Professional Gaming. It's amazing, we all agree. Yet, many of the avid SC2 fans on sites like TL don't seem to know very much about its past. People like me, who follow esports since quite a while, often come across statements that are utterly confusing (and sometimes even enraging). What I want to do here is to provide a summary of what lead esports to be where it is today. Of course, it's absolutely impossible to cover everything that is relevant to the current state of competitive gaming – this is just an overview. And yet, if you're new to esports and take the time to read through it, you'll certainly gain quite a few new insights. Yes, this post is incredibly long.
eSports is born June 1997: The Microsoft-sponsored Red Annihilation Quake tournament at the E3 expo is considered to be the first real esports competition of all time. Dennis 'Thresh' Fong wins the first prize: The Ferrari 328 GTS Cabriolet of Quake's lead developer John Carmack.
October 1997: The Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) hosts its very first event, called The FRAG. Prizes: Merchandise worth ~4000 $. The FRAG 2, which takes place one year later, already features a prize money of 15 000 $ in cash. At this point, the CPL isn't that special – there are various similar events.
April 2000: The Razer CPL Event changes that: It's a Quake 3 tournament with an overall prize pool of 100 000 $. Johnathan 'Fatal1ty' Wendel takes the first place, winning 40 000 $. Throughout the year, he claims a total of 102 000 $ in prize money. Yes, we're talking about the year 2000.
May 2000: Having moved to South Korea in order to pursue a pro-gaming career, the Canadian StarCraft player Guillaume 'Grrrr...' Patry wins the first OSL event that actually has Starleague in its name (the preceding Tooniverse Progamer Korea Open is widely considered to be the first OSL ever held; OnGameNet only starts broadcasting the season after Grrrr...'s victory). He is one of the first esports legionnaires and it's very likely that he will forever remain the only foreigner to win a major Korean competition in SC:BW. All this happens shortly after the government-approved Korean e-Sports Players Association (KeSPA) comes into operation and SC:BW starts to take off in South Korea.
May 2000: Turtle Entertainment is born. It serves as a parent company for the Electronic Sports League which thereby turns from a hobby into a business venture. The ESL (known as ESPL at first) has its roots in the DeCL (Deutsche Clanliga, means German clan-league) which started in 1997 – today, it's Europe's biggest esports league, having over 3 million registered users.
October 2000: The World Cyber Games Challenge takes place in Seoul; it features StarCraft: Brood War, Quake 3, Age of Empires II and FIFA 2000 as well as a prize pool of 200 000 $. Since day one, all WCG-related events are sponsored and co-organized by Samsung. Basically, WCG is Samsung.
May 2001: A fine gentleman named Lim 'BoxeR' Yo-hwan wins his first OnGameNet Starleague trophy. By that time, he is already widely regarded to be the most famous Korean pro-gamer. And yet it took some more years until he became a public figure and appeared in TV spots.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv3dqjgLeCg OSL final: BoxeR vs. JinNam
December 2001: The first actual World Cyber Games have an overall prize money of 300 000 $. They involve 430 players from 37 nations in 6 disciplines: Counter-Strike, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, Age of Empires II, FIFA 2001 – and, of course, StarCraft: Brood War, where BoxeR places first. He will repeat his success one year later.
December 2001: As the dot-come bubble bursts, most event organizers are forced to take a step back – the first esports recession, so to say – but the CPL continues to grow. The CPL World Championship 2001 has a 150 000 $ prize pool, primarily provided by Intel. The event's main title is Counter-Strike – the game that slowly out-competes Quake 3 in terms of popularity. From then on, there are two major CPL events each year: The CPL Summer Championship and the CPL Winter Championship, both taking place in Dallas, USA.
Professionalism! March 2002: Major League Gaming sees the light of day. It entirely focuses on the US market and on console gaming at first, in particular the Halo series and Super Smash Bros. Melee.
July 2002: The first event of the Evolution Championship Series (short: EVO), the most important annual fighting game tournament, takes place in Las Vegas, USA. Winning gold in Marvel vs. Capcom 2: Justin 'JWong' Wong. Many other achievements followed; today, he is considered to be the most successful American fighting game player. Other than in the USA, fighting games are also very popular in Japan – Justin Wong's Japanese counterpart is Daigo Umehara.
August 2002: The ESL Pro Series launches in Germany. The first season of the online league with LAN finals has a prize money of ~80 000 $. The Berlin-based team mousesports, founded in March 2002 and sponsored by GeForce at that time, becomes the first EPS champion in Counter-Strike. The ESL Pro Series successfully positions itself as the premier league for esports on a national level and, over the course of time, shapes the German esports industry more than anything else – mainly because of the professionalism-enhancing rule set (transfer regulations, etc.), the huge audience numbers and the league's regular presence in German mainstream media.
February 2003: SK Gaming, founded as a German Quake team in 1997, is the first non-Korean organization to set up written contracts with the players of its Swedish Counter-Strike team. Some months later, the Norwegian star player Ola 'elemeNt' Moum joins SK, and the team becomes a dominant force in 2003, winning the CPL Summer, the CPL Winter and the World Cyber Games. Many people feel that the SK.swe lineup of that time made a significant contribution to the development of professional Counter-Strike – it forced other teams to practise very hard if they wanted to stay competitive.
Emil 'HeatoN' Christensen and his team mates dominate the CS world
March 2003: An important event for SC:BW in South Korea: The first ProLeague starts, hosted by OnGameNet. Companies like AMD, Samsung and Korean Telecom Freetel field own teams. Dongyang Orion, led by BoxeR, eventually comes out on top in season one. One year later, the largest telecommunications service provider in South Korea acquires Orion: SK Telecom T1 is born. Until today, no team has won the ProLeague more often than SKT T1.
August 2003: After being the main sponsor of mTw for a while, Alternate (Europe's biggest online shop for computer hardware and multimedia devices) presents its own corporate team: Alternate aTTaX, now Team Alternate, which becomes mousesports' main rival in the German ESL Pro Series. Soon thereafter, a team house is opened at the company's head quarters in Linden near Frankfurt. Players regularly visit it for LAN training sessions, nobody lives there permanently. By the way, Alternate aTTaX isn't the only corporate team at that time – probably, the most relevant one is Team64.AMD which closed down in the end of 2006.
July 2003: Another major SC:BW tournament pops up: the MBCGame StarCraft League (MSL), a successor to the KPGA Tour. Kang 'Nal_rA' Min wins the first season of the MSL over Lee 'NaDa' Yoon Yeol.
July 2003: The first Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) takes place. It establishes itself as one of the most important events of the year, not least due to its competitive prize pools. The first edition features 156 000 $ split over five disciplines: Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike Female, WarCraft 3, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Quake 3. In the following years, the prize money gets more than doubled.
