Esports are becoming more mainstream. You can now watch some of the major tournaments on TV, just like you can watch soccer, hockey, or golf – and Esports was also featured as part of the 2022 Commonwealth Games.
Competitive online gaming can start with casino sites like 888, where you can play online poker against gamers around the world, or it can be on a PC or console playing Fortnite, Call of Duty or Rocket League in front of a packed stadium.
How did gaming reach the dizzying heights of multi-million-dollar prize pots and American colleges and universities offering Esports scholarships to high-performing students? As humans, we love a bit of competition, and gaming competitions have been growing since the 1970s.
A Timeline of Esports
1971 – Students at Stamford University organized a Spacewar! tournament, for the grand prize of… a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine.
1980 – The first truly official competitive gaming event took place, where more than 10,000 people took part in the Space Invaders Championship
1980 – Walter Day created Twin Galaxies to monitor and record the top scorers on arcade machines around the world, and he also created the first professional gaming team – earning himself a place in history as a pioneer of Esports
1990 – The burgeoning console market meant that players could get all the fun of the arcade at home, and Nintendo led the way, creating the Nintendo World Championships where players competed in the classic games Super Mario Bros, Tetris, and Rad Racer
Mid-1990s – PC gaming started to become more mainstream as networking made it possible for LAN parties to play in expanding regions – using games like Doom, Quake, and StarCraft.
2000 – The first proper Esports tournament was held in Seoul, called the World Cyber Games.
2003 – Electronic Sports World Cup held in France.
2004 – The final of the Cyberathlete Professional League was broadcast on the MTV music channel.
2007 – The new Championship Gaming Series was the first competition to offer a prize of $1 million.
Most Popular Esports Games
The top games that are used in Esports events can be solo play or in teams. There are games that require real-time strategy or a quick trigger finger, there are those that need teamwork or the ability to play soccer with a car – so there is something for everyone.
Some of the top games include:
Counterstrike: Global Offensive – Two teams of five face off against each other for control, playing as either terrorist or counter-terrorists
League of Legends – Teams try to get each other’s base in this strategy game that is known as a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena
Fortnite – This Battle Royale game sees individuals or teams fight it out to be the last one standing.
Rocket League – Teams play soccer, as cars.
The Top Esports Events
What makes a top Esports event? They attract a global audience, in person at the stadiums that they are held in, and through multiple live streams and even TV coverage.
Evolution Championship Series
Known globally as EVO, this is a competition that is focused on fighting games and started as a Street Fighter tournament in 1996.
The popularity of the competition saw it grow and develop, rebranding as EVO in 2002 and moving to Las Vegas for the annual competition in 2005.
Although the tournament started on arcade machines, in 2004 it started using consoles, although keeping to the fighting games that started it all.
EVO was acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment and the Endeavour agency in 2021, so there is potential for this series of events to get even more media attention than it already has.
Electronic Sports League (ESL)
Born out of the burgeoning competitive gaming scene in Cologne, Germany, the ESL is both a production company and an Esports organizer, with multiple championships available for different games.
In 2015, ESLs Intel Extreme Masters Katowice became the most Esports event in history, with more than 100,000 people physically attending, and more than a million streamers on Twitch.
ESL champions play a wide range of the most-loved Esports games, including Battlefield 4, Dota 2, Halo, Heroes of the Storm, Mortal Kombat, and World of Tanks, among others.
The International
First held at the Gamescom in 2011 to promote a new game called Dota 2, The International is hosted and developed by Valve.
Now, twenty teams compete against each other for the largest single-tournament prize pool of any event – up to $40 million. This prize pool is crowdfunded using the microtransactions from battle pass purchases made by players in the game, which was developed as a funding tool by Valve in 2013.
The International is mostly covered on Twitch, and there are multiple streams including different languages, commentary, analysis, match predictions and player interviews. Valve has also released documentaries showcasing the competition
League of Legends World Cup
Commonly abbreviated to Worlds, this competition is hosted by Riot Games with the winners getting a Summoner’s Cup that weighs 70 pounds (and a multi-million-dollar prize).
When the first World’s was held in 2011, 1.6 million people streamed the competition – and by 2021 the global appetite for this competition had grown enough that at one point in the final there were 73.86 million concurrent viewers.
Fortnite World Cup
This might be one of the newest competitions on the list, but it has made headlines in more ways than one already despite only having had one event so far in 2019.
Hosted by Epic Games, the 2019 Fortnite World Cup sold out the 23,700-capacity stadium it was being held in and was being watched by viewers on Twitch and YouTube, as well as by players who were in the Fortnite world.
Getting into the world of Esports is an exciting way for gamers to get recognition for their ability to play – and the opportunity to win some truly enormous prizes.
