Research (In)complete: an Exploratory History of Competitive Video Gaming

You Got My Attention ¹

Esports, the competitive playing of multiplayer video games, is, as of early 2017, on the rise. According to digital gaming tracker Newzoo, in 2016 esports had global revenues (defined as total spending on media rights, advertising, sponsorships, merchandise, tickets, and game publisher fees) of $493 million, a respectable increase over 2015's total of $325 million. The total audience for live, streamed, and broadcast esports events likewise increased from 235 million to 333 million. ² The upward trajectory of esports has led to and been fed by increased media and business attention: ESPN began consistent, daily coverage of esports in 2016, and companies from equipment manufacturers to casino operators have looked to get in on the action. ³

While not new, competitive gaming has not received much historical inquiry to date. The earliest identified competitive gaming contest took place in 1972, with real expansion in the 1990s, when interest in playing video games grew rapidly; by that point, one could speak of esports as having been thoroughly professionalized, with regular competitions and even independent governing bodies. By the early twenty‐first century, esports had arrived, though the 2010s would see exponential growth that made previous levels of play, prize pools, and audience size seem miniscule.

Competitive video gaming has already had an interesting history that deserves preservation and analysis. Esports present excellent case studies of how a basic human drive, competition, is mediated by technological changes. It is not at all surprising that, as digital recreation evolved, humans figured out ways to compete against each other using it; but the ways that esports have thrived—or not—can reveal nuances in the basic truth that people like chances to beat each other and that some of them are really good at it. When considered in the proper historical context, it is not shocking that those with exceptional skill can make a living beating other people at video games. With the historical investigation of esports in its infancy, there is a need to outline the questions that can be asked and identify the sources that will help reveal the answers. At this stage, enough is known to propose a broad framework with which to understand esports' development over the past half‐century. This initial analysis suggests that the development of competitive video gaming is an under‐appreciated and not well‐understood area of play, work, and business that deserves serious historical scrutiny.

Call the Shot

A few words on terminology and approach. This article will use both “esports” and “competitive video gaming.” “Esports” is a term of relatively recent vintage—its earliest recorded usage was in the late 1990s in South Korea, and it crossed the Pacific a few years later. It is defined as “competitive tournaments of video games, especially among professional gamers,” ⁴ or, in other words, competitive video gaming. Google searches for the term “esports” were static until early 2013, when they increased rapidly; this date correlates with the onset of the current esports boom. ⁵ Writing before that date, it would have made sense to use only “competitive video gaming” to describe the subject, but with the term esports on the rise currently, it makes sense to use both, with the understanding that competitive video gaming encompasses esports but not necessarily vice versa. Esports describes, fundamentally, multiplayer contests with direct competition between participants, but it is possible to compete serially in single‐player games as well.

It is also important to note that the term “esports” is something of an anachronism when applied to developments before the late 1990s in that it wouldn't have been used by participants or observers at the time. This is consonant, however, with general historical practice, which often involves using terms to describe developments that would have been alien to contemporary actors. Mercantilism, for example, was a predominant economic theory in England from the sixteenth century to late eighteenth century, but it was not until Adam Smith that the “mercantile system” was named. ⁶ Likewise, Americans of the 1840s would be quite disturbed to learn that they were living in the antebellum era, as those without precognition had no knowledge of the coming Civil War. In this spirit, it is appropriate to refer to “esports” as far back as 1972.

Finally, both “esports” and “competitive video gaming” refer to several genres of games played in many different ways, both over time and currently. This article briefly summarizes the development of several types of games played competitively. For the sake of convenience, one can refer to “esports” as a category, with the caveat that one can't “play” esports any more than they can play “Hasbro” or “Steam.” To use the word “esports” as media organizations have (witness the 2017 headline, “Esports Will Become a Medal Event at the 2022 Asian Games” ⁷ ) is incorrect.

I Hear That

Any historical study of competitive video gaming should be situated within the broader context of video game history. This interesting field intersects leisure and technology. For the perfectly logical reason that it is a relatively new phenomenon, the historiography of video games lacks the depth of writing that the histories of chess or Elizabethan drama can boast. As historians have only been writing about video games for about 20 years, there aren't layers of analysis and interpretation to peel back.

In fact, the most in‐depth writing about the history of video games to date has come primarily from journalists. One of the first and most impassioned is J. C. Herz's Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds. Herz renders in snappy prose key moments in game history. A digression on the “future” of game purchases reminds us that the online distribution we take for granted—heavily weighted, in 2017, towards cheap to purchase or free to play games—was not inevitable. In the near future, Herz writes, kids will run games “on play‐per‐view off a cable channel or jiggle joysticks for a buck an hour online. Before we get movies‐on‐demand, interactive television, or any other media empire fantasy distribution scheme, kids will be playing some Sonic the Hedgehog sequel off a satellite network.” ⁸ To a generation conditioned to play games a quarter at a time, the thought of virtually unlimited play for free was almost inconceivable—and yet it is here.