October 2003: The World Cyber Games feature WarCraft 3 for the first time. SK's Bulgarian player Zdravko 'Insomnia' Georgiev places first and wins 20 000 $. At that time, WarCraft 3 is becoming huge everywhere around the world. There are even televized tournaments in South Korea; Bertrand 'ElkY' Grospellier, one of the best foreign SC:BW players over there, switches to WC3 – and some not too successful Korean pro-gamers also do. In Korea, StarCraft remains much bigger than WarCraft, but in the rest of the world, it fades away.
January 2004: The Cyber X Games in Las Vegas, USA turn out to be a huge disaster. They are announced as a revolutionary tournament for CS, WC3, UT2003 and other games, with over 600 000 $ in prize money. However, the event is very poorly organized and network issues force the organisers to cancel the majority of the tournaments, including the Counter-Strike one. In the end, a big part of the prize money isn't distributed at all and many teams and players travelled all the way to Las Vegas for no reason.
May 2004: The first real transfer in the Western esports world takes place: Counter-Strike player Ola 'elemeNt' Moum gets transfered from SK Gaming to Team NoA, an undisclosed transfer fee is paid. NoA is the first trans-continental CS team on a professional level: Three members are from America, two from Norway.
October 2004: SK Gaming sends its Korean WC3 player Hwang 'Zacard' Tae-min to Germany in order to compete in the ESL Pro Series. A pro-gaming legionnaire, just the other way round. However, SK|Zacard only places 5th in his first EPS season, barely not qualifying for the finals, and returns to Korea.
October 2004: Meng 'RocketBoy' Yang wins 1 million ¥ (~120 000 $) by defeating Fatal1ty in an abit-sponsored Doom 3 shootout at the Great Wall of China. This is the highest prize anyone has ever received for winning one single esports match.
RocketBoy with his cheque
December 2004: The CPL Winter 2004 is the event where compLexity gets introduced to the global scene. It's the first major event for the Counter-Strike team and, to the surprise of many people, it places 5th. coL's charismatic manager Jason '1' Lake draws a lot of attention to himself because of his enthusiastic, emotional appearance and his style of clothing. Seriously, for many people compLexity was simply "the team with the tie-wearing guy who always shouts like crazy" at first.
Reaching for the stars January 2005: To exclude fake accounts from competitive online play, the Electronic Sports League introduces its user authentification system in Germany. Users who verify their data via postal mail and, as introduced later, a copy of their personal ID, become Trusted users and get a credit-card-sized ESL Playercard which offers benefits at ESL events. Being a Trusted user becomes a requirement for participation in the ESL Pro Series and its qualification league, the ESL Amateur Series. (In 2011, another method of authentification was developed in cooperation with Deutsche Post, the German postal service, which is currently one of ESL's sponsors.)
January 2005: The World e-Sports Games are announced. The WEG are a series of highly lucrative events for Counter-Strike and WarCraft 3. All matches take place in a TV studio, so the participants are required to live in China respectively South Korea for the duration of the season, i.e. approximately two months – accomodation and more is provided by WEG, there's an actual Players Village. In 2005, there are three seasons with overall prizes of ~700 000 $. Unsurprisingly, the WEG manage to attract many of the world's best teams and players. Furthermore, this is one of the first times that Western and Chinese participants compete with each other, many people are surprised by the quality of the Asians, in particular wNv Teamwork (CS) and Li 'Sky' Xiaofeng (WC3).
March 2005: The Intel-sponsored CPL World Tour, a ground-breaking global tournament series in the fast-paced shooter Painkiller, starts. It features a total prize money of 1 000 000 $, half of it being given out at the World Tour Finals. To qualify, you have to gather points at the 9 regular events (supposedly 10, the German stop is cancelled due to youth protection regulations), and the points also determine your final seeding. The result is that most of the ambitious players attend as many World Tour stops as they can, everywhere from Brazil to Singapore. Many of them do it full-time, they come together to practise on LAN for weeks.
March 2005: It is discovered that the MBCGame Prime League in WC3 used modified maps that favor the Orc race and weaken the Nightelf race. This scandal further contributes to WC3's unpopularity in South Korea. However, WC3 still flourishes in the rest of the world. The ESL's WC3L establishes itself as the premier team league and becomes very reputable.
April 2005: Ola 'elemeNt' Moum leaves Team NoA after winning the first season of the WEG due to personal differences with fellow countryman Jørgen 'XeqtR' Johannessen. He joins the team Made in Brazil (mibr) from – you guessed it – Brazil. As the NoA players didn't permanently live together, this can be considered to be the first Counter-Strike-related relocation in esports history. However, he only stays for a few months because mibr's management is dissatisfied with his frequent absence due to trips back to Norway. Half a year later, elemeNt becomes a legionnaire again: He moves to Germany to become part of the mousesports team. There, his contract is terminated after half a year due to communication problems and the related lack of satisfying results.
April 2005: Lim 'BoxeR' Yo-hwan signs a new three-year SKT T1 contract with an annual salary of ~180 000 $ plus up to ~80 000 $ in bonuses. This is the highest level of salary ever achieved in SC:BW. Yet, there are a few top players with an income that is comparable to BoxeR's – for instance, Lee 'NaDa' Yoon Yeol eventually earns ~200 000 $ a year in Pantech EX, now known as WeMade FOX.
June 2005: The ESL creates a separate league for players from Austria and Switzerland: The EPS Alps is born. There are several EPS throughout Europe – they are organized with the help of national licence partners. At different points in time, there are EPS Benelux (Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg), EPS Bulgaria, EPS Germany, EPS Spain, EPS France, EPS Greece, EPS Italy, EPS Poland, EPS Romania, EPS Denmark, EPS Scandinavia (later-on called EPS Nordic; Sweden, Norway, Denmark), EPS Ukraine and EPS UK.
November 2005: The World Cyber Games 2005 take place in Singapore; the overall prize money is 435 000 $ and there are over 800 players from 67 countries. This is the first and, as of today, only time that Counter-Strike's successor, Counter-Strike: Source, is used at the WCG. Many CS fans, especially the professional players, dislike CS:Source and the game fails to establish itself in the competitive scene. There are some less important events that feature CS:Source, but the major competitions still stick to the original Counter-Strike even today, or they include both games. Well, the top 3 of the WCG 2005 consists of teams that generally compete in CS and not in CS:S anyway. The first place goes to Team 3D from the USA – it's their second title after 2004. It's assumed that a CS player at 3D, managed by Craig 'Torbull' Levine, already receives an average monthly salary of approximately 800 $ at that time. Silver goes to the entirely unknown Kazakh team k23 whose players later stated that they sometimes couldn't even practise 5on5 but had to play team-internal 2on2 or 3on3 matches due to the lack of skilled opponents in Kazakhstan – this is possibly esports' prime Cinderella story. Bronze went to Evil Geniuses from Canada – yes, it used to be a Canada-focused organization; there were some US players, too, but EG wasn't on the same level as 3D and coL.
