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First Video Game Tournament
The tournament had 10,000 participants and was extremely important to the growth of eSports as it helped popularize competitive gaming and inspired future tournaments to occur. -
Nintendo World Championships
This tournament featured a bigger prize pool then the space invaders tournament with a $10,000 cash prize for the winner as well as a convertible and a television. This tournament started to set the tone for bigger prize pools in future tournaments. -
Red Annihilation
This was a tournament for the popular FPS, Quake. Quake was one of the first 1v1 player vs player type games so it allowed for better tournaments then previous arcade games did where people fought for a better high score. -
Cyberathlete Professional League is founded
he CPL looked to organize more competitive tournaments as well as offer players bigger prize pools which would reward them for being good at the games and give an incentive for people to get into competitive gaming. Right now, they are many e sports organizations which host events and offer money to players, but the CPL was the first big one. -
KeSPA is formed
KeSpa is one of the most important eSports organizations in the world and is the reason that eSports is such a big phenomenon in South Korea. -
MLG is founded
MLG is one of the biggest eSports organizations today, with tournaments for dozens of differents titles and genres. Their goal when being founded as a company was to turn competitive gaming into something professional with real competition and prizes and value as a spectator sport -
CPL World Tour
The CPL World tour was a year long circuit which featured tournaments for the FPS game, Painkiller which ran for the entire year until the Finals were played in November. The total prize pool for the entire year was $1,000,000. The way the tournaments were set up all-year long and the attractive prize pool began to stir a lot of interest in the eSports scene, whether as a player or a spectator. -
League of Legends Season 2 World Championship
The grand prize was 1 Million dollars. Over 8.2 million viewers watched the online stream of the tournament, making it the most watched eSports event of all time. -
Us Government recognizes League of Legends Players as Professional Athletes
As a result of many discussions with the creators of the game, Riot Games and the US government, League of Legends has been recognized as a professional sport. Foreign players may now gain visas to live the country and work there under the title of a professional athlete. -
League of Legends becomes an Olympic Sport
Because of the United State's decision to recognize League of Legends players as professional athletes, The International Olympic Commitee also decided to accept it as an olympic sport. The game will be featured at the 2016 summer olympics in Rio do Janeiro, Brazil.