Herz's enthusiastic approach is illuminating rather than encyclopedic, but others have approached the subject with more rigor. In The Ultimate History of Video Games, Steven L. Kent meticulously documents the evolution of video games from Steve Russell's work with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Tech Model Railroad Club creating Spacewar to the launch of Microsoft's Xbox. Drawing from more than 500 interviews conducted by the author, the book begins by cataloging pre‐video amusement games but really gets serious in 1971, when Nolan Bushnell developed a purpose‐built, coin‐operated Spacewar derivative called Computer Space that sold modestly. The following year, Bushnell's new startup, Atari, released Pong, which many credit as the first true arcade video game, and whose release is, for Kent (and most other writers on the subject), the inflection point for video games. ⁹

Kent recreates the rapid development of other video arcade titles, which bolstered the “golden age” of video arcades in the early 1980s. At the same time, several companies offered home gaming consoles. By 1981, the arcade business seemed to be a juggernaut. As Kent reports, arcade games took in $20 billion in revenue in 1981, substantially more than Nevada and New Jersey casinos, movies, and major league sports. With 24,000 full‐fledged arcades and 400,000 locations with a small selection of games (bars and pizza restaurants, among others), arcade games seemed to be omnipresent; there were, by one industry count, more than 1.5 million of them in the United States alone. Arcade devotees spent, it was estimated, 75,000 man‐years playing those machines in that year. ¹⁰ In about a half‐decade, an entire industry had been created.

And yet this digital utopia was no more sustainable than a gambler's lucky streak. Overexpansion followed by a sudden decline in both the arcade and home console business led to the “crash of 1983,” the video gaming industry's first cataclysm. Home console systems disappeared, video game titles languished in discount bins, and major developers left the field. The crash illustrates the susceptibility of video gaming to the same laws of supply and demand that govern other industries, including gambling. Only the late‐1980s success of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) reinvigorated the console business. Kent covers the revival of the arcade market, the Sega/Nintendo/Sony “console wars,” and the growth of PC‐based games. Kent presents primarily a history of the video gaming business, with behind‐the‐scenes details of game design and development, corporate missteps, and legal battles.

Published in 2010, Tristan Donovan's Replay: The History of Video Games strives to present the story of games as a global one (reducing a trend towards U.S.‐centered studies by devoting more attention to Europe and Japan). In addition, Donovan focuses less on the business of video gaming and more on its art. “The real story of video games,” he writes, “is a story of human creativity, aided by technological growth.” ¹¹ That focus certainly provides a layer of depth to the tales of console wars and arcade crashes; it provides insight into why games looked the way they did. The development of PC and mobile games get more space in Donovan's book than earlier game histories, as do independent studios, which shortly after the publication of Replay would become major game providers thanks to the App Store and Google Play. Donovan closes his book with a 40‐page “Gameography” that highlights major titles in several game genres, ranging from “Japanese role‐playing games” to “British surrealism.”

Richard Stanton's A Brief History of Video Games: The Evolution of a Global Industry takes a similar tack. Published five years after Replay, it takes the story a bit further, with more attention devoted to new consoles, Valve Corporation's Steam platform, and mobile games. Far more image‐heavy and much less text‐dense than Replay, it does not boast its predecessor's level of detail, but does provide a highly readable summary of others' work. Tellingly, it is the first of the books surveyed to mention esports by that name, including an eight‐page chapter on the phenomenon. ¹²

Stanton mentions the “early Spacewar competitions,” Atari's 1980 Space Invaders Championship, and Twin Galaxies' record‐keeping as key milestones, but reports that “it wasn't until around the millennium that international tournaments and leagues setting players against each other on a regular basis were established.” ¹³ He marks the founding of the Electronic Sport League in 1997, the debut of the World Cyber Games tournament in 2000, and the 2002 creation of Major League Gaming as the key moments for the inception of esports. He sketches the growth of game‐streaming service Twitch, which he believes was a necessary precondition for the broad popularity of game competitions as mass entertainment. ¹⁴ Stanton devotes a great deal of space to StarCraft, explaining the game's South Korean popularity and walking the reader through a typical competitive match. First‐person shooter (FPS) franchise Counter‐Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) gets a similar treatment. He then details the rise of multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games. At the time of writing, League of Legends (2009) and Defense of the Ancients (DotA 2, 2013) were the reigning kings of the genre. As with the other game types, Stanton mixes statistics about their popularity (65 million unique monthly players for League of Legends) with brief descriptions of play. He concludes with the heady optimism prevalent when he wrote his book: “In Asia, the most important StarCraft and DotA 2 games are already held in huge stadiums with crowds in the tens of thousands. Before long you'll see the same at Wembley.” ¹⁵

Video games were, from their start, controversial, with moral authorities and concerned parents campaigning incessantly for their regulation or removal. Others disagreed. Patrick M. Markey and Christopher J. Ferguson's Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong seeks to defend violent video games and debunk the arguments of their detractors. As psychologists, the authors chiefly argue that playing violent video games is not harmful to young people and may, as the back‐cover text proclaims, “make us more morally sensitive.” ¹⁶ Markey and Ferguson cite the December 1993 uploading of Doom as a crucial moment for violent games. Although it was not the first FPS game, its more sophisticated graphics made possible a markedly more immersive three‐dimensional playscape than earlier entries like Wolfenstein 3D. Not even this, though, truly set Doom apart; what did was “the introduction of online death matches,” in which players tried to kill as many other (human) players as possible. Able to compete against other players on locally networked machines or via modem, Doom became distractingly popular; the authors cite a report that employers had specifically forbidden Doom playing during business hours. ¹⁷ This was an important moment to the history of esports that had a profound effect on the genre and cast a long shadow far outside the gaming community. It is up to historians to better contextualize how the rise of competitive video gaming figures into evergreen debates on video games and violence.