November 2005: Turtle Entertainment becomes a shareholder of the innovative multimedia- and youth-focused German TV channel GIGA. Its program is restructured to cover gaming and especially esports more frequently. Half a year later, the professional IPTV channel GIGA2 is launched. It entirely focuses on high-quality esports broadcasts in return for a subscribtion fee of 2-3 € a month, However, it has to close down one and a half years later because its losses were too high – the esports shows on GIGA also get cancelled and the TV channel gets sold to another company. There are esports-related TV show projects in other countries, too – in Sweden and in Russia, for example. None of them make a serious impact though, despite having a few creative ideas.
December 2005: The CPL World Tour Finals take place in New York City, USA. In the grand final, which is broadcasted live on MTV Overdrive, the two most important figures of the World Tour meet. On one side, there's the most prominent fast-paced shooter player in the world, Johnathan 'Fatal1ty' Wendel, and on the other, we have Sander 'Vo0' Kaasjager. The Dutch fnatic player was a relative noname until Painkiller came out, but managed to win 5 of the 9 World Tour stops and is considered the favorite to win. In the end, it's Fatal1ty who takes home the victory, earning 150 000 $, while fnatic|Vo0 receives 100 000 $ for the second place. In overall winnings, however, Vo0 outperforms Fatal1ty: He earned 223 000 $ throughout the season. His outstanding performance initiates the rise of fnatic – at that point, the 2004-founded organization is still young, but the popularity of Vo0 makes it possible to grow the business and attract many new sponsors. Standing on a good financial basis, fnatic then acquires a new Swedish CS team which eventually becomes the world's best.
fnatic|Vo0 vs. Fatal1ty
The golden era of esports commences February 2006: Major League Gaming secures 10 million $ in venture capital funding. This allows for further expansion: MLG starts broadcasting their events on USA Network, and one year later, on Comcast's G4 – however, it turns out that TV presence is not as relevant for MLG's advertisers as assumed, and since then MLG focuses on internet broadcasts. Furthermore, the top performers of the league get directly contracted to and sponsored by MLG; it starts to act as a governing body for console gaming in the US. Its main event series, the MLG Pro Circuit, consists of 4-8 events throughout North America and one final event called National Championship – in 2006, the total prize money amounts to 800 000 $.
Febuary 2006: Jang 'Moon' Jae-ho, the most successful WC3 player of all times, joins MeetYourMakers. MYM, initially a Danish team, was one of the first organizations to bring Korean WarCraft 3 players to the international arena. Later, MYM started a cooperation with the Korean team Hanbitstars, forming MYM.Hanbit – and in the beginning of 2006, it entirely takes over the players. Other Western organizations also look around for Korean additions, and most WC3L teams soon mainly consist of Asian players – with the exception of Four Kings, who gain many fans thanks to Manuel 'Grubby' Schenkhuizen and Yoan 'ToD' Merlo.
February 2006: Intel doesn't continue its cooperation with the CPL, but sponsors a new venture, namely the World Series of Video Games (WSVG). It features Counter-Strike, WarCraft 3 and Quake 4 as its main disciplines. Its regular events take place in cooperation with other event organisers, for instance one WSVG stop is part of the DreamHack Summer 2006 – and this is basically the first time DreamHack becomes really relevant in terms of esports (and since then, its tournaments become bigger every year). The overall prize money given away by WSVG in 2006 amounts to 750 000 $.
May 2006: Instead of having multiple seasons like in 2005, there is only one WEG event in 2006: the World e-Sports Games Masters. In Counter-Strike, wNv Teamwork places first and wins 70 000 $. In WarCraft 3, Yoan 'ToD' Merlo places first and wins 30 000 $. Both are the highest payouts for winning a single tournament the history of these two games. The event series is continued under the name World e-Sports Masters (WEM).
May 2006: Verizon FiOS announces a Grand Tournament for the rather unpopular game Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. The top 8 players are taken to Hermosa Beach, CA, USA for a LAN to compete for the top prize – 100 000 $, won by Micah 'Micahwave' Ernst.
June 2006: Turtle Entertainment announces the first season of the Intel Extreme Masters, featuring CS and WC3. The IEM become the premier international competition of the Eletronic Sports League. The top teams and players of the ESL Pro Series qualify for the IEM where they are joined by the winners of qualification tournaments in countries without an EPS. As the IEM become bigger, Global Challenges and Continential Championships are added to the initial concept.
June 2006: The MLG announces the signing of their most successful Halo 2 team, Final Boss (formerly part of Team 3D), to a 1 000 000 $ contract, and also signs Tom 'Tsquared' Taylor, leader of the team Str8 Rippin, for another 250 000 $. Overall, MLG manages over 30 of its top players at this point. Thanks to MLG, console gaming actually plays a very relevant role for esports in North America while it's pretty underdeveloped in Europe and the rest of the world.
June 2006: In 2006, the Electronic Sports World Cup hosts its highlight event. The venue is the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy and several thousands of enthusiastic spectators come to watch the best teams and players of the world. The prize money is at its peak, too: 400 000 $ are given away. Other than that, this is the event that marks the beginning of Alexey 'Cypher' Yanushevsky's career. The unknown 16-year-old Belarussian Quake 4 player surprisingly wins silver at his first international event, defeating players such as mousesports' Russian Quake master Anton 'Cooller' Singov. The second new-generation Quake star, one year younger Maciej 'av3k' Krzykowski from Poland, celebrates his first major achievement at the next year's ESWC: He takes home gold. And the ESWC 2008 is the first time that the US-American player Shane 'rapha' Hendrixson gets into the spotlight by placing third – today, he's a two-time IEM world champion.
Electronic Sports World Cup 2006
July 2006: Team Alternate's star Javid 'Kapio' Navadi, who is presumably the best German Counter-Strike player at that time, signs a pre-contract with mousesports, thereby violating his contract with Alternate that forbids him to sign any other contracts until it expires in the end of the year. As a result, he gets barred by Alternate and has to spend one full EPS season on the bench – for obvious reasons, the transfer negotiations between the two rivaling organizations don't yield any fruit. As initially planned, Kapio joins mouz in the beginning of 2007 and contributes to seven ESL Pro Series championships in a row.
August 2006: In Germany, there is a new print magazine called eGames which focuses on esports. However, it can't establish itself and gets discontinued in 2007. There are other attempts at bringing esports to the print world, most notably the ProGam3r Magazine in the US. Another way traditional publishing houses get involved in esports is by buying esports news sites: The German Computec Media AG acquires readmore.de in 2007; a Swedish newspaper eventually buys fragbite.se.
