The first task I set myself was to learn the history of esports, finding out where it had come from and where it was heading. It wasn’t long before I hit my first obstacle, people were actually having real beef with each other over how to write esports. Was it esports, Esports or E-Sports? The amount of debate was unreal, it was far beyond the Football vs Soccer argument. If you want my two pennies, from my research, its esports! If you call it anything else you are wrong and, according to some, should be burnt at the stake!
So now I knew how to spell the sports name but where did it come from? The first tournament was in 1972 at Stanford University and involved a game called Spacewar a title that was developed in the 1960s and is the equivalent of noughts and crosses by today's gaming standards. In the 90s titles like Street Fighter and Doom stepped things up a notch and in 1996 the first Street Fighter tournament took place in California and involved 40 people. This tournament was called “Battle of the Bay” and is still going strong today under the name EVO which now has on average 10,000 spectators. This new “sport” needed players and eventually The Cyberathlete Professional League was founded in 1997, I imagine when people said that they were a cyber-athlete back then they were probably laughed out of the comic shop they probably hung out in.
There are some relationships that were always meant to happen, Will and Kate, Ross and Rachel and the internet and gaming. Xbox Live opened up a whole new world for console gamers with PC gamers laughing at everyone else playing catch up. People could now find someone to play against at any time of day, you could also play people in other countries. I still think the online troll was born during the heyday of Xbox 360. Titles like Halo 2 paved the way for COD and Fortnite but it was Counter Strike and StarCraft that lit the touch paper under esports gaining a mass following that increased year on year and is still going strong today.
In 2010 the first Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games surfaced, which were team based. Two of the sports biggest titles were born, DOTA2 and League Of Legends, two juggernauts. These were like the equivalent of Star Wars having kids with Lord Of The Rings, massively popular and hugely entertaining to watch. They are still the king and queen today even after being around for over 7 years. League of Legends has over 100m players alone, that’s more than the population of the UK and Canada combined.
Eventually titles like FIFA, F1 and Fortnite broke into the scene respectively, but, the main players are the MOBA titles. League of Legends had 200 million viewers at the same time during the world championships in 2018 which is the equivalent of every single person in Pakistan sitting down to watch a video game on their TV.
I know that some purists will say that I have missed A LOT of information out of this history lesson, that’s why I said it was brief, get your own damn blog!
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