Proto-eSports That Predate the Spread of the Internet

Today, we can’t imagine playing multiplayer video games – competitive or cooperative, doesn’t matter – without going online. You can play FIFA while checking out the latest soccer odds in a browser window, load a game and find countless competitors or teammates in the lobby, and maybe even qualify for a major international tournament without leaving your room. Things were a bit different in the distant past when internet connections were much slower – perhaps even non-existent. Competitive gaming predates the spread of the home internet, though, by quite a bit. The phenomenon that went down in history as ‘eSports’ has been with us for longer than many of you might think.

The beginnings: Spacewar!

Before shooters, MOBAs, and sports simulators, we had much simpler games – but simplicity doesn’t mean that they weren’t challenging as hell. One of the earliest “dogfight” games was Spacewar!, developed by computer scientist Steve Russell in 1962. The game involved two spaceships – the Needle and the Wedge – engaged in a dogfight in the gravity well of a star. Spacewar! became the first widely distributed video game, even though the hardware required to run it – a PDP-1 microcomputer – wasn’t exactly widespread at the time.

The first recorded video game competition was the “Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics” held almost 50 years ago, on October 19, 1972. The participating players fought each other “arena-style”, in five-man free-for-all matches. The first prize for both the teams and solo competitions was a year-long subscription to Rolling Stone magazine.

Street Fighter II and the first large-scale video game tournaments

There were many arcade gaming competitions in the Golden Age of Arcade but most of them were built around persistent high scores stored by the games. Then Street Fighter II: The World Warrior emerged, and with it, the first tournament-level competition between two players. The game became one of the most popular titles in its genre in the early 1990s and ultimately led to the creation of the fighting-game-focused annual tournament called “Evolution Championship Series” in 1996. 

The first EVO (then called “Battle by the Bay”) was held in 1996 and involved 40 competitors playing Super Street Fighter II Turbo and Street Fighter Alpha 2. In time, the tournament evolved and grew, moving from Sunnyvale, California to the Las Vegas Valley. EVO is held to this day – the franchise is owned by Sony and Endeavor’s esports venture RTS. The list of games played at the event still includes Street Fighter, with the addition of other popular titles like Tekken, Mortal Kombat, and others.

KeSPA

eSports was strong in the late 1990s around the world, with the CPL, QuakeCon, and the Professional Gamers League continuously holding tournaments in Counter-Strike, Quake, and StarCraft, among others. Most of them locally. None of these gave eSports the legitimacy the Korean eSports Association did, though.

The KeSPA was founded in 2000 after South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism approved the initiative. Its goal was to turn competitive gaming – prolific in the country’s vast network of internet cafes – into a bona fide sport, complete with governing bodies and official international tournaments with prize pools and extended media coverage. Today, KeSPA regulates the broadcast of eSports events in the country, oversees the ranking systems, regulates the conditions in which professional gamers work, and is even a member of the country’s Olympic Committee. The rest, as they say, is history – eSports gained a lot of popularity in traditional media and online, becoming the fastest-growing spectator sport of our time.