In Coin‐Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Arcade, Carly A. Kocurek considers the gendering of gaming. Attempting to explain why video gaming came to be seen as “the exclusive domain of young men,” Kocurek argues that it was due to four primary factors: the greater ease with which young boys participated in public culture, the theming of video games around military and male‐dominated sports, the violent nature of video game content, and the “ongoing association of technological skill with masculinity.” ¹⁸ Focused on the development of the video gamer as a “cultural identity” in the golden years of arcade gaming (Pong to the Crash, or 1972–83), she places the origin of video gaming as a mostly male preserve in those years: “Gender inequalities in video gaming did not develop during the industry's post‐crash resurrection or with the rise of home consoles; rather, these historical inequalities emerged through public discourse and public practice that accompanied the rise of video gaming's early commercial success in the coin‐op industry.” ¹⁹

In her second chapter, “Gaming's Gold Medalists: Twin Galaxies and the Rush to Competitive Gaming,” Kocurek focuses specifically on one “important image,” the photograph of young male gamers in front of Ottumwa, Iowa's Twin Galaxies arcade in Life magazine's 1982 “Year in Pictures.” Kocurek presents arcade owner Walter Day's choreographing the photograph itself and its cultural implications for gaming's gendering. Analyzing the photograph as a document, Kocurek says, “contributes to an understanding of the persistent fetishization of individualized competitive achievement in gaming. Further, it suggests that, at its perceived best, arcade gaming provided an arena for young white men with quarters to burn to prove their mettle.” ²⁰ Kocurek delivers on her deep reading of the photograph (and then some), and provides an excellent, brief description of Day's creation of the Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard, the first effort to standardize scorekeeping and create a national database of high scores. ²¹ This was one step in the evolution of competitive video gaming.

Journalist Roland Li directly takes on competitive gaming in Good Luck Have Fun: The Rise of eSports, but does not trace the development of esports from its 1970s roots. Instead, in an introductory chapter he glosses over two competitive gaming milestones, the 1972 Spacewar competition and Atari's 1980 Space Invaders Championship before declaring that, thanks to growing complexity of games, “[f]our decades later, competitive gaming … has become a global phenomenon” with professional gamers vying for seven‐figure cash prizes. ²² The book is chiefly a chronicle of notable moments in twenty‐first century esports, chiefly the rise to dominance of specific players and teams. Li discusses the growth of games like StarCraft, StarCraft 2, League of Legends, and DotA 2, as well as the development of streaming services like Twitch, but does so in a purely descriptive way. These happenings are begging for a more nuanced historical context and thorough analysis.

The most exhaustive analyses of competitive video gaming to date has come from the game studies field. In the 2012 collection Computer Games and New Media Cultures, Tanja Adamus contributes a chapter on “playing computer games as electronic sport.” In addition to constructing a theoretical framework for esports as a youth subculture or scene, she provides a brief introduction to the genre. ²³ Adamus finds that both subculture and scene frameworks are lacking in some regards. Writing to “shed some light on a phenomenon that has been a kind of a blind spot in the current scientific discussion on computer games and players' cultures,” she concludes that we haven't quite grasped just what esports are. ²⁴ Esports, she says, are more than just a new form of media usage among adolescents.” ²⁵ She speaks to the need for further “fundamental as well as specialized research,” concluding optimistically that “there will be a lot of possibilities for further scientific studies.” ²⁶

In Half‐Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, games scholar Jesper Juul constructs a “coherent theory of video games” that has implications for the study of competition. ²⁷ How, he wants to know, have computer games extended the possibilities of traditional games, and how are they new? His classic game model holds that a game has six features that work on three levels; as rules within the game itself, as the player's relationship to the game, and as the relationship between game play and the rest of the world. Juul holds that a game is: (1) a rule‐based formal system (2) with variable and quantifiable outcomes (3) where different outcomes are assigned different values (4) where the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome (5) which the player feels emotionally attached to (6) and whose consequences are optional and negotiable. ²⁸ Juul concludes that video games are, in essence, a “combination of rules and fiction” that create challenges for players to overcome and set limits on how they can be overcome. ²⁹

Juul's theory raises interesting implications for the study of competitive video games that may challenge his conclusions. Juul holds that “the conflict of a game is not antisocial; rather it provides a context for human interaction … competitive games are social affairs, and much more so than the rarely‐played non‐competitive games that have been proposed.” ³⁰ This may be true, but competitive video gaming at the professional level introduces an entirely different context and motivation for game‐playing. While team play can lead to social bonding, and many gamers may be driven into the field by their fondness for games and desire to spend time with others who share their interest, professional gamers are motivated to “play” in individual matches primarily because of money.

Luckily, scholars have begun to seriously examine the implications of competitive gaming's professionalization. T.L. Taylor, in Raising the Stakes: E‐Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming, presents a study of competitive video gaming just before the mid‐2010s MOBA explosion. Writing as the disruption forced by the Great Recession on esports was the major story, Taylor seeks to examine not only players, but also “larger structural mechanisms and other activities (teams, leagues, broadcasters) as central mechanisms in the formation of a pro culture.” ³¹

Taylor gives primary consideration to esports in South Korea, a global leader in online gaming and competitive video gaming that “is regularly held up as a model for the future of e‐sports worldwide.” ³² She demonstrates that competitive gaming's early triumph in Korea transcends young people's passion for StarCraft; rather, it was built upon key institutional and infrastructural foundations, ranging from robust high‐speed Internet access and the proliferation of PC bangs (cafés) to corporate sponsorships and media attention. ³³ This is in concordance with her overall view of competitive video gaming's development. She sees much more continuity between its early manifestations and the high‐stakes professional matches of contemporary esports.

