A brief history of eSports

From a music magazine subscription to $34m dollars in prize money – how the world of eSport has grown to become the biggest sporting entertainment activity on the planet.

eSport is chess at warp speed. It’s strategic, you need to be really clever, several steps ahead of your opponent, you need to have good strategy, you need to practice all the time, to the point – and even beyond – of obsession. 

The history of ‘electronic sports’ dates back to the 1970s and Stanford University in America where a group of students competed in the game Spacewar! (itself dating back into the 60s) for the prize of a Rolling Stone magazine subscription. Fast forward 50 years and more than $219m has been handed over in prize money for entering the battle arena of Dota 2 alone.

Big numbers are everywhere: $84.4m picked up for Fortnite, $73m in League of Legends and $32.1m for another inter-galactic duel, StarCraft II.

Just as technology has developed, and access to technology has improved, today we live in a world where almost everyone, regardless of age, class or where they live, now has access to computer games via their own personal device. This means the eSports has grown exponentially.

Space Invaders provided the world with its first true world championship, when the competitors were around the 10,000 mark in 1980, and throughout that decade recognition for such events lay within the printed pages of record books in the absence of the internet to spread the word.

That game changer arrived in the 1990s, bringing together gamers from around the planet, in the virtual world rather than them having to travel to one destination, and suddenly big brands got involved. 

By 1997, what is now considered the first competitive eSport took place, Red Annihilation saw 2,000 Americans compete in shooter game Quake with the eventual winner driving off in the Ferrari of legendary computer game developer John D Carmack. 

Soon after a professional league was formed with prize money of up $15,000 being offered for tournaments as the game began to resemble the tiniest fledging of the gargantuan sport it has become today.

Other key milestones included the birth of Twitch, the online streaming platform, in 2011, which, in just two years, would have viewers watching 12 billion minutes of video. That same year, US eSports players were recognised officially as professional athletes and months later, The Staples Center in Los Angeles drew a physical sold-out attendance of 15,000 and an online audience of 32 million for the League of Legends World Championship.

Twenty years after Red Annihilation, upwards of $110m was awarded across nearly 4,000 tournaments with $24.6m for The International, the annual grand prix event for Dota 2 – last year that prize pool had risen to $34m, with the top prize won by Red Bull Team OG, one of Mia’s clients. 

Next year, eSports is predicted to generate $1.8bn in revenue – an increase of 0.7billion. The figures are simply mind-blowing – almost as mind-blowing as the talent, skill, dedication and mental strength it takes to win those big-money, high-pressure tournaments.