Arcade Era
The golden age of video games is the best place to begin when talking about competitive video gaming. This refers to a point in the eighties when arcade games were extremely popular. One of the first key figures in competitive gaming, a man named Walter Day, places the golden age of video games between 1982 and 1986. There are other estimates, but Day's is the only one that matters since we're talking about competitive gaming. Day founded Twin Galaxies in Ottumwa, Iowa, an arcade where he kept track of video game world records that players submitted via video tape. The mayor of Ottumwa named Twin Galaxies the "Video Game Capital of the World" in 1982. Day's list of records were published in several magazines, and he also hosted the Video Game News Update show to update gamers on new high scores. Twin Galaxies brought several record holders to Ottumwa to be photographed by LIFE magazine, and give the gamers a chance to meet each other. They challenged each other's scores by playing against one another to see if the claimed scores were legitimate. Twin Galaxies' first tournament is recognized as the first video game championship, which was aired on ABC-TV's "That's Incredible!" on February 21st, 1983.
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| The golden age gamers behind the golden age games Photographed by Enrico Ferorelli http://www.classicarcadegaming.com/contests/Nov1982/life.htm |
In 1990, Nintendo hosted the Nintendo World Championships across the United States. A single Nintendo cartridge was specially made for the tournament and it included special versions of Super Mario Bros, Rad Racer, and Tetris. The task for the players was to get fifty coins in Super Mario Bros, complete a special Nintendo World Championship course in Rad Racer, and get the highest score possible in Tetris. The players had six minutes and twenty-one seconds to play. Once the time was up, they used a formula to determine who had the highest score, using the scores achieved in each game: (Super Mario Bros.) + (Rad Racer x 10) + (Tetris x 25) = Final Score. The players were split into three age groups: 11 and under, 12-17, and 18 and older. The players had to earn a score of 175,000 to move on to the second round, and then 200,000 points allow them to move on to the semi-final round where the players were split into their age groups and played until the top seven of each group were found. The top two of those seven then played in a final round, and the winner of those two was crowned the champion. The winner in each age category took home a $10,000 US Savings Bond, a new 1990 Geo Metro Convertible, a 40" rear-projection TV, and a gold painted Mario trophy. This tournament may have been more for the promotion of the Nintendo brand, but it was a video game tournament none-the-less.
Global Tournament Era
The release of Doom not only spawned a genre of games that e-sports thrives on, but also online gaming itself. People connected to each other via their phone lines to frag each other. Microsoft sponsored an offline tournament with the release of Doom II called Deathmatch '95. The tournament was held in Richmond, Virginia, and all the computers were exactly the same so no one had any sort of hardware advantage. This spawned all of the gaming tournaments I wrote about in my last post.
Angel Munoz founded the Cyberathlete Professional League in 1997. The CPL hosted one tournament in the summer, and one tournament in the winter. Counter-Strike was most often the featured game, so it had the highest prize pot. Teams from around the world would compete to prove themselves, as well as make some money. These teams would practice for several months between the tournaments, even flying in to practice playing together in an offline environment. An immediate rivalry formed between the American Team 3D and the Swedish Schroet Kommando. The two teams went back and forth being the best in the world, and many spectators showed up and connected to the online servers to witness the intense matches between the two powerhouse teams. The tournaments were always double elimination, and rows of computers were set up for teams to play on. Companies like nVidia sponsored the tournaments. For many years this was the best chance for gamers at calling themselves professional gamers. Teams like 3D and Shcroet Kommando had contracts that controlled salaries for their players, funded by their sponsors like Intel, AMD, ATI and nVidia. 3D and SK both had managers that made business decisions for their organizations. Other smaller teams that did not have the luxury of having the big name sponsors depended on the prize money to cover the travel costs. Unfortunately, the CPL did not pay very many of the players after the first few years. They have yet to pay the players their winnings to this day. This is probably why they decided to call it quits, everyone realized the CPL was just taking peoples' money, so they just stopped showing up to the tournaments. Another reason they closed was their main sponsors stopped sponsoring them. It is quite a shame that a tournament that was so influential in e-Sports became so corrupt.
