A stadium filled with fans wearing their favorite team’s jersey chanting players’ names, athletes anxiously waiting in the shadows to get on the floor to show off their carefully honed skills and stamina. This may sound like your typical athletic event, but it is actually the scene at an esports tournament where teams compete against each other in games like Call of Duty, League of Legends & Dota (Defense of the Ancients).
Even traditional sports leagues see the potential with esports. The NBA sponsors its NBA 2K League and the NFL the Madden Club Championship Major Series. And Major League Baseball is considering getting on the bandwagon too.
While esports is still a relatively new area of sports and sports medicine, it might surprise you to know that competitive video games have actually been around for over 30 years.
History of Esports
The first esport competition dates back to October 19, 1972, when more than 20 students gathered at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to compete at Spacewar, the first science fiction themed videogame where spaceship captains battle it out for ultimate domination.
Many people, however, consider 1980 as the year of the first video game tournament when Atari held a Space Invaders competition with about 10,000 players across multiple cities.
In the 1980s, companies like Twin Galaxies began recording and publicizing high scores of popular video games. In the ’90s, with the dawn of the Internet age, online games where players can compete with each other became popular. And video game companies like Nintendo began sponsoring championships for video games.
Then in the 2000s, international competitions began cropping up like the Electronic Sports World Cup and Major League Gaming with bigger and bigger pots of money on the line.
Since then, professional gaming has increased exponentially and in the United States, professional gamers can now get a P-1 visa just like other athletes and compete on esports teams as student-athletes for their college or university. The Peach Belt Conference is the first NCAA conference to sponsor esports.