Taylor briefly sketches a history of competitive video gaming that begins, like virtually all others, with Spacewar and swings to arcade high score one‐upmanship in the late 1970s. Walter Day's scorekeeping is given its due, as is the 1982–4 television program Starcade. She sees competition shifting with the migration of video game play into the home following the growth of first console gaming, then PC gaming. She sees the popularity of Doom and Quake as instrumental, with face‐to‐face (F2F), local area network (LAN), and ultimately remote play online creating modern competitive video gaming. ³⁴ Of particular note are two 1997 events: Dennis “Thresh” Fong's victory in Quake's Red Annihilation tournament and the launch of the Cyberathlete Professional League. ³⁵ Overall, she believes, it is the Internet's growth that made “scaling niche activities possible,” opening the door for competitive video gaming to become a widespread phenomenon. ³⁶

Taylor's work correctly assigns a major role in esports to South Korea, and Dal Yong Jin's Korea's Online Gaming Empire is a necessary study of the rapid growth of esports there. In his introduction, Jin cites a Western software executive as saying, “When it comes to gaming, Korea is the developed market, and it's the rest of the world that's playing catch‐up.” ³⁷ The esports world that Jin depicts, in which games are simultaneously a commodity for developers, a vocation for players, and a form of media to be consumed by audiences, must have a prominent place in any history of esports that strives to be more than regional.

But Asia is larger than South Korea; more study of competitive play in other Asian countries is also needed. Nir Kshetri's 2009 article, “The Evolution of the Chinese Online Gaming Industry,” charts the development of the then‐$3 billion/year Chinese online gaming market, which, he writes, had in 2006 overtaken South Korea to become Asia's largest. ³⁸ Kshteri distinguishes between the “slow growth” of the 1990s and a more rapid growth after 2001, identifying three chief barriers (a different business model than the U.S., Japan, and South Korea; a high piracy rate; and government regulation) and describing how they were surmounted. He does not focus specifically on competitive multiplayer gaming, but notes in his abstract that, “a lack of primary data and empirical documentation and a lack of in‐depth treatment of some of the key issues are major limitations here,” which is an accurate description of the state of English‐language scholarship on much of Asian gaming. ³⁹

A decidedly international look at the growth of esports comes from Yuri Seo of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, whose 2013 article, “Electronic Sports: A New Marketing Landscape of the Experience Economy,” is chiefly concerned with advancing “the concept of eSports consumption in marketing by developing the experiential perspective of competitive gaming as an assemblage of multiple interrelated experiential performances, which traverse the virtual and real worlds.” ⁴⁰ In service to his chief argument, Seo outlines a brief (seven‐paragraph) “history of eSports” that begins in Europe and the United States with the release of multiplayer FPS games such as Quake and Doom in the “mid‐nineties.” Asian esports, in Seo's reckoning, date from 1998 and Blizzard Entertainment's release of StarCraft, which led to the dramatic popularity of it and similar real‐time strategy (RTS) games. ⁴¹

Seo writes that “[t]he history of eSports is dominated by two key developments.” ⁴² The first, he believes, is the increasing consumer literacy and popularity of computer games.” ⁴³ He cites the wide penetration of video game consoles in the United States as evidence for this growing popularity, although most esports are played on personal computers, not consoles. The second is the “dynamic technological evolution of the Internet and digital technologies.” ⁴⁴ In other words, he believes that a broad “installed base” of machines and a robust, accessible network to link them were necessary preconditions for the proliferation of esports as we now know it. It is a solid argument that fits well with both the extant evidence and simple logic. There remains, however, much to be explained. Namely, why did FPS games spring to popularity in the United States in the 1990s, why did StarCraft take South Korea by storm and continue to dominate that country until the 2010 release of StarCraft 2, and why did multiplayer online battle arena games like League of Legends create such a rapid expansion of esports' reach in the early 2010s?

There is some debate as to how exactly to categorize gaming competitors. Seo and Sang‐Uk Jung in 2016, for example, sought to reframe esports participants not as “players,” (thereby sidestepping much of the growing game studies corpus on the topic) but as “consumers.” ⁴⁵ They point to the need for a broader consideration of computer game play in light of the larger range of social interactions that competitive gaming opens up:

Their article illuminates the profound questions that competitive video gaming raises by expanding the range of interaction and consumption centered on games. The graphical and gameplay differences between the Atari 2600 port of Space Invaders and Overwatch are immediately obvious; but the ways that players engage with the games are even more fundamentally different. Any single theoretical framework that embraces both ends of what might be described as “home gaming” is so broad as to be effectively useless as an interpretative aid. Riffing on Watchmen's Rorschach, we not only must investigate further; we must develop new ways of conceptualizing what we find and where we look. As Adamus says, this is a blind spot, and it begs to be seen and described. ⁴⁷

Competitive video gaming constituted as esports is different from other forms of gaming because it has not just developers/publishers and players, but also spectators. Esports did not invent the concept of watching others play video games; those who have spent time in any arcade in the past 40 years can attest to that. Early competitions had relatively small audiences, but audiences are an integral, not incidental, part of today's big business esports scene. Audiences, presumably, buy things, which is why developers, sponsors, and advertisers have been footing the bill for competitions. N.T. Taylor points out a major gap in the scholarship when he notes that, “Little critical attention has been paid to the activities and perspectives of spectators—particularly to those who attend e‐sports events in person. In other words, there has been little attempt thus far in studies of e‐sports to attend to the embodied work of watching.” ⁴⁸ This is a fair point, as is his assertion that “we do not yet have an adequate understanding of the labor involved in other aspects of the industry—the activities of coaches, event coordinators, color commentators,” and audiences. ⁴⁹

