One of the earliest video game tournaments on record had a prize of a year’s subscription to Rolling Stone, and free beer. In October 1972 the writer Stewart Brand organised the “Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics” at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where researchers had been playing Spacewar!, the space battle that Steve Russell and his fellow hackers had written at MIT in 1962, for years. The magazine sponsored it, and a young photographer, Annie Leibovitz, came along. “The twenty or so raucous competitors,” Brand wrote, “quickly organize three events: Five-Player Free-For-All, Team Competition (two against two), and Singles Competition.”
Nothing about the evening was professional. The lab’s executive officer, Les Earnest, who had approved the event, “is found to have no immediate function and is sent out for beer.” Yet it had everything later competitions would have: rules, events, winners, and a journalist writing it up for readers who had never touched a computer. Over the next thirty years the same pattern grew into arcade championships, television shows, touring roadshows and professional leagues.
Fast facts
- Early tournament: the Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics, Stanford, October 1972.
- Mass entry: Atari’s Space Invaders tournament of 1980, with more than 10,000 players.
- On television: That’s Incredible! filmed the North American Video Game Olympics in 1983; Starcade ran from 1982 to 1984.
- PC era: Doom deathmatch finals at Microsoft in 1995; Quake’s Red Annihilation in 1997; the Cyberathlete Professional League from 1997.
- Korea: by 2000, StarCraft had weekly tournaments, TV shows and sponsored players.
Stanford, 1972
Brand’s report, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums”, appeared in Rolling Stone on 7 December 1972. At Stanford the game ran on the laboratory’s PDP-10, and up to five ships could fly at once, each reappearing 16 seconds after it was destroyed. Brand’s tape recorder caught the team final: “Oooo! We win! Tovar and REM!” Tovar and Robert E. Maas won the team event, Bruce Baumgart the five-player free-for-all, and Tovar the singles. For Brand the game was more than a pastime; he called it “a flawless crystal ball of things to come in computer science and computer use”.
Space Invaders, 1980
Eight years later a game company ran a tournament for the public. In 1980 Atari, which had bought the home rights to Taito’s Space Invaders, held a national Space Invaders championship. Electronic Games reported that “more than 10,000 eager players” came to regional competitions in San Francisco, Chicago, Fort Worth, Los Angeles and New York City. The New York regional alone drew more than 6,000, and Frank Tetro Jr. of Westchester “astounded” them with his score; Electronic Games later hired him as its strategy editor.
Atari held the final in New York, in a meeting room at the headquarters of its parent company, Warner Communications, and “amid whirring recorders and clicking cameras” Bill Heineman “emerged from the fray as the first U.S. Space Invaders champion”. Heineman, who later became known as Rebecca Heineman, went on to a long career as a game programmer. The prizes included an Atari 800 computer and a cocktail-table Asteroids machine, which drew so much attention from the press that Electronic Games saw it as a sign that Asteroids was about to overtake the older game.
The next year was bigger. The Atari World Championships, played on Atari’s coin-op games with $50,000 in cash and prizes, opened in Chicago on 29 October 1981 after preliminary rounds in arcades around the country during the summer.
Champions on television
In the early 1980s the arcade champions became minor celebrities. Walter Day’s Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, kept the scoreboard, and in January 1983 it held the North American Video Game Olympics: 19 players, two days, five games, and a final in Los Angeles for ABC’s That’s Incredible!, which 16-year-old Ben Gold of Dallas won. That spring Day’s players were courted for the Electronic Circus, a touring show that promised the top-ranked player about $3,000 a week and closed after two days. Gold had already spotted the problem with playing for money: “When we start competing against each other, then we’re going to start hating each other.”
Television also tried a quiz. Starcade, first shown on the cable channel WTBS in December 1982 and later syndicated, had contestants answer questions about video games to win turns on arcade machines. Its later presenter, Geoff Edwards, was remembered by the fanzine Digital Press as “ultra-smarmy”, and its questions as “beyond ridiculous”, but viewers watched anyway “to see all the cool video games that didn’t make it into your local game room”.
Nintendo World Championships, 1990
Nintendo turned competition into a travelling show. In 1990 the Nintendo PowerFest toured American cities with new NES and Game Boy games, and at each stop players entered the Nintendo World Championships. Competitors had six minutes to collect 50 coins in Super Mario Bros., finish the first track of Rad Racer and then score as many points as they could at Tetris. Nintendo Power reported that 90 regional champions reached the December finals at Universal Studios, where the three age-group titles went to Jeff Hansen (11 and under), Thor Aackerlund (12 to 17) and Robert Whiteman (18 and over).
Deathmatch and a Ferrari
On the PC, Doom (1993) let players fight each other over a network or a modem, and organisers soon ran tournaments by phone line. In October 1995 the finalists of Deathmatch 95, drawn from American modem qualifiers and European heats, were flown to Microsoft’s campus near Seattle for the final. PC Zone later recalled the first tournament appearance of a player called Thresh, on a “flood-lit stage in the Microsoft ballroom in Redmond in 1995”, where “he steadily pummelled Merlock, a moccasin-wearing Doom player from Minneapolis, into submission.”