August 2006: A new German venture, the eSport-Bundesliga, broadcasts its mainstreamized FIFA league on the German TV channel DSF. The league exclusively signs its players to itself and bans them from participating in competing leagues such as the ESL Pro Series. The eSport-Bundesliga never gets accepted as part of "our" esports world and only survives for one season, then the company goes bankrupt. Its creators work on an inofficial successor which is featured on MTV as a part of the show MTV Game One, but it fails again.
October 2006: MLG secures another 25 million $ in funding and buys GameBattles, a popular website for amateur-level online competitions mostly in console games. It becomes MLG's counterpart to ESL's normal ladders and leagues that are immensely popular in Germany and other European countries. In the US, the most popular online leagues of that time are the Cyberathlete Amateur League (CAL, part of CPL), the CEVO and a new, ambitious venture called Global Gaming League. The GGL, which also acquired the old Europe-based league ClanBase, hosts events on a professional level as well – most notably its TransAtlantic Showdown 2006 with over 100 000 $ in prize money. However, GGL/ClanBase don't survive the financial crisis.
December 2006: The WSVG Grand Finals take place in New York City. Noone is surprised when SK's Johan 'toxjq' Quick wins the Quake 4 tournament, defeating Fatal1ty in the final. toxjq is the dominating player of the year, winning most major events and being considered the best Quake 4 player thoughout the game's entire esports lifespan of about two years. However, after the release of Quake Live (which is basically a free-to-play online version of Quake 3), he decides to quit professional gaming.
January 2007: The Championship Gaming Series by DirecTV starts – and brings esports to the TV. It's a global league with over 1 000 000 $ in prize money, and it's completely exclusive: If you sign one of CGS' lucrative contracts, you aren't allowed to participate in any other tournaments. The selected games are rather controversial: CS:Source, Dead or Alive 4, FIFA 07 and Project Gotham Racing 3 are played. The two premier North American teams, Team 3D and compLexity, become exclusive CGS franchise teams (being renamed to New York 3D and Los Angeles Complexity). Most esports fans are uninterested in the CGS due to its disciplines, the mainstream-focused broadcasts and the cheesy, unauthentic presentation (e.g. paid fans, models in referee shirts, draft event at the Playboy Mansion). And obviously "stealing" some of the best players and organizations didn't contribute to CGS' popularity either.
January 2007: The Koreans Zacard and Sweet leave SK Gaming to join the newly-created Chinese organization Beijing eSports Team (BeT). After Li 'Sky' Xiaofeng won the WCG in 2005 and in 2006, WC3 is becoming more and more popular in China. There are several new events that take place there and attract players from everywhere around the world, and at a later point even the WC3L hosts its finals in China instead of in Germany. Sky is part of Team WE aka World Elite, together with players like Wang 'Infi' Xuwen and Zhuo 'TeD' Zeng. The Koreans Lee 'SoJu' Sung Duk, Kim 'ReMinD' Sung Sik and Park 'Lyn' June also play for WE, but they get signed by SK Gaming half a year later – WE continues to do well with a purely Chinese lineup.
May 2007: The first fanbus in the history of the German ESL Pro Series drives from Alternate's corporate head quarters to Stuttgart, where one of the regular LAN events of the ESL Pro Series takes place. These events, called Intel Friday Night Games, usually present one league match per discipline played on stage in front of 500-1500 live spectators. At that time, there are about 10 IFNGs every season (until today, the amount was reduced by half). Three months later, TBH eSports organizes the first open-for-all fanbus from Munich to Stuttgart. Yes, there are actual fans.
hoorai at one of the better visited IFNGs (still only one match in CS, CS:S, WC3 and FIFA)
September 2007: The World Series of Video Games gives up after half of the announced 2007 stops. Its first season was alright, but for its second season, Counter-Strike and WarCraft 3 were removed. Other than Quake 4, the WSVG used Guitar Hero 2, Fight Night 3 and World of WarCraft – trying to get more into the mainstream, without any success.
November 2007: After winning the WC3L four times, the WC3 team of the British organization Four Kings disbands due to financial problems, and since then, 4K couldn't live up to its previous achievements despite changing owners. ToD joins mousesports while Grubby signs with MeetYourMakers, who thereby complete their self-claimed 'Dreamteam'. The third top performer of 4K, Olav 'Creolophus' Undheim from Norway, already ended his (rather short) esports career some months earlier – at his last event, the WCG 2007, he showed an amazing performance and took home gold, but nonetheless sticked to his quitting plans. At this point in time, WC3 is at its peak. The top players earn monthly salaries in the four-digit area; allegedly, MYM pays a monthly salary of over 7000 $ to Jang 'Moon' Jae-ho. In the entire WC3L, which consists of 12 teams, basically all regular players receive at least a few hundred $ a month.
December 2007: Team NoA merges with, or rather becomes part of mTw. At that time, NoA features a strong Danish Counter-Strike team, and mTw.dk turns out to be one of the world's most successful Counter-Strike teams until today. NoA's WC3 team left the organization some months earlier, then gets contracted by fnatic. Notable player: Park 'Space' Sueng Hyun, who plays WC3 on the highest possible level despite having a rare inveterate muscle disorder which significantly lowers his life expectancy.
Brought back down to earth May 2008: The G7 Teams are an association of the most successful organizations of the world, created in the year 2006 (consisting of SK, fnatic, mouz, MYM, wNv and a few others). They aim to improve the coordination between teams, event organisers and the community and to jointly impose sanctions on events that fail to pay out prize money – such as the CPL which is being boycotted. In May 2008, the G7 Teams publish a set of standard contracts for esports players. They commit to supporting teams with contract-related issues if they use said contracts. At this point, contracts are already the industry standard. All professional teams make use of them and it is generally recognized that they are indeed legally binding. It's reasonable to estimate that there are over 200 players with professional contracts at this time only in Germany.
May 2008: The Cyberathlete Professional League officially goes out of business after it already lost all its relevance more than one year ago – mainly because the CPL has had a history of not paying out prize money. Later-on, the founder Angel Munoz sells the brand to allegedly Arabic investors, but eventually it is revealed that the new, Asia-oriented CPL endeavors are in fact run by the same people who were responsible for CPL World Tour, WSVG and CGS.
August 2008: The International eSport Federation is founded as a parent organization for all national esports associations. The founding members are Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam. According to ie-sf.com, today's members are China, Taiwan, India, Malaysia, Maldives, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil.