There is some precedent for a historical study of competitive video gaming. Academic historians have begun to rise to the challenge of interpreting the development of video games, and their place in and meaning for surrounding culture. In 2016, Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins edited Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon, a collection which sought to “jump start the critical historical study of games,” that is, to move game histories from the “merely” descriptive to the analytical. ⁵⁰ This reset is critical, they argue, because “the poorly developed state of game history has become a drag on rather than a driver in the field of game studies as a whole, particularly with respect to humanistic or critical methods of inquiry.” A series of “takes” on historical topics focused on hyper‐specific terms, the collected essays suggest approaches to video game historiography. There are chapters of “achievements,” “cooperative play,” and “playing,” but, not its own, “competition.” Emma Witkowski's chapter on cooperative play describes the development of multiplayer games from the Magnavox Odyssey (1972) to Left 4 Dead (2008). Initially, competitive play was the norm: “The multiplayer mode essentially represented player(s) versus player(s) or head‐to‐head competition. And sports titles of the time championed this game mode, making it a prevalent way of playing together in the first decade of video games.” ⁵¹ And yet, the lack of a separate chapter on competition speaks to the gap in historical writing on the topic.

The time for a serious history of competitive gaming, then, is now.

Commlink on Line

Much like video games themselves, competitive video gaming emerged out of an academic computing subculture in its earliest days, and from a more generalized gaming subculture in its later iterations.

The earliest documented competitive gaming event was an October 1972 competition at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; those who could prevail at the genre‐creating game Spacewar took home a year's subscription to Rolling Stone (the magazine also covered the event, styled “the first Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics). ⁵²

Spacewar is, as discussed above, almost universally marked as the first video game. William Higinbotham developed a rival claimant, Tennis for Two, as early as 1958, but it remained largely unknown for many years. ⁵³ Steve Russell and other members of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club wrote Spacewar in 1961/62 on the university's $120,000 PDP‐1 computer. The game featured two spaceships on opposite sides of a sun; its gravity and the opponent's torpedoes were the implements of doom. ⁵⁴ Neither Russell nor anyone else at MIT bothered trying to make money selling the game—with few computers, there was no retail market. Yet it was widely shared, until, as J.C. Herz writes, “there was a copy of Spacewar on every research computer in America.” ⁵⁵

This is why, a decade later, a group of Stanford students would gather to drink beer and play the game under the scrutiny of Rolling Stone writer Stewart Brand and photographer Annie Leibowitz in what many hail as the birth of competitive video gaming. In his description of the competition, Brand gives a sense of the zeitgeist (and a brief description of the gameplay):

The game, by design, was competitive. It required two players and had no AI (computer) opponent. The version played at the Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics was modified to allow up to five players as well as options like space mines. By today's standards, the game is basic but not unchallenging; mastering the sun's gravitation is a bit of a learning curve. It may be a testament to competitive video gaming that, even within this primitive milieu, players showed individual styles. Per Brand:

The Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics included three contests: “Five‐Player Free‐For‐All, Team Competition (two against two), and Singles Competition.” Brand recorded the winners: Bruce Baumgart won the free‐for all, Tovar and REM the team, and Tovar the singles. ⁵⁸

Both Brand's writing and Leibowitz's photographs are priceless documents of hacker subculture circa 1972. Unlike the later construction of competitive video gamers as well‐conditioned athletes, the Stanford conclave is strictly counter‐culture: long hair, anti‐war poster, and Tolkien references are the norm. The hackers, Brand writes, are “[a] mobile new‐found elite, with its own apparat, language and character, its own legends and humor. Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what's possible.” ⁵⁹

Brand further writes that, while Spacewar was everywhere, there were not yet many other games. “It's an art form waiting for artists,” he wrote, “a consciousness form waiting for mystics.” ⁶⁰ This was prescient, as was his discussion of ARPA Net, the forerunner of the Internet. Anyone, Brand wrote, would be able to read news and share music, eliminating the need for newspapers and record stores. Brand even considered the possibility of playing Spacewar over the “Net,” and while “kid emeritus” Alan Kay held that it was possible, the infrastructure did not yet boast reliable and fast enough connections to make it feasible. ⁶¹ So, as early as 1972, the ideas were there; it would take the technology another generation to catch up.

The Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics are important, not because they were the first time players competed—that was the whole point of Spacewar from the start (it lacked a single player mode)—or because the quality of play was noteworthy. But, just like the ARPA Net showed the fumbling possibilities of online communication, those 20 Stanford‐affiliated gamers demonstrated that competitive video gaming could be compelling to both players and observers—the key to esports today.

Receiving Transmission

With computers large, expensive, and limited to large institutions, organized competitions à la the Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics did not become broadly popular. For most of the public, video games were played on cabinets in arcades. The main vector for serious competition, then, became achieving a high score on a single‐player arcade game, which in effect made it a multiplayer game.

