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First Video Game Tournament
In November of 1980, Atari held the first ever large-scale video game tournament: The National Space Invaders Championship. It was created to help promote their console release of the popular game, Space Invaders on the Atari 2600. 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. Link text -
Nintendo World Championships
The Nintendo World Championship had thousands of competitors compete to get the highest score in the games Super Mario Bros, Rad Racers and Tetris with a time limit of 6 minutes and 21 seconds. 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. Link text -
Starcraft released
Starcraft was a sci-fi real time strategy game created by Blizzard. It singlehandedly sparked the huge surge of eSports popularity in South Korea and as the professional scene developed, it really set the tone for how eSports tournaments should be treated and handled all around the world. Players all over the country could face off against each other in a battle of wits and this easy acessability of competition made it great. Link text -
KeSPA is formed
Founded in 2000, with approval from the Korean ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. It's goal when created was to make eSports an official sport and would do this by broadcasting events, creating a good atmosphere for pro gamers to work in. 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. Link text -
World Cyber Games
A new South Korean eSports organization was created in late 2000, by the name of the World Cyber Games. The goal of the organization was to create an annual international tournament similar in a sense to the Olympics except with eSports instead of actual sports. This was one of the first international competitions. Link text -
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. They seeked to turn eSports into a mainstream event by offering a lucrative prizepool and they even managed to get one of their tournaments televised. Link text -
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 winner of the grand finals hosted in New York were awarded a prize of $150,000. Link text -
League of Legends Season 2 World Championship
The League of Legends season 2 World championship had the biggest prize pool for any eSports tournament of all time, totalling to around 2 Million dollars. 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. Link text -
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. Link text -
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. Link text -
League of Legends Season 3 World Championship
This tournament broke the previous year's record of 8.2 million total online viewers with 1.1 million watching at once. During the Season 3 world championships, 32 million people watched it being streamed online, with 8.5 million watching simultaneously. This tournament broke the record of most watched eSports event of all time. Link text