August 2008: For the first time in its history, the ESWC doesn't take place in France, but in San Josè, USA, near the corporate head quarters of main sponsor Nvidia – in terms of spectator attendance, it flops. The event features Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike Female, WarCraft 3, Quake 3, TrackMania Nations ESWC (a special edition of the racing game specifically created for the tournament) as well as the WC3 mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA) – it's the first major event to host a tournament for the increasingly popular game. It's the first one of its kind; today, games like DotA, LoL and HoN are usually classified as Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA). This is the time when DotA becomes present in esports and successful organizations like SK Gaming, MeetYourMakers and mousesports field own teams, even though they are usually haunted by lineup instability and other problems. DotA is especially popular in China, South East Asia and Eastern Europe.
September 2008: Over the course of time, it becomes evident that the WC3 players' earnings were blown out of proportion – to a large extent, due to MeetYourMakers' high salaries. Since a while, organizations struggle at making their WC3 teams sustainable (Four Kings was only one example), and the problem gets out of hand when the effects of the financial crisis kick in. In September 2008, SK Gaming removes the biggest part of its WC3 team and leaves all team leagues. mousesports did just the same thing a few months earlier, but then eventually returns with a less expensive, mainly Chinese lineup. Other teams also change their approach. This forces the WC3L to adjust its league system so that it only requires three players instead of five.
The legendary 4Kings team
November 2008: The World Cyber Games take place in Cologne, Germany. So far, it's the biggest WCG event in terms of participants: There are 78 participating countries, 850 gamers, 13 disciplines. Overall, 408 000 $ in prize money are given away. That's 54 000 $ less than in 2006 when WCG hit its prize money peak – for comparison: WCG 2010 only featured 167 000 $, which is even less than the WCG Challenge in the year 2000. Not only the prize money decreases significantly after 2008, Samsung also shrinks down its sponsorship for national qualifier organisers which leads to less participating countries (in 2010, there are 57).
November 2008: After two seasons, the Championship Gaming Series gets cancelled. Many people agree that this could have been expected, but nonetheless the CGS had a strong influence especially on esports in North America. While the European CS teams didn't switch to CS:Source nor paid much attention to the small-scale European CGS competition, the US championship managed to attract most of the American players – simply due to the lack of alternatives. The exclusive, draft-based system damaged non-CGS organizations. Some teams, however, used the new environment to their advantage, most notably Evil Geniuses who become the premier American organization outside of CGS. Anyway, when the CGS closes down, things look rather bad for PC esports in the US.
December 2008: Jason '1' Lake decides to rebuild compLexity. He intends to continue working with his CS players (who switched back from CS:Source after CGS) – after all, they partially played for coL since its beginnings in 2004. However, the team accepts an offer from Evil Geniuses instead of waiting until coL attracts new sponsors. Some months later, the Finnish player Tomi 'lurppis' Kovanen moves to the USA in order to play for EG – and this gives a significant boost to the team's performance. He stays with EG for almost two years, then returns to his home country. As for Jason Lake, he doesn't give up on his plans despite this heavy setback, contracts other teams and brings two other reputable esports personalities on board as managers and co-owners: Jason 'Anomoly' Bass and Alex 'Jax' Conroy (who eventually leaves again).
January 2009: ESNation A/S, the company behind MeetYourMakers (and some other esports projects), files for bankruptcy. ESNation has always tried to become the best and grow its business in a very aggressive fashion, relying on millions of $ in venture capital, paying the highest salaries, and so on. Eventually, their approach backfires and the company is unable to survive. MYM's WC3 stars move on: Grubby gets transfered to Evil Geniuses, which thereby once and for all establishes itself as one of the world's leading organizations; Moon joins WeMade FOX. MYM's successful Polish CS team (which was signed in the end of 2007, being known as PGS Gaming/Team Pentagram before) needs a few attempts to find the right partner, but eventually joins the Polish organization Frag eXecutors – not before winning the WCG 2009 under the provisory name AGAiN. Half a year later, the MYM brand and the website gets sold to a German company and the organization is reopened under a new management – this time, without exorbitant player salaries.
March 2009: The company behind the ESWC ceases its operations. It was unable to secure enough funding for another season after the event's latest main sponsor, Nvidia, didn't continue supporting the ESWC due to the financial crisis. Later-on, the ESWC brand gets bought by another French company and the tournament comes back to life in 2010.
March 2009: A young man runs amok in the small village Winnenden near Stuttgart, Germany – 16 people die. As the spree killer used to play games such as Counter-Strike, there is a political debate whether violent video games should be banned. The following IFNGs in Stuttgart and Karlsruhe get cancelled by the respective city administrations despite Turtle Entertainment's active participation in debates about Counter-Strike and concentrated lobbying efforts. Due to this, esports plays an actual role in public discussions, and on a few occassions esports personalities even get invited into TV talk shows. Gamer-organized demonstrations take place. At a later point, Turtle Entertainment co-organizes an educational LAN party at the German parliament, the Bundestag.
December 2009: The Ukrainian Counter-Strike team Natus Vincere sees the light of day. Until the WCG 2007, where A-Gaming from Ukraine unexpectedly places third, people don't even consider Ukraine to be competitive in CS, but over the course of time, the internet connections get better and Ukrainians start to show good results. Na`Vi wins all major events in 2010: IEM World Championship, Electronic Sports World Cup, World Cyber Games. It becomes the team to beat. Na`Vi has its own team flat, too – this is actually not a rarity for professional CS teams in Eastern Europe. Of course, top teams in other parts of the world also get together to practise at the same physical location regularly.
Na`Vi get to meet the Ukrainian prime minister Mykola Azarov
The recent past May 2010: The Korean match fixing scandal is revealed. 11 SC:BW pro-gamers, including Ma 'sAviOr' Jae Yoon and Park 'Luxury' Chan Soo are found guilty of losing matches on purpose and being involved in betting fraud. Four of the players are sentenced to probation, the others receive financial penalties. All are banned from pro-gaming by KeSPA.
June 2010 Evil Geniuses signs the top fighting game players Justin 'JWong' Wong, Martin 'MaRN' Pham and Ricky Ortiz, becoming the first CS-grown organization to get involved in Super Street Fighter IV and other popular titles. Exactly one year later, compLexity opens a fighting game division with players such as Ryan 'gootecks' Gutierrez. Shortly afterwards, EG adds the first Japanese players to its roster.
July 2010: After the previous half-hearted attempts to conquer the USA failed, Turtle Entertainment launches the National ESL with the help of experienced people like Trevor 'Midway' Schmidt. Other than hosting the qualifications for the Intel Extreme Masters and other global ESL events, it also features normal league play. This is the second continent the ESL expands to after it already acquired the Chinese company ProGamer League (PGL) to establish itself on the Asian market in 2007.
July 2010: Shortly after StarCraft 2 is released, the first esports competitions for the long-awaited new Blizzard game pop up. It replaces WarCraft 3 and StarCraft: Brood War basically everywhere and most top players make the switch (some with more success than others) – WC3 only stays alive in China, and of course SC:BW does in South Korea. Soon, Major League Gaming announces that it also adds SC2 to its Pro Circuit – the second time a PC title is played at MLG after World of WarCraft was featured in 2008. Yet, MLG doesn't carry over its governing body and league exclusivity intentions – instead, they sponsor certain players such as Dario 'TLO' Wünsch and Tyler 'Tyler' Wasielewski who are still allowed to represent their teams.
July 2010: Transfer scandal between fnatic and SK Gaming: It is announced that Rasmus 'Gux' Ståhl returns to fnatic's CS team after playing for SK since February. However, SK's management regards Gux as a contracted player even though he delayed sending them a written contract – they present chat logs that prove that Gux claimed to have sent it already. The two organizations can't come to an agreement and blame each other for making the details of their conflict public – this marks the beginning of their ongoing hostile rivalry. And this marks the end of the G7 Teams as the two driving forces behind it, SK's Alexander 'TheSlaSH' Müller and fnatic's Sam 'zr0' Mathews, refuse to cooperate with each other any longer.
July 2010: Sadly, this tragic event is part of esports history as well: 20-year-old Antonio 'cyx' Daniloski, CS player for mousesports, dies in a car accident while travelling to the IEM Global Challenge in Shanghai, China.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GykS0d_wl2Y Rest in peace, mouz|cyx.
August 2010: GOM TV announces the Global StarCraft II League (GSL) – the biggest event series in SC2 so far. All GSL matches are played in a TV studio in Seoul, South Korea and the prize money amounts to over 500 000 $ only in 2010. Kim 'FruitDealer' Won Ki (formerly known as Cool) receives 100 000 000 KRW (~85 000 $) for winning the first GSL – Lim 'NesTea' Jae Duk (formerly known as ZergBong) and Jang 'MC' Min Chul (formerly known as IrOn) get the same amount of money for winning the other two open seasons. In 2011, a league system that consists of Code S and Code A is established. The prize money for the Code S winner is only half of what a 2010 champion receives, but there is the Super Tournament which features 100 000 000 KRW.
August 2010: Team Liquid announces a cooperation with Old Generations (oGs) – most of the team's players move to the oGs team house in South Korea to practise and participate in the GSL. Jonathan 'Jinro' Walsh has the most success, he places in the GSL top 4 twice. However, most other players don't do nearly as well and eventually return home. Some start a new team house in Sweden.
December 2010: The FIFA twins Daniel 'hero' Schellhase and Dennis 'styla' Schellhase end their esports careers. The two Germans have been extremely successful in the FIFA series: Both of them won the World Cyber Games twice (in addition, they won the 2on2 competition of the WCG 2003 as a team). They also won several ESL Pro Series championships – placing first in the solo leagues as well as in the team leagues together with their team SK Gaming, where they played since the end of 2004. They were featured on German TV several times and appeared in advertising campaigns for companies such as adidas.
December 2010: SK signs two of fnatic's core CS players, Patrik 'f0rest' Lindberg and Christopher 'GeT_RiGhT' Alesund. The two wanted to change their team's lineup, removing two long-time players – but fnatic's management disagreed. Therefore, they join SK Gaming instead, and SK's new lineup does not only look extremely good on paper, but also shows excellent results. fnatic builds a new team with players such as Marcus 'Delpan' Larsson.
February 2011: The North American Star League (NASL), a huge global SC2 tournament, starts – the main season is played online and the top 16 get invited to the LAN finals which take place in California, USA. 100 000 $ are distributed among the top performers.
May 2011: The SK-fnatic rivalry continues: SK Gaming announces that Delpan joins its CS team even though he still has a contract with fnatic. It is only until after his official presentation as a new player that SK starts engaging in negotiations and eventually agrees on a transfer fee with fnatic whose management is anything but pleased with SK's approach.
June 2011: fnatic signs the Korean SC2 player Park 'Rain' Seo Yong and he moves to fnatic's team house in the USA. This is the first time that a Korean pro-gamer prefers a Western SC2 team over a domestic one. He won't be the last one, as Evil Geniuses takes in Lee 'PuMa' Ho Joon after he wins the NASL. However, another approach also becomes popular: Cooperations in which Korean players represent Western organizations at events outside of South Korea while remaining part of their domestic teams in Korean tournaments. SK Gaming does this with oGs' MC and NaDa, compLexity with players from MVP. At the same time, the Australian organization FXOpen acquires the Korean team fOu.
July 2011 Turtle Entertainment presents its new format for the Intel Extreme Masters: Instead of a regular online season in Europe and North America and subsequent Continental Championships in Europe, America and Asia/Oceania, there are only Global Challenges – five of them – and a final event. This indicates that the ESL moves away from its initial concept – after all, the ESL Pro Series don't have nearly as much relevance in SC2 as they used to have in CS and WC3. Most of the national licence partners have quit and only EPS Germany, EPS France, EPS Spain and EPS Poland remain. Furthermore, IEM drops Quake Live – which is a huge hit for the game's competive scene as it only has very few events such as QuakeCon and DreamHack left. Quake's time as one of the main esports titles is over.
July 2011: The esports-focused Korean TV station MBCGame is said to shut down. This would also mean the end of the MBCGame StarCraft League (and most likely the end of the SC:BW team MBCGame HERO).
August 2011: Two events mark the esports breakthrough of MOBA games: Firstly, the popular free-to-play game League of Legends is added to the Intel Extreme Masters. Secondly, Valve announces a tournament for its to-be-released game DotA2: At the gamescom in Cologne, 16 invited DotA top teams compete in DotA2 for the very first time – the winners receive 1 000 000 $.
Many of us "oldschool" people just ignore all the weird comments and jokingly ask ourselves what we were doing all the time if esports only exists since 2010. But maybe it's our fault?! After all, the Western CS-, WC3- and Quake-centered esports world never really bothered to get involved in SC:BW which eventually lead to separated communities. Anyway, I hope this shows that the Western scene has its own established structures and all in all, they work rather well. Of course, our organizations can learn from the Koreans, especially in terms of training efficiency, but there is no need to adapt everything they do. And not everything that is presented as "revolutionary" is in fact revolutionary, there's already been a lot of crazy stuff – not saying that there's anything wrong with having the same crazy stuff again in SC2, just be aware of past attempts.
It should be entirely irrelevant who I am, but apparently some people here consider a poster's reputation to be really important (only read if you're one of them): + Show Spoiler +
Lari 'D.Devil' Syrota. I'm involved in esports since over half a decade – not particularly specialized in one game, but closely following the industry as a whole. In 2006, I co-founded the German team hoorai and eventually worked as its head manager for three consecutive years. hoorai was quite successful back then, being one of the not-too-many organizations that worked with a six-digit yearly sponsorship budget during the previous golden era of esports. One of our former players you guys probably know is Johan 'NaNiwa' Lucchesi, who competed in WC3 for us. (Sadly, hoorai doesn't exist anymore: It closed down in 2010 due to sponsorship-related issues, one year after I quit.)
Anyway, since I left hoorai, I started an esports marketing agency that helps companies to properly advertise their brands to competitive gamers. Right now, I'm also working on a site called The Rocketjumper, which is supposed to become a hub for people who work in esports, focusing on where the industry is heading and what is happening behind the curtains. Unfortunately, I'm really busy with other stuff atm, but I hope to get it online in the next months. It's going to be great. Hopefully.
Oh, and I also play SC2 once in a while: EU Diamond League in 1on1, EU Master League in 2on2. (It's my first real RTS, I came all the way from Bronze... fuck yeah!)
Wow i can't believe I read all of thsi when i could have been watching Boxer vs. Rain. I thought when i say the "this post is incredibly long" sentence that it would take up like half a page, but it was double what i expected.
Thank you for taking the time to write this, it was a pleasure to read.
This was pretty cool reading through this and remembering all this stuff happening. Thanks a lot for going through and writing it all up, one complaint though: you completely neglect the whole fighting game scene and its huge resurgence back into the mainstream since the release of street fighter 4 in 2009.
Anyway, since I left hoorai, I started an esports marketing agency that helps companies to properly advertise their brands to competitive gamers. Right now, I'm also working on a site called The Rocketjumper, which is supposed to become a hub for people who work in esports, focusing on where the industry is heading and what is happening behind the curtains. Unfortunately, I'm really busy with other stuff atm, but I hope to get it online in the next months. It's going to be great. Hopefully.
If you need some help or need some contributions, let me know. I'm heavily interested~
Great, great history. I recognize a lot more names than I thought a lot more chapters you mentioned. I'm glad someone wrote this.
On August 01 2011 05:40 Fatmatt2000 wrote: This was pretty cool reading through this and remembering all this stuff happening. Thanks a lot for going through and writing it all up, one complaint though: you completely neglect the whole fighting game scene and its huge resurgence back into the mainstream since the release of street fighter 4 in 2009.
The fighting game scene isnt really included in the 'esports' category. Sure, it is a part of whatever most people considering esports, but it never really caught on to the 'mainstream' esports community which was basically CS/Quake -> WC3 -> SC2.
Sick writeup, though I found it a tad sad that you didn't write anything about CS:S as you used the picture of Ex6TenZ from VeryGames (got my hopes up) - the part on CS:S today is flawed however, and not completetly true
There's a ton of great info here. Being a Quake player at heart I wish you shed a little more light on the Quake scene (Toxjq's domination of Quake 4 for it's entire lifespan, IEM dropping Quake Live making Quakecon virtually the only QL major tournament still in existence, etc) but eSports has such a diverse history I guess it's very easy to miss a few details here and there. Great article, can't wait to see this get spotlighted.
On August 01 2011 05:40 Fatmatt2000 wrote: This was pretty cool reading through this and remembering all this stuff happening. Thanks a lot for going through and writing it all up, one complaint though: you completely neglect the whole fighting game scene and its huge resurgence back into the mainstream since the release of street fighter 4 in 2009.
The fighting game scene isnt really included in the 'esports' category. Sure, it is a part of whatever most people considering esports, but it never really caught on to the 'mainstream' esports community which was basically CS/Quake -> WC3 -> SC2.
875k unique viewers for Evo 2011 Day 1 might disagree The fighting game scene is relatively sheltered from the rest of the eSports world but companies like Evil Geniuses and Complexity have already realized the huge potential that this scene has and have added the best names to their roster (EG.Justin Wong, coL.CC Mike Ross, etc).
Fighting games haven't taken off internationally like some of the other titles. You'll notice that CS, Warcraft, Quake, and SC are all games that can be played at a high level online which goes leaps and bounds in fostering a community. Fighting games don't have that same luxury, a delay of even 30ms can make the game practically unplayable. Fighting games are huge in the east and west coast US as well as various capital cities throughout North America, and seemingly only popular in countries where arcades are still dominant (Korea, Japan - eg. 4 of top 8 in SSF4: AE Evo 2011 are Japanese/Korean), but outside of that there's just not that same huge following elsewhere.
But just because it hasn't taken off the same way other genres have doesn't mean it shouldn't be considered
On August 01 2011 05:40 Fatmatt2000 wrote: This was pretty cool reading through this and remembering all this stuff happening. Thanks a lot for going through and writing it all up, one complaint though: you completely neglect the whole fighting game scene and its huge resurgence back into the mainstream since the release of street fighter 4 in 2009.
Two reasons for this: 1. I tried to focus on the events that were somehow relevant to today's SC2 esports (e.g. the history of today's successful teams). I don't feel like fighting games contributed much to this, even teams like EG and coL only added fighting game players quite recently.
2. I'm not as well informed in fighting games as in other disciplines, but I believe that there aren't as many important things that have to be included in such a post (be aware I already removed lots of other things from the post). Maybe I just missed some stuff, I don't know. Feel free to give me some advice on what to include (but alone the release of SSF4 isn't enough because I didn't include any game releases for a reason).
After all, I mentioned the first EVO event and Justin Wong.
Wow thanks for this. I think you missed some details but then again it is a "short" story and I don't want to know how long this post would have been! thanks again!
One of the best articles on e-sports I've read. Was a bit dissapointed that you didn't write about Johan 'toxjq' Quick and his complete and utter dominance in Quake 4.
Kinda agree with your final statement about the seperated communities. I followed alot competitiv gaming (primary the cs scene from 2001 till 2006) but never found out about the crazyness of sc:bw going on in South Korea and teamliquid.net. It took Starcraft 2 to find them and realizing that i love them
Wow that WAs a lot of stuff to read but I did it all and It was really good.
The guy right above me has a huge point though. The fighting games sence seems to have always been seperate from other organizations and yet have flurished all the same. you never mentioned them once and I just find that so odd.
The fighting scene was only really big in Japan and the US, while all these other games had all three "major" continents (Asia, Europe, North America) following them.
On August 01 2011 06:13 mbr wrote: One of the best articles on e-sports I've read. Was a bit dissapointed that you didn't write about Johan 'toxjq' Quick and his complete and utter dominance in Quake 4.
You're right, I'll fix this.
On August 01 2011 06:15 javy925 wrote: Great writeup, but I wish you spent more time talking about heaton and potti rather than element, even though he is also a good player.
The SK-NiP-SK transfer story was one of the things I had to cut out because the post is already ridiculously long. elemeNt might not have been the best CS player, but he was involved in most of the ground-breaking events.
Good read, puts to light some things i was confused about like CPL dieing. I left the cs1.6/cod for wow before it died so when i tried to check out cal lately i never could lol.
