The following is a summary of the development and history of e-sports from 1972 to the present

Games and competitions are 2 things that are very attached, from the past until now, actually these two things have existed for each other. But did you know the beginning of the game into an E-Sports and became big as it is today?

Now the world of E-Sports has grown very rapidly and the whole world is feeling the impact of the E-Sports event which is constantly getting bigger and better, the branches and also the participants. Even now E-Sports will be competed in the 2022 Asian Games, thus enabling E-Sports to enter an even bigger event, namely the Olympics as a sport.

In fact, looking back, the first organized video game competition was held at Stanford University in October 1972. At that time Stanford students competed in the Spacewar game for the prize of 1 year free subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. Now E-Sports competitions like Dota 2 have fantastic prizes of up to tens of millions of dollars.

In 1980, Atari held a Space Invaders tournament where more than 10,000 players took part in the tournament. Although the competition has been recorded since 1980, game competition began to grow rapidly when the internet began to develop and allowed gamers to compete in multiplayer.

In the 1990s, PCs began to develop and games on PCs had also started to advance because of the help of the development of the internet. It was in that year that E-Sports began to grow and become as big as it is today. Big companies such as Nintendo and Blockbuster began sponsoring video game world championships that competed in sports, racing, and combat genre games.

In 1997 the ‘Quake’ tournament was held which can be said to be the first E-Sports event. Quake game is an FPS game that was participated by more than 2,000 participants with a prize of a used Ferrari car. Most of the games in the 1990s were FPS games, but in the end an RTS game emerged, namely StarCraft: Blood War, which brought E-Sports into the modern era.

In the early 2000s came the World Cyber Games and Electronic Sports World Cup which brought even greater changes in E-Sports. Major League Gaming (MLG) emerged in 2002 and is still the largest E-Sports league today. The country of South Korea can be said to be the birthplace of E-Sports because they have extraordinary internet speeds and make internet cafes and game centers thrive there. The E-Sports tournament which was broadcast for the first time on television stations also came from South Korea with the RTS game StarCraft: Blood War being the most popular game to compete in.

As an example of how fast E-Sports is developing, the MLG Spring Tournament audience in 2012 reached 4 million viewers worldwide and that number has already surpassed the NBA All-Stars Game audience in 2012.

Now one of the most popular games to compete in is the Dota 2 game, a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game that has successfully attracted the audience. The Dota 2 game is now an E-Sports with the largest total prize in history which has reached 22 million dollars at this time for The International 7 event which is about to start. At The International 6 the number of spectators throughout the tournament has reached 20 million people.

The development of E-Sports has made it inseparable from gambling as in traditional sports in general. Various gambling sites now have markets for accepting E-Sports branch bets. Of course this has resulted in a controversy such as the fixing of the score that had occurred in the CS:Go tournament where the iBUYPOWER team was proven to be fixing the score and had to receive a ban from playing in the CS:GO tournament.

However, even though several controversies had arisen, E-Sports did not show a decline and instead grew every year. Plus various conveniences for gamers to be able to watch E-Sports matches through various streaming media such as Twitch and Ligagame which allows gamers to follow the actions of professional players in their favorite games.

Now E-Sports will continue to grow and will get bigger from year to year following technological developments in the world. However, E-Sports must be able to regenerate its athletes through various stages of tournaments such as soccer for example and if you look at its development, maybe in the next 10 years, E-Sports can beat soccer.