The Professional Gamers’ League later listed Deathmatch 95 among the titles won by Thresh, whose real name was Dennis Fong. Two years later he won a bigger prize. The Red Annihilation tournament for Quake began in April 1997 with almost 2,000 players in online qualifying matches. The 16 finalists met at the E3 trade show. Fong beat Elvin Kimzey, known as Entropy, in the final and won the grand prize, a red 1987 Ferrari 328 GTS donated by id Software’s John Carmack. Computer Gaming World reported that Carmack saw the gift as “a way to give something back to the gamers who have contributed to his own success”. At QuakeCon ’97, a gathering of Quake players, Dan “RIX” Hammans took first place.
Leagues and prize money
Two American leagues started in 1997. The Professional Gamers’ League, played online through the TEN network, advertised $250,000 in cash and prizes and named Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, as its commissioner. The Cyberathlete Professional League, founded by Angel Munoz, ran its first tournaments that year. In 1998 the British magazine PC Zone viewed the whole idea with suspicion: American “entrepreneurial enthusiasts have taken what we treat as a hobby, shined it and renamed it a ‘sport’ — or worse, a ‘cybersport’”. British players met at weekend “Net meets”, in gaming cafés and on university networks; see LAN parties.
By 2001 the money was real for a few players. Computer Gaming World reported that Johnathan Wendel, a 19-year-old Quake III player known as Fatality, would make more than $100,000 in winnings that year, and that he practised two to six hours a day.
StarCraft in Korea
The largest audience was in South Korea. In January 2001 Computer Gaming World reported that Koreans had bought more copies of Blizzard’s StarCraft than any other country, with 40,000 copies still selling each month, and that Blizzard estimated at least 70 per cent of the population had played it. There were weekly tournaments with prizes of thousands of dollars, companies paying top players $30,000 or more a year in sponsorship, and StarCraft television shows. The World Cyber Games Challenge of 2000 brought players from 17 countries to Korea for events in Quake III, StarCraft, FIFA 2000 and Age of Empires II. The organisers spoke of a “Cyber-Olympics”. Munoz of the CPL doubted Korea could be copied elsewhere: “They think the sport is at level 50, we think it’s at level 10.”
What came after
The events of the 1970s to the 1990s set the formats that later competitions used: open qualifiers feeding a staged final, sponsors, prize money and an audience. The big festivals became esports venues. The first League of Legends world championship was played at Sweden’s DreamHack in 2011, and in 2020 DreamHack merged with the esports company ESL. The prize money kept growing. The first Dota 2 International, held at Gamescom in Cologne in 2011, offered $1.6 million, funded by the game’s developer, Valve. The 2021 event in Bucharest offered $40 million, most of it raised through fans’ purchases of an in-game “battle pass”.
Sources
- Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums”, Rolling Stone, 7 December 1972: the Olympics notice, the prize, the photographer, the events, Les Earnest, the winners and “a flawless crystal ball”. Transcription (web, secondary): https://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html
- Creative Computing vol. 6 no. 9, September 1980, pp. 16–18: Atari’s announcement of a Space Invaders competition for later that year.
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 1, Winter 1981: p. 13 (Frank Tetro and the New York regional of “more than 6,000 arcaders”); p. 15 (the Atari World Championships, Chicago, 29 October, $50,000, and “Last year’s SI tournament attracted 10,000 video fanatics!”); pp. 29–32 (the regional cities, the final at Warner’s headquarters, Heineman as champion, the prizes).
- JoyStik vol. 2 no. 3, December 1983: Eric Ginner’s recognition at the 1981 Atari World Championships; Ben Gold’s win on That’s Incredible!.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 7, April 1983, and vol. 1 no. 10, July 1983, pp. 29–36: the Video Game Olympics, the Electronic Circus plans and Ben Gold’s quote.
- Computer Games (Italy) vol. 1 no. 4, July 1984, p. 34: the Electronic Circus closing after two days.
- Digital Press issue 39, January 1999, and issue 45, January 2001: memories of Starcade and its host Geoff Edwards.
- Wikipedia, “Starcade” (web, secondary): broadcast dates, December 1982 to February 1984, on WTBS and in syndication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starcade
- Nintendo Power issue 14, July/August 1990, pp. 90–91: the PowerFest, the six-minute competition and the finals. Issue 16, September/October 1990: the finals planned for December. Issue 22, March 1991, p. 7: 90 regional champions, the finals at Universal Studios and the three winners.
- PC Zone issue 34, January 1996: World Deathmatch 95, its qualifiers and the final at Microsoft. Issue 66, August 1998: Thresh’s 1995 debut, the PGL and the Cyberathletes, and “cybersport”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 158, September 1997: Red Annihilation, the 2,000 qualifiers, the 16 finalists, Thresh, Entropy and Carmack’s Ferrari. Issue 161, December 1997: Professional Gamers’ League advertisement, listing Thresh’s “DeathMatch95: 1st Place Champion”. Issue 163, February 1998: Micron advertisement naming RIX winner of QuakeCon ’97. Issue 198, January 2001: the World Cyber Games Challenge, StarCraft in Korea, Fatality, and Angel Munoz of the CPL.
- Wikipedia, “Rebecca Heineman” (web, secondary): Heineman’s later name and career. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Heineman
- Wikipedia, “DreamHack” and “League of Legends World Championship” (web, secondary): the 2011 championship at DreamHack and the ESL merger in 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DreamHack
- Wikipedia, “The International (esports)” (web, secondary): the 2011 and 2021 prize pools. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_(esports)