High score hunting originated with video games. Into the 1970s, pinball machines' scores reset each time a coin was inserted for a new game. It was possible to keep track of and compare high scores manually, but this was not widespread. Video games, however, had greater capabilities. Midway's 1976 video game Star Wolf provided an innovation: the game “remembered” the highest score yet achieved on it and displayed it before play began. With the game itself timed (players had 60 seconds to score as many points as possible, with the chance for bonus time), the chance to beat the high score was a real incentive for continued play. ⁶²

This was just the start. Taito's Space Invaders (1978) was the first arcade game which not only saved the highest score achieved, but displayed it on the screen during gameplay. ⁶³ The next innovation was the personalized high score. Starting with Star Fire (1979), players could select three letters to be displayed next to their score. ⁶⁴ By 1980, many games had rosters of the top ten scores, each with three letters next to it.

Competing for high‐score bragging rights spread with remarkable, although perhaps unsurprising, speed across the United States. A skilled player could put his or her initials at the top of the leaderboard, perhaps even accumulate a small bit of local glory. But what about gamers in other arcades?

Walter Day was the first person to systematically track top scores—and promote his efforts. A video game aficionado, Day began by noting high scores in arcades he visited on his travels selling historical newspapers. In November 1981, together with Jon Bloch, he opened Twin Galaxy arcades in Ottumwa, Iowa, and Kirksville, Missouri. ⁶⁵ Three months later, Day publicly posted the Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard, soliciting scores from major manufacturers, trade journal publishers, and players themselves. Carly Kocurek, who has written the most compelling analysis of Twin Galaxies yet published, believes this was a transition for competitive video gaming:

Day parlayed his record keeping into the famous Life photograph, which was published in January 1983, as well as a segment on That's Incredible which aired the same month. ⁶⁷ The combined media attention raised public awareness of high‐level video gamers and garnered some publicity for Ottumwa as the “Video Game Capital of the World.”

Day's efforts did not translate into success for his arcades; both had closed by early 1984, victims of the arcade bust. ⁶⁸ But he continued his video game record keeping, for a time in conjunction with the Guinness Book of World Records and, starting in 1997, online. After a series of ownership changes, the Twin Galaxies website is still tracking high scores across nearly 100 platforms, proving the enduring worth of Day's vision. ⁶⁹

Around the time that Day made Ottumwa famous for video games, Superstation WTBS began broadcasting Starcade, a game show that featured two players competing against each other by answering video game trivia questions and playing games. Airing first in December 1982, the show lasted until 1984 in syndication, with 123 episodes broadcast. ⁷⁰ As T.L. Taylor writes, the show was one of many early attempts “to integrate a new form of culture, video gaming, into an existing one, television,” which makes it of great significance for the study of competitive video gaming. ⁷¹

Twin Galaxies and Starcade receive their due of recognition for charting and encouraging high score competition. One game that has not received much attention, but which is noteworthy, is Golden Tee Golf which, through several iterations since 1995, has provided an arena for golf‐loving tavern‐goers. Developed by Illinois‐based Incredible Technologies, the game was a departure from other titles, which tended to feature futuristic or fantasy themes. This was a game geared primarily towards 21‐ to 35‐year‐old bar patrons who might think twice about being seen in public battling wizards or blasting spaceships but were perfectly secure about driving down virtual fairways. ⁷²

Golden Tee made strides in competitive video gaming history. In late 1995, the game offered the first‐ever networked tournament, with 24 machines installed around the Chicago area linked to a central computer. The overall winner received $1,000, with the best player at each location getting a smaller prize. ⁷³ This was, according to Michael Rudowicz, president of the American Amusement Machine Association, the first coin‐operated manufacturer to organize such a competition. ⁷⁴ Golden Tee games were also the first to boast hard drives and individual ID cards that let players track their point totals. ⁷⁵ The company began holding national tournaments. By 2003, Golden Tee had an installed base of 100,000 machines nationwide, with 40,000 registered players and monthly tournaments with $200,000 in cash prizes. ⁷⁶

The game is important to the broader scope of competitive video gaming because it proved early on that networked play was not only feasible but lucrative (Golden Tee machines took in an estimated $350 million in 2003 alone). ⁷⁷ It also provided the prototype for the cultural mainstreaming of competitive video gaming. Consoles and arcades took gaming out of computer labs and into the home and public spaces; Golden Tee brought it into bars. While one strand of competitive play tends towards geek/nerd subculture, a competing strand idealizes the gamer as an athlete. Golden Tee, in many ways, opened the door for the jock video gamer.

Jacked Up and Good to Go

Competing against other players to get a high score brought a certain level of satisfaction, but it lacked the frisson of head‐to‐head competition, which has always been an important part of electronic games. Head‐to‐head play in arcades dates back to pinball. From 1960 onward, pinball manufacturers offered games that accommodated up to four players. Each game could still be played by one player, but in multiplayer mode, players alternated in turn, with each accumulating points on their own counter. ⁷⁸ Video games also featured this kind of serial competitive play.

Console sports titles allowed players to face off against each other at home, but it was the development of fighting games that brought head‐to‐head competition to the arcade. Unlike Spacewar, these games typically had two modes: single players could fight against AI opponents as they climbed the ladder to the game's final antagonist, or they could fight each other. The genre started with Capcom's Street Fighter (1987), but really came into its own with Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991). According to Steven Kent, Street Fighter II reinvigorated the arcade business in the early 1990s; arcades bought multiple machines to handle the volume of play. ⁷⁹ The game launched a multi‐media franchise that included comics books, movies, and a series of games on several platforms.

