In the year 1971, the very first competition took place. Handpicked players would take part in a Spacewar competition and people were invited to come and watch. The winner would then gohome with a subscription to the Rolling Stone magazine.

The location was set in Stanford because they had had an AI lab and this was one of the few places that had been high-tech enough to be able to run this kind of competition. The first Pong cabinet would not actually go on to be installed until a few weeks later.

© Fox, Pexels.com

How does a Game Become a Sport?

In order for a game to become a sport, a number of components need to come together. You need to make sure that you have a tournament, as well as some competition[SJ1]. If you look at the top UK online casino sites, you will soon find that they often have a huge range of games. Some of them offer live blackjack and even roulette. Various people can go on and compete with others, and come out with a win. This just goes to show how the rise of online casino games has paved the way for eSports. Without this casino foundation, it’s safe to say that eSports, as we know it now, would not have emerged as it has done.

New Competition

The video game industry has been growing for years. Atari even hosted a championship for Space Invaders in the year 1980 and 10,000 people attended. Gaming competitions were relatively popular by the year 1989 and The Wizard was released at this point as well. This helped to give the industry the steam it needed to launch titles such as Super Mario Brothers 3. As the internet grew and became much more established, it would seem that gaming soon became a very inevitable addition. The world changed even more when 1988 came around. Netrek, which was the first internet game launched, managed to attract up to 5,000 people every single day by the year 1993. This was an entirely new gaming experience, to say the least, because you had arcade battles and you also had much more advanced hardware. This is when online gaming truly started to boom, making it possible for opponents to be on opposite sides of the world and still play together as though they were sitting in the same room.

The Growth of eSports

Three elements are contributing to the rise of the industry. You have streamed competitions and you also have very organised leagues. As if that wasn’t enough, you also have professional players who stream their events so that they can be viewed online. Twitch is a huge platform for this and it would seem that people from all across the world can easily tune in and watch as many games as they want from their favourite streamers. It would seem that platforms such as this are quickly becoming huge and it’s fantastic to see how things have changed so far. Twitch has played a massive part in how things have changed and it would seem that there is now even more room for growth as even more streaming services are launched. This adds an interesting dynamic to the gaming world, to say the least, and ensures that we can all anticipate further developments in the future.