I never really noticed E-Sports outside of Korea before SCII so I'm very thankful for this informative article. Very detailed and I think has all the essential points of an entire decade.
One thing I'd like to call attention to:
July 2011: The esports-focused Korean TV station MBCGame is said to shut down. This would also mean the end of the MBCGame StarCraft League (and most likely the end of the SC:BW team MBCGame HERO).
This is actually something that threatens the SCII scene in Korea, because MBCGame is actually a large part of the Korean infrastructure and threatens to signal the beginning of the end of major E-Sports in Korea. If people could read this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=248299¤tpage=13 and try to help convince MBCGame to keep E-Sports on twitter that would be a huge help for the entire scene in general. Especially considering GOMTV is not very popular in Korea.
Korea is undeniably the world capital of eSports, they were the first to start having computer games played on a professional level, and they are the guiding light for any other place that wants to follow suit. How will this look if eSports can't even last for 10 years before having to declare bankruptcy? No one will want that for their future.
Stacraft Brood War is the predecessor to Starcraft 2, not just for the story and the game series, but because SC:BW has the infrastructure and the public acceptance that makes it legitimate in the public eye. SC:BW and MBCGame laid the foundation for eSports as we know it today by promoting computer games as a valid occupation and career. That foundation is the main reason Starcraft 2 already has such a strong professional following (it took 3-4 years for SC:BW teams to really get going, look how easy it was for SC2 with that precedent).
SC:BW and MBC in general are constantly getting more and more young people interested in eSports: SC:BW is so ingrained in the mind of the average Korean youth today that it is literally part of the collective national identity. Young people grow up with eSports, and that makes them want to become progamers themselves. With so much of that TV Broadcasting infrastructure the next generation of progamers probably won't exist.
Write that if anybody truly cares about E-Sports, truly truly (not just saying it because it sounds so fucking noble), they'll lend a hand in preserving the future, sustainability, and acknowledgment of professional gaming in general.
Korea is still the world's spawning pool for the best of the best starcraft players. If TV stations, prestigious tournaments like the MSL, and eventually sponsors start to phase out Brood War from signifigance, it's only a matter of time before a number of pro gaming teams and players are out of a job. Yes. Some of them WILL go to SCII if that happens. That's a probability. But if we're looking at this from a long term perspective, Korea will cease to be the world wide power in starcraft. That means no more MCs (iron), no more Nesteas (zergbong), no more Puma/Gentlemens, no more Losiras, no more Bombers (fancy), no more MarineKings (clare) no more Nadas, no more Julys, no more YellOws, no more BoxeRs.
The mere existance of good Korean players, and good Korean players from BW ensures that the skill ceiling for SCII is incredibly high. It ensures that nobody has to watch crappy players (TN snip) in tournaments when Thorzain and Naniwa aspire to compete with the Koreans. If there's no incentive for skilled players in Korea to join professional gaming, the entire scene as a whole will suffer.
Don't be stupid and think that this doesn't effect you. (TN we're all in this together, BW, SC2, whatever) If you truly truly care, you'll try and understand, and hopefully, help.
On August 01 2011 06:02 BushidoSnipr wrote: you wrote this...DURING MLG ANAHEIM?!!??!? SHAME ON YOU lol jk amazing post, really nostalgic to be reminded of this
I started writing this last weekend because I was annoyed by people thinking Western SC2 players don't have contracts. Thought about it for the first time when I read about people never having heard of SK Gaming before.
Added this chapter:
December 2006: The WSVG Grand Finals take place in New York City. Huge surprise in CS: Team Alternate qualified for the finals but doesn't have a real lineup, so it fields a mix team (with Kapio among others), and this mix team actually wins the tournament over Team 3D. This is the first international championship victory of a German team. Not that much of a surprise in WC3: 4K^Grubby places first. Even less of a surprise in Quake 4: SK's Johan 'toxjq' Quick wins the grand final against Fatal1ty. He is the dominating player of the year, winning most major events and being considered the best Quake 4 player thoughout the game's entire esports lifespan of about two years. However, after the release of Quake Live (which is basically a free-to-play online version of Quake 3), he decides to quit professional gaming.
But I really don't want to add too much, I already removed stuff like this, SK.swe becoming NiP; socrates_ moving to Germany, the failed Cyber X Games or ESL's anti-cheat endeavors.
Truly awesome post. I'm waiting for the day when I can go downstairs, turn on the TV, and watch a starcraft 2 match being played in the USA, being commentated in English, and featuring players from around the world. I want players who are truly dedicated to the game to be able to make a viable career choice to become professionals and eventually appear on television. I don't know when it will happen, but I know that starcraft and esports WILL make it into the United States mainstream very soon. We're getting closer to that every single day. Thanks to all the players, sponsors, support staff, and event coordinators who are making this possible.
This is the most interesting post on TL I have ever read. Thank you so much, I've been looking for sth like this since I began to follow esport about 2 years ago!
that was a nice read for me, i still did not know so much stuff about all that. but i am interested into esports since i Got WC3 and started playing it in 2004. i am more a watchman and enjoy every game bw wc3
Great read. I am glad some people will finally realize that e-sports have been around much longer (in the Western world) than SC2.
I've been attending fighting game events since 1998, FPS events since 2000, and RTS events since 2002. I've followed (and played) most of them throughout their entire lifespans.
I am constantly amazed by how many people don't realize just how MASSIVE games like Counter-Strike have been since the early 2000s. Fight games have been huge for a decade as well, and finally started blowing up around 2002.
People keep facing all of these "issues" with making SC2 a legitimate e-sport, but ignore the decade+ that e-sports have already been huge ($100,000 events, tens of thousands of attendees, and 100k concurrent viewers have been around since 2003 at least). Look at history if you want to learn about how to handle these seemingly "modern" (which totally aren't) problems.
There was a spotlighted article recently about "pre-esports", as in the attempts at setting up e-sports way back 20 or 30 or even more years ago. It might be interesting to add that history too, esports goes back FAR longer than most people think.
On August 01 2011 05:31 HappyMan wrote: Wow. That's a lot more comprehensive than I expected from a thread that says it's a "short history" ^^
Thanks for writing this up!
I was a little worried at first until I had to keep scrolling and scrolling... So much info I missed even though I have been following some sort of competitive scene since 98.
On August 01 2011 07:43 hi19hi19 wrote: There was a spotlighted article recently about "pre-esports", as in the attempts at setting up e-sports way back 20 or 30 or even more years ago. It might be interesting to add that history too, esports goes back FAR longer than most people think.
I guess you're referring to Walter Day and Twin Galaxies. While this is interesting for sure, I wanted to focus on "our" kind of esports.
I'm so, so glad someone posted this for all the SC2 bubble kids to read. There's a few bits missed out, of course but i think you hit most of the super important