Mortal Kombat (1993), Midway's answer to Street Fighter II, likewise spawned an empire that spanned movies, television shows, and, of course, several generations of the game. Sega's Virtua Fighter (1993) and Tekken (1994), from Namco, had a similarly large impact, with the latter becoming a particularly formidable franchise. A series of other fighting games, featuring everything from Marvel super heroes to WWF wrestlers to fantastic prehistoric beasts (Primal Rage) gave players a range of environments in which to fight. Improvements in graphics and refinements in gameplay helped fighting games maintain their popularity in both arcade and home console platforms. It is a genre that is naturally suited to competitive play; it might be amusing to see if Player 2 can score more points than Player 1 at BurgerTime in 40 seconds, but watching two players battle to the finish (and, in the case of Mortal Kombat, to a gory “fatality”) was riveting.

Naturally, local heroes soon wanted to test their mettle against other elites. The first documented tournament took place in New York City in 1995, with 40 gamers dueling on Super Street Fighter II Turbo. ⁸⁰ The competition morphed into the Battle by the Bay, a Sunnyvale, California melee that featured 128 players on two Street Fighter variants. In 2000, it became an annual tournament that changed its name to the Evolution Championship Series (EVO for short) in 2002. By this time, the tournament featured several titles. The 2004 switch from arcade games to consoles engendered some controversy, but the tournament took a leap forward in 2005 when it moved to Las Vegas, or, to be precise, Henderson, Nevada's Green Valley Ranch casino resort. Subsequent tournaments have taken place in several casinos on and around the Las Vegas Strip. ⁸¹ EVO 2016, held at Mandalay Bay, featured nine games and an estimated 14,000 competitors. ⁸²

Fighting games, then, are a storied genre of competitive video games that, along with team sports titles such as Rocket League (2015), deserve further historical investigation.

Gimme Something to Shoot

Fighting games took a while to become more than head‐to‐head battles. It was another genre, FPS, that pioneered networked and LAN play. In particular, id Software's Doom was the game changer. Released in 1993, its wild popularity pointed the way to the future of software distribution. Its first episode, “Knee Deep in the Dead,” was available as free “shareware.” Those who wanted the additional two episodes had to pay. By 1995, the shareware version had been installed on more than 10 million computers. ⁸³ In this way, it was a forerunner of later “freemium” and free‐to‐play games.

There had been FPS games before, including id's own Wolfenstein 3D. Doom was more immersive than anything that came before: writers wax poetic describing its appeal. “Even now,” writes Richard Stanton, “Doom's combination of fluid motion and speed can take the breath away, its cacophonous sound effects ringing out as yet another demon explodes into a pile of mushy pink pixels.” ⁸⁴ Beyond its aesthetic thrill, though, was its multiplayer modes, which allowed at first four and later 16 players to share in the same game. ⁸⁵ Play could be cooperative or “deathmatch,” the latter pitting players against each other. Players gained a “frag” for each kill of another player and respawned if killed themselves. ⁸⁶ It was not the first FPS to allow humans to (virtually) kill each other; that honor goes to Atari's MIDI Maze (1987). ⁸⁷ It was, however, the first to use Ethernet (local area) connections to allow that kind of play, and it popularized the term “deathmatch.” ⁸⁸

Another Doom difference was its developers' commitment to modifications, or mods, to the game. Elements of the game were easily editable and content could be replaced entirely by “patch wads” or PWADs, which could create custom maps and alter game visuals and sounds. ⁸⁹ Modding vastly added to the game's appeal and replay value. A series of Doom sequels gave way in 1996 to Quake, which was even more amenable to multi‐player play. Other foundational shooters include Half‐Life (1998), built on a modified version of Quake's engine and which developed into the Counter‐Strike series. Call of Duty (2003) and Halo (2001) are FPS series that are primarily console‐based. Team Fortress 2 (2007) and Overwatch (2016) have emerged in recent years as popular FPS esports titles.

First‐person shooters have remained popular even as other genres have emerged, partially because of the style's inherent attractions and partially because of the innovations developers have brought to games. With the potential to be more complex and immersive than ever before, shooters will likely continue to enjoy success.

All Right, Bring It On

The increasing sophistication of available hardware opened up new vistas for video game design and play. This led to the development of real‐time strategy (RTS) games, primarily for the PC. Westwood Studios' Dune 2 was the game that defined the genre. In the words of one chronicler, it and its successors “took the strategy of the turn‐based strategy games, removed the monotony inherent in them, and fused the result with the action of a first person shooter.” ⁹⁰ RTS players must harvest and manage resources, build structures, research technologies, create units, and manage combat. Westwood Studios' Command and Conquer (1995) and Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft series (1994–2003) developed the genre further, as did Microsoft Game Studios' Age of Empires (1997) and its sequel, Age of Empires II (1999).

Many RTS games had fantasy and historical settings. But it was the jump to science fiction that brought the genre to its greatest popularity. Blizzard Entertainment's StarCraft (1998) allowed players to use one of three races (Terran, Zerg, Protoss) in a single‐player campaign mode, single‐player matches against the AI, and multiplayer combat. StarCraft is notable for the freedom players have. They can, for example, quickly produce many low‐value units, or climb the tech tree by researching and building more advanced units, which may leave them vulnerable to an early “Zergling rush.” Similarly, each of the three races has strengths and weaknesses that good players exploit. Respectable play combines effective resource management, scouting, unit building, appropriate tech researching, and micromanagement of combat. ⁹¹ Superb players must blend strategic insight with tactical perfection. The game, according to one RTS enthusiast, “put control of the gaming experience into the hands of the player,” which led it “to become a truly competitive RTS.” ⁹²

