E-sports has become an essential part of gaming with games like League of Legends, CS:GO, or Valorant. But which game actually hosted the first tournament? And what was the first major e-sport event? We will tell you.
What is considered the first e-sport match? Here opinions differ, as two events are essentially seen as the origin of e-sports:
- In 1958, the first video game for two players was presented by Instrumentation Higinbotham – “Tennis for Two”. This could also be played against each other at the open house, which some see as the beginning of competitive gaming and thus the first e-sport match.
- On October 19, 1972, the first major tournament between multiple players took place. Students from Stanford University competed against each other in “Intergalactic Olympics” in the game Spacewar.
What was the Intergalactic Olympics? In the game Spacewar, players competed in one-on-one matches. Each player controls a spaceship that is slowly pulled by a gravitational field towards the center. With a press of a button, players can jump into hyperspace and land at a random spot on the screen. They can also shoot, with the projectiles being attracted by the star as well.
The goal is to survive longer than the opponent. It was played on a PDP-1 computer.
About 25 players participated in the tournament, with two events taking place: a one-on-one tournament and a team event. The first place received a yearly subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. The winners of the team event were Slim Tovar and Robert E. Maas; the singles tournament was won by Bruce Baumgart.
You can get a glimpse into Spacewar in this YouTube video:
First Leagues in the 90s and the World Cyber Games
How did e-sport evolve? The first major tournament series happened in 1980. At that time, Atari held a tournament for the game “Space Invaders”. This event lasted over 3 months, and more than 10,000 players participated. However, it was not played directly against each other, but rather high scores were chased.
It was also the first tournament to be played on the home console, the Atari 2600. However, for the finals, the players were flown in. Rebecca Heineman won, playing Space Invaders for an hour and 45 minutes straight.
In the 1990s, LAN parties became more popular, and the internet became more important. In Germany, first leagues emerged, such as the DeCL – the German Clan League – from which ESL later evolved.
Tournaments mostly revolved around titles like Doom, Quake, or later StarCraft, Warcraft, and FIFA.
The first professional gamer: In the Guinness Book of Records stands the American Dennis “Tresh” Fong as the first professional gamer (via guinessworldrecords). He won in 1997 in a Quake tournament and won the Ferrari of developer John Carmack, earning him this title.
Learn more about Thresh and his story in this YouTube video:
The first international tournament: Another important milestone in e-sport history was the World Cyber Games, which took place for the first time in 2000 in Seoul. The event featured 174 players from 17 different nations competing for a total prize pool of $200,000.
The four games that were part of the tournament at that time were:
- FIFA
- Age of Empires
- Quake
- StarCraft
In 2001, 430 players from 37 nations participated. New additions included the video games Counter Strike and Unreal Tournament. The World Cyber Games were held every year until 2013, even in Cologne in 2008.
Further large tournaments followed, such as the Intel Extreme Masters, Major League Gaming, or DreamHack.
For a short time, many video game broadcasts were even shown on television. In Germany, the TV channel GIGA took care of it, which was shut down in 2009, in the UK the channel xleague, which ran from 2007 to 2009, and in the USA, tournaments of Madden NFL were shown on the respective sports channel from 2005 to 2008.
Today, however, most broadcasts surrounding e-sports take place on streaming channels like Twitch or YouTube.
What does it look like today? Today, e-sports is hardly imaginable without gaming. League of Legends captivates millions with the world championship every year. But Valorant, FIFA, and many other titles are also played competitively.
The amounts of money distributed are enormous. The highest prize pools are offered by DOTA 2. In recent years, 20 to 40 million dollars have been at stake for the big tournament “The International”.
One pro made headlines because at 17 he told his mother what he wanted to achieve, and he has now accomplished just that:
