What was the first esports tournament in reality?

Electronic sports with games like league of legendsAnd the CS:GO or brave Now an essential part of playing. But in which match did you actually play the first tournament? What was the first major sporting event? We’ll tell you.

What counts as the first esports match? Opinions differ here, because two basic events are seen as the origin of esports:

• In 1958, Instrumentation Higinbotham introduced the first two-player video game – “Tennis for Two”. This can also be played against each other in the open house, which some see as the beginning of competitive gaming and thus the first esports match.
• On October 19, 1972, there was the first major championship between multiple players. Stanford students competed in the “intergalactic Olympics” in the game Spacewar.

What was the intergalactic olympiad? In Spacewar, you play one-on-one. Each player controls a spaceship that is slowly pulled toward the center by a gravitational field. With the press of a button, players can jump into hyperspace and land at a random location on the screen. They can also shoot, and the projectiles are also attracted to the star.

The goal is to survive longer than the opponent. It was run on a PDP-1 computer.

About 25 players participated in the tournament, which consisted of two events: an individual tournament and a team event. The first place was taken by a year’s subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. The team event winners are Slim Tovar and Robert E. Maas. The singles championship was won by Bruce Baumgart.

You can get an insight into Spacewar in this YouTube video:

Premier Leagues in the 90s and World Wide Web Games

How did esports evolve? The first major championship series was in 1980. At that time, Atari held a tournament in the game “Space Invaders”. This event lasted for 3 months and more than 10,000 players participated in it. Here, however, they were not played directly against each other, but high scores were caught.

It was also the first tournament to be played from the main console, the Atari 2600. However, players were taken to the final game. It was won by Rebecca Heinemann, who played Space Invaders for 1 hour and 45 minutes.

Then in the 1990s LAN parties became more popular and the Internet became more important. In Germany, the first leagues were formed, such as the DeCL – German Clan League – from which ESL later sprang.

Tournaments mostly revolve around titles like Doom and Quake or later StarCraft, Warcraft and FIFA.

First professional player: In the Guinness Book of Records, American Dennis “Trish” Fung is the first professional player (via Guinness World Records). He won the Quake Championship in 1997, winning John Carmack’s Ferrari. This earned him this nickname.

You can learn more about Thresh and his story in this YouTube video:

First international tournament: Another important milestone in the history of esports is the World Electronic Games, which were held in Seoul for the first time in 2000. 174 gamers from 17 different countries participated in the event and played with a total prize money of $200,000.

The four matches were part of the tournament at the time:

• FIFA
• Age of Empires
• earthquake
• StarCraft

In 2001, 430 players from 37 countries participated. The video games Counter Strike and Unreal Tournament were two new additions. The World Electronic Games were held every year until 2013, in 2008 even in Cologne.

Other major tournaments, such as Intel Extreme Masters, Major League Gaming, and Dreamchack, followed suit.

For a short time, there were many video game broadcasts on TV. In Germany, for example, he was taken care of by the GIGA TV channel, which was closed in 2009, in Great Britain the xleague channel, which ran from 2007 to 2009, and in the USA Madden NFL from 2005 to 2008 were shown on Associated Sports Channel.

Meanwhile, most esports-related submissions take place on broadcast channels such as Twitch or YouTube.

How do you look today? Today, it’s hard to imagine playing e-sports in games. League of Legends in particular attracts millions every year with the World Cup. But Valorant, FIFA, and many other titles are also played competitively.

The amounts being paid are enormous. DOTA 2 has the highest prize money, in recent years, 20 to 40 million dollars have been launched for the big tournament “The International”.

A pro made headlines because when he was 17 he explained to his mom what he wanted to achieve, and he did just that:

DOTA 2: 17-Year-Old Explains To Mom Perfectly Why He Goes Pro Gaming – Now Wins $20 Million Tournament