Competitive play took place over LAN connections as well as Blizzard's own online Battle.net. And while the game was popular in the United States, it became truly massive in South Korea. The game hit the country in the aftermath of the 1997 financial crisis. Distributor Young‐man Kim's decision to provide free copies of the game to Korea's burgeoning PC bangs made it accessible to unemployed young people with much free time. Combined with the nation's robust broadband infrastructure and an early media interest, this made StarCraft a phenomenon. ⁹³ With about 15,000 PC bangs charging roughly $2 an hour for access, StarCraft became an inexpensive, popular obsession. ⁹⁴ By early 1999, 170,000 copies of the game had been sold in Korea, with players logging a combined 300,000 hours a day on Battle.net, compared to 200,000 hours for American players (this despite the U.S.'s population outdistancing South Korea's by nearly six to one). ⁹⁵

Within a year, the first league was formed, with televised matches soon filling arenas. This led to the creation of an industry around StarCraft and other titles. Media coverage was omnipresent; by 2010, South Korea could boast “two cable television channels (Ongamenet and MBC Game), five Internet Protocol (IP) televisions, and two Web portals” dedicated to competitive video gaming. ⁹⁶ When discussing competitive video gaming, it is hard to overstate the importance of South Korea. The game remains so popular that, in early 2017, South Korean presidential candidate Moon Jae‐in released a custom StarCraft map to promote his campaign. ⁹⁷

With competitive play becoming lucrative, professional players emerged, and with them, the first organizations that systematically promoted and policed esports. The Online Gamers Association (OGA) was launched by EuroGamer at the Sports Academy in London in 1999 as “an independent governing body set up for everybody in online gaming to come together and help online gaming through its growth period.” ⁹⁸ The OGA proved to be ephemeral, but other representative bodies have emerged. Not surprisingly, one of the most well established is in South Korea. The Korea e‐Sports Association (KeSPA) began in 2000. Created with the blessing of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and supported by major corporations, KeSPA is tasked with regulating and organizing both players and tournaments. As T.L. Taylor writes, KeSPA's prime role “in everything from maintaining player statistics and rankings to managing broadcast licenses and organization details for tournaments” has assisted greatly in stabilizing South Korea's esports scene. ⁹⁹ The continued existence of these organizations is further evidence of esports' permanence.

Your Warriors Have Engaged the Enemy

If competitive video gaming reached maturity with StarCraft, it entered an entirely new stage with the recent growth of multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games. MOBAs typically feature teams of five human players fighting on a map with three diagonal lanes that connect their bases. The object of a MOBA is to destroy the opposing base. As with fighting games going back to Street Fighter II, players can choose from a selection of heroes, each with different abilities. An effective team must have heroes who serve specific roles, such as carry, tank, ganker, jungler, and support. ¹⁰⁰ As the game progresses, players unlock skills and acquire better equipment.

MOBAs grew directly out of RTS games; just as Half‐Life was born from a Quake mod, the first recognized MOBA, Aeon of Strife, was a customized StarCraft map. ¹⁰¹ Defense of the Ancients (DotA) started as a WarCraft III custom map in 2003. This, in the opinion of chronicler Mike Minotti, has essentially all the ingredients of a “modern” MOBA: two teams of five players each, levelling up with experience earned, and a jungle stocked with “creeps” (AI‐controlled enemies). ¹⁰² In addition, DotA stripped away the resource management, base construction, and army building from WarCraft III, exchanging complexity for carefully timed hack‐and‐slash fighting. ¹⁰³ It was, however, still a WarCraft III mod, and did not boast any new heroes. ¹⁰⁴

In 2009, two standalone MOBAs appeared: Demigod was handicapped by server issues and did not achieve mass popularity, but Riot Games' League of Legends did. Built partially by DotA veterans, League of Legends was a friendlier evolution of DotA, with smaller penalties for dying and more abundant mana (spell‐casting energy). ¹⁰⁵ The most revolutionary part of League of Legends, however, was its price: it was free to play. This is where competitive video gaming is influenced by mobile‐ and social‐based games like Farmville. The entire base game was free to the player, with Riot's revenue coming from in‐game purchases. This quickly established itself as a viable model; as of 2016, Riot was earning $150 million a month from League of Legends. ¹⁰⁶ By comparison, Blizzard made an estimated $437 million from StarCraft and $542 million from StarCraft II from their inception through 2016. It would take Riot less than a year to earn that from League of Legends. ¹⁰⁷

League of Legends is the leading but not only MOBA with a strong competitive scene. DotA 2, launched by Half‐Life publisher Valve in 2013, has become a rival offspring of the original. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) that also feature team‐based competitions, like Wargaming's World of Tanks, World of Warplanes, and World of Warships, have also been fertile ground for professional competition. Team‐based play offers yet another variant of competition with a variety of interesting questions.

Finally

Esports became front‐page news via the New York Times in 2014, ¹⁰⁸ but they have a history that stretches back to 1972. As a relatively new form of competition, it invites serious analysis that can confirm the validity of or problematize existing theories of why and how people compete. While the general outline of competitive video gaming's history can be gleaned from presently accessible sources, concerted collecting and documentation efforts can make the task of assembling a more comprehensive history far more realistic and can preserve primary sources for future generations of scholars, who will undoubtedly have different questions.

The history of competitive video gaming deserves preservation and analysis for its own sake, but studies to come promise to use the activity to explore how people approach play, sport, entertainment, and the professionalization of each. This is an area that is begging for more study.