E-Sports Media Coverage
In 2002, Trevor Schmidt founded GotFrag, an e-Sports community website. The front page would have coverage of any tournaments going on, any news in the gaming world, updates to the games they followed, and articles about anything related to games. They hosted replays of tournament matches, galleries of events, a message board for the community, and VIP informational videos that gave tips on how to get better at a given game. GotFrag was the ESPN of gaming. If there was an event going on, GotFrag staff was there taking pictures, interviewing players, doing commentary for live matches, keeping track of where each team in the tournament was in the brackets, keeping track of scores, who is playing for what team, posting where to connect to watch matches, everything. Without GotFrag, e-Sports would not have fans. Gamers would just play in these tournaments and no one would know about them. GotFrag was the media center of e-Sports and it has been very important in the development of e-Sports. Unfortunately many of the people behind GotFrag have either lost interest of moved on to bigger things in the community, so the website has slowed down significantly and only covers World of WarCraft, and the community has since moved on to other websites.
Major League Gaming was founded in 2002, and is the largest video gaming league today. Their goal is to make video gaming a televised spectator sport, and they have done well in working toward that goal. Everything they do is very professional and spectator friendly, unlike anything before it. Even the CPL seemed kind of thrown together and they were never able to get their matches on television. MLG has aired their tournaments on ESPN, several streaming websites, and they also stream everything on their own website. Their website is very similar to GotFrag; it has the same amount of media content. It is surprising how much success MLG has had with no help of the popularity of Counter-Strike, although Halo 3 does seem to be the Xbox 360 equivalent in fan base. I see MLG as the video gaming league of the future, and it has the greatest chance at validating e-Sports as a sport. I think if they managed to incorporate Counter-Strike in their events they would have the best gaming organization.
A Horrible Mistake
The Championship Gaming Series, founded in 2007, attempted to be the first televised gaming league, with a regular season and playoffs and everything. They wanted to establish teams for certain cities, contracts and salaries, general managers and everything just like real sports. Their matches were only aired on DirectTV, which took away a lot of possible spectators. Their games were Counter-Strike: Source, FIFA Soccer, Project Gotham Racing 3, and Dead or Alive 4. Each team had two Dead or Alive players, one male one female. This league had Counter-Strike, but it was the newer better looking but worse game play version of the original. This means many pro players from the original had to move on to this new version if they wanted to continue their career in professional gaming. So, every international Counter-Strike contending team in America quit and tried to get really good at this new game. This was quite a shocking move considering how much the Counter-Strike community hated this new game. But, as pro gamers do, they became the best at it and all but one Counter-Strike team were teams that switched games to play in the CGS. This seemed like e-Sports' future at the time, the players were supposedly being paid at least $30,000 for a season and they all spent the season in California playing these games. However, the financial costs proved to be too great and it had to be shut down. The regular Counter-Strike tournaments continued on without these pro players that went to the CGS, but without a single good American team, sub-par players had to step up to represent the country internationally, and it was bad. Not surprisingly, most of the players that switched games went back to the old game, and the rest apparently quit playing games competitively entirely. In their absence, the game had changed, many strategies and tactics they once depended on were no longer as dominant as they once were, so they had to relearn the game. It has taken until literally yesterday for the American teams to be good enough to even compete with the European teams. Three years of watching the European Counter-Strike teams dominate, with absolutely no American team to look up to. Quite a let down. Not only did CGS last barely a year, it also set American e-Sports way back in comparison to the rest of the world. Hopefully the entire e-Sports community has learned from this horrible screwup that was CGS.
The Future?
What is funny about all of this is South Korea is way ahead of the rest of the world, StarCraft is considered a professional sport there. Their top players are superstars like Michael Jordan. They have two channels dedicated entirely to broadcasting professional StarCraft matches. Their events are way bigger than the events for any game in any country. The players are all on teams that are not only gaming organizations but standalone businesses that have established their own brands. The players all have contracts, not just a few select players. Professional gaming in Korea shows just how big it can be, but maybe the rest of the world just isn't ready for that. Here's a video if you want to learn more about e-Sports in Korea.
References:
Alpager, Mark (?). Video Game V.I.P.S. Retrieved from http://www.classicarcadegaming.com/contests/Nov1982/life.htm
Bellos, Alex (2007, June 29). Rise of the esports superstars. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/6252524.stm
Day, Walter (?). Our Unique History. Retrieved from http://www.twingalaxies.com/index.aspx?c=17&id=332
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