were FPS games, so a lot of eSport events were based around those, because Mobas and or RTS games didn’t really exist.
During 2000 to 2018, the increase in eSports events have increased astronomically from smaller events that included 20,000 people to over 800,000. Also the tournaments were also increasing in size and hence the competitive aspect increased, because now countries can play against countries. Then games like Dota, League Of Legends and Smite were born that took the MOBA scene by force and currently hold the most popular gaming domain in eSport history. So many tournaments are held yearly, allowing so many players to get involved and play to show who the best are. There are significant teams like NRG, Dignitas, Rival, Cloud9, Faze, Optic Gaming, Splyce, G2 Esports, Obey Alliance, EUnited, Spacestation, London Spitfire and many more.
Going from a single room that included only a handful of gamers to an entire stadium dedicated to a single tournament. It really does show how much eSports has grown and how much it will continue to grow.
1972
Spacewar was the start of something great, even though like everything that currently existed, it had to start somewhere, in this case it start in a room filled with 24 students and an audience.
2016
As time progressed and eSports became significantly bigger, the number of gamers increased, eSports teams and players became famous. The prize pools became bigger and the audience grew to millions. Even though this stadium probably held maybe 10,000 people. That does not include the great number of people watching around the world, which was made possibly due to technology and streaming. Hopefully now, eSports will grow to become even bigger, allowing more fans to join in on the fun and hopefully become global stars in their own right.
References:
MOBA Image- https://assets.rockpapershotgun.com/images//2018/02/Smite-2018-02-05-00-46-35-20-620x388.jpg
Esports Logos- https://goo.gl/images/uScUcu
First Esports- https://goo.gl/images/UTJUKK
LoL eSports- https://goo.gl/images/ANsvK4
Dennis Keijzer
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