Video games are the fastest-growing industry on the planet, having only emerged during the 1970’s yet somehow earning revenues that exceed those of both the music and film industries combined. In such a scenario, it’s perhaps unsurprising that organized competitive video gaming has taken off in a massive way during that time.
How it Began
The first recorded occurrence of a video gaming competition took place at Stanford University all the way back in 1972, when five students competed on the first ever commercially available arcade game Spacewar for a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. Clearly, that contest was light years away from the modern concept of ESports which regularly sees professional teams competing for tens of millions of dollars at televised stadium-based events watched by more people than the US Super Bowl!
If you’re not familiar with Spacewar, you’re not alone – the game didn’t manage to find a widespread audience in the same way as its successor Pong. Spacewar is still an important game in the history of ESports, however, as it was one of the first titles to keep track of the players score – an essential element of competition. Fast forward to the release of Taito’s Space Invaders in 1979, and high score competitions were hugely popular with the gamers of the day – more than 10,000 showed up to participate in one such contest.
Notable Events
If you’re a fan of those games from the ‘golden age’ of arcade gaming, you may well be familiar with Twin Galaxies, the organization which was founded in 1982 by Walter Day to keep track of the world’s highest scores on a range of popular arcade titles. Twin Galaxies is still operating today, and is frequently used by Guinness World Records as a source of information regarding the top scores on games which require specialist knowledge to monitor successfully.
In 1990, a notice appeared in the popular Nintendo Power gaming magazine announcing a nationwide competition dubbed the Nintendo World Championships. This contest required players to compete for the highest score on three popular NES titles – Super Mario Bros, Rad Racer, and Tetris – with prizes of up to $10,000 for the winner. Widespread organized contests such as this continued to be held through the 1990s on games such as Street Fighter 2, Doom, and Quake, the latter of which is credited as being the first “true” ESports title.
Rapid Growth
It wasn’t until televised ESports began to take off in the 2000s that the public at large really began to take competitive video gaming seriously. South Korea was one of the first countries to broadcast competitive gaming on television, and their sportsbooks were also amongst the first to offer online sports betting on video game contests. It was at this point that the craze really began to take off worldwide, with Germany’s GIGA Television, France’s Game One, and the United Kingdom’s XLEAGUE.TV all showing ESports contests on major channels during the first decade of the 21st century.
The United States joined the party in 2005, when ESPN ran a show based on American Football named Madden Nation. The programme was popular enough to be shown for four consecutive years, and also led to competing network CBS broadcasting their own ESports coverage – this time of the World Series of Video Games tournaments. A dedicated video game channel even sprung up around this time, known as G4, although it later expanded its scope to cover wider areas of technology and general entertainment.
ESports Finds a Home
Twitch is a well-known videogame-centric streaming platform that is now owned by Amazon, but you may not realize just how much history the website has. Twitch was initially set up in 2011, and had a huge audience of 3.2 million unique visitor’s right from the start thanks to a range of ESports partnerships and sponsorships. In those early days, the most popular games to feature on the site were League of Legends and the Call of Duty franchise, both of which are still popular with players and viewers today.
The twitch era saw a huge increase in viewership for ESports events, with a corresponding increase in the size of the prize pools attached to these contests. One of the most popular ESports titles of today, Dota 2, features in a dedicated annual event known as The International. This competition frequently sets records in the ESports arena, with the 2019 contest having a prize fund of $34.3 million. This has been achieved by an interaction-based approach which sees 25% of the profits generated by the games battle pass content being used to fund The International.
The growth of ESports is a fascinating and dramatic story that has evolved over an incredibly short period of time. Some universities are now even offering degrees in ESports-related business, a development which seems likely to increase future participation in the industry from the already gaming-mad younger generations of today.
