[Esports] The Beginning

People have been playing video games competitively for a long time. From competing with your friend, or sibling, to hanging out in an arcade, spending your quarters on one more match of Street Fighter, gaming competitively has been around for a while. However what a lot of people don't know is that there is an entire industry emerging built around this competitive play. A lot of people aren't aware that there are games that are fun to watch, and players that play for money. But most of all what goes unnoticed is that the market is getting bigger every year. From Quake, to Brood War, Counter Strike, Smash Bros, Halo, and now Starcraft 2 and League of Legends, eSports is showing it's potential.

 Commonly seen as the first real esports tournament  was the Microsoft sponsored Quake competition at E3 '97. However also in '97 CPL (Cyber Athlete Professional League) hosted it's very first tournament "The Frag". A year later, however CPL wasn't that special. There had been many tournaments similar to "The Frag" by the time "The Frag 2" rolled around. This was also around the time that online events were picking up with events like Clan Ring T3. This was also the second year of Quake Con and the first year that they held the Quake World Tournament. The conventions was much much bigger then the previous year. PGL was formed this year as well.

It wasn't until the year 2000 that esports really started to become big though. Up until now it had been mostly smaller events and none of the players were really remembered, however in 2000 a gamer by the name of Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel claimed $102,000 in prize money. Around this same time a Canadian Starcraft player wins the first OSL tournament with "Starleague" actually in the name. To date he his the only foreigner to win a Korean Brood War tournament. This was right after KeSPA (Korean e-Sports Players Association) was formed. The World Cyber Games Challenge also took place in 2000.

ESports success continued into 2001 when BoxeR won his first Starleague trophy. At this time BoxeR was considered to be the best Korean Brood War player, but it would take several years before he became a public figure. The first actual World Cyber Games has a prize pool of $300,000, features 430 players, playing 6 games. The games were Counter Strike, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, Age of Empires 2, FIFA 2001, and Starcraft: Brood War. However, despite the recent success of eSports, it had a recession at the end of 2001. As the dot-com bubble bursted most eSports organizers were forced to host less tournaments, the only company that continued to grow was CPL, hosting two major events a year. The CPL World Championship 2001's flagship game was Counter Strike.


This is where I am going to end this first article, as this was the beginning of the eSports market. In the next article I will talk about MLG, Halo 2, and the rise of eSports to the professional level.

I would also like to thank the writer of this for having the most organized, clean write up of eSports I have ever seen. It wasn't my first stop for research, but most of the things I found out happened to be written there anyway.