Timeline & History of E-Sports (Competitive Gaming)

E-sports, also known as electronic sports or competitive gaming, is a term for organized multiplayer video game competitions, whereby the most common game genres associated with e-sports are real-time strategy (RTS), fighting, first-person shooters (FPS) and multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA).

The earliest known video game competition took place on October 19, 1972, at Stanford University for the game Spacewar, where students were invited to an "Intergalactic spacewar olympics" whose grand prize was a year's subscription for Rolling Stone magazine . The Space Invaders Championship held by Atari in 1980 was the earliest large scale video game competition, attracting more than 10,000 participants across the United States, establishing competitive gaming as a mainstream hobby.

During the 1970s and 1980s, electronic sports players and tournaments begun being featured in popular newspapers and magazines including Life and Time. One of the most well known classic arcade game players is Billy Mitchell, for his listing as holding the records for high scores in six games including Pac-Man and Donkey Kong in the 1985 issue of the Guinness Book of World Records. Televised eSports events aired during this period included the American show Starcade which ran between 1982 and 1984 airing a total of 133 episodes, on which contestants would attempt to beat each other's high scores on an arcade game. A video game tournament was included as part of TV show That's Incredible!, and tournaments were also featured as part of the plot of various films, including 1982's Tron.

In the 1990s, many games benefited from increasing internet connectivity, especially PC games. For example, the 1988 game Netrek was an Internet game for up to 16 players, written almost entirely in cross-platform open source software. Netrek was the third Internet game, the first Internet team game, the first Internet game to use metaservers to locate open game servers, and the first to have persistent user information. In 1993 it was credited by Wired Magazine as "the first online sports game".

As the presence of professional gaming grew from the early 2000's, a number of organisations emerged attempting to take the sector to a wider world stage. These included Major League Gaming (MLG), which was established in 2002.

Shooters such as Counter-Strike and Call of Duty have remained popular choices for those seeking competitive gaming, while fighting titles like Street Fighter and Marvel vs Capcom have found their own eSports home in the Evolution Champion Series – or ‘Evo’.

Matt MacDonald, senior eSports manager at Multiplay, says of the UK sector: “Right now, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the dominant eSport in the UK in terms of both viewership and participants. Call of Duty also seems to be doing incredibly well in terms of console gaming.”

Despite the popularity of shooters, it is actually a relative newcomer to the sector – the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) genre – that currently holds the eSports crown.

2009 title League of Legends boasted more than 27 million players daily as of last January,according to developer Riot Games, with in excess of 11 million people simultaneously watching the 2014 LoL World Championship event.

Fellow MOBA Dota 2 has also boomed in popularity since its official 2013 launch, now seeing more than 800,000 concurrent users on the Steam platform.

The exclusivity of these two titles has also meant that PC remains the top choice for pro-gamers.

As audience numbers have grown, so has the money on offer for the best players – and event hosts.

Valve’s annual tournament for Dota 2, The International, saw its prize pool explode from $2.9 million in 2013 to a staggering $10.9 million last year – making 2014’s instalment the biggest eSports event to date.

The birth of live streaming through services such as Twitch has opened the accessibility of eSports.

“Twitch has boosted the entire scene for everyone and created probably the first sport to be successful outside of traditional media,” explains Michael ‘ODEE’ O’Dell, manager of UK eSports group Team Dignitas.

71.5 million people watched pro-gaming in 2014, according to Red Bull, with viewers watching just over two hours at a time on average. Mainstream broadcaster ESPN showed 2014 finals of The International live – the first such time an eSports competition had been broadcast on TV.

To get a closer look on the MOBA genre, watch the trailer for a documentary entitled Free To Play created by Valve posted on the top of this blog post, where the full movie is available on Youtube for free as well. Enjoy!

#gaming #esports #timeline #history #dota2 #gabriel