If you want to know about the origins of eSports, join us on our journey. Let’s take a look at the biggest eSports events in history and discover the exciting popularity of eSports.
The beginnings of video games
So how did the history of eSports begin? Short answer: with the invention of video games. The first video game was created in 1947, but it wasn’t until the mid-1950s that competitive video games entered the world. The year 1958 was particularly significant, as it was the year Tennis for Two was launched. With the birth of the two-player game, the history of e-sports also began. Present day games online would be unthinkable without these historical events.
The history of e-sports began with the release of Tennis for Two in 1958
Fast forward to the 1970s when consoles and arcade games took over the world. The first console game was connected to a television in 1972, and later arcades allowed people to gather in public and play games like Pong. All of this led to the creation of the games we know today as eSports.
Notable moments of e-sports boom
On October 19, 1972, the first eSports tournament was held at Stanford University. The game was called “Spacewar!”, and featured 24 players competing in the so-called “Intergalactic Space War Olympics.”
The famous game Space Invaders was released in 1980, and what happened that year a tournament was a huge turning point for the development of e-sports. It was the biggest championship of that era, with a total of 10,000 participants.
In the 1980s, various eSports events were broadcast on television, including the American show Starcade, which aired from 1982 to 1984, in which participants competed against each other for the best score in an arcade game. The series ran for 133 episodes.
Track & Field was released in 1984 and the international arcade competition organized by Konami and Centuri attracted over a million players from Japan and North America.
Fighting games boomed in the 1990s. Releases like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat popularized the type of game where one player fights another player directly. Especially Street Fighter II is considered the author of this achievement.
In 2000, the Korea E-Sports Association (KeSPA) was established under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism to promote and regulate e-sports. The main goal of this South Korean institution was to work towards making eSports an official sporting event.
In 2004, a fighting game tournament called the Evolution Championship Series (EVO) was held in Pomona, California. Nine fighting games participated in the tournaments, including Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and had 700 participants from over 30 countries.
In the 2000s, the number of gaming TV channels and TV shows in general increased in the US. One of the most famous TV channels devoted mainly to video games, called G4 (also known as G4TV), launched with a week-long series of Pong games. The channel was renovated in 2021.
In 2013, a professional gamer named Danny “Shiphtur” Le was the first person to receive a P-1 sports visa for eSports from the US State Department. This event marked the beginning of the recognition of professional players as athletes.
The first e-sports tournament
As mentioned above, the first recognized eSports tournament was held in 1972 at Stanford University for the game Spacewar. With 24 contestants competing for a year’s subscription to Rolling Stone magazine, this tournament made eSports history. However, only later did the prizes become what they usually are today – cash prizes.
The beginnings of e-sports
As you can see in the timeline, the consoles and fighting games of the 1990s and 2000s were the defining era of eSports as we know it today.
However, in this era, the development of eSports was most fueled by the rise of personal computers. Not only could computers soon be found in almost every household, but thanks to LAN networks, more and more gamers gathered in public and private places to play their favorite video games.
The rise of e-sports
As internet connections and privacy configurations evolved, the championships became bigger and more important. Games that marked this era, such as Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament and StarCraft, are now an integral part of eSports history.
It can be said that modern eSports truly began with the advent of streaming platforms, especially Twitch. Thanks to these platforms, it was easy to host large eSports tournaments that were watched live by thousands and soon millions of fans.
The most popular games of this period are Defense of the Ancients (more commonly known as DotA), FIFA, DotA 2, Call of Duty (CoD), StarCraft II and the game that is considered the most popular to this day: League of Legends (LoL). In 2017 alone, the League of Legends community had as many as 81 million people. In 2017, League of Legends had an estimated global audience of 81 million people.
Tomorrow’s eSports
The history of gambling is long, and every casino game has seen progress from its inception to the present day, including eSports. Who would have thought back then that e-sports would become part of mass culture? Therefore, we cannot know for sure what awaits us in the future, eSports can develop into something new, but one thing is clear – the journey of eSports does not end.
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2023-09-25 18:35:33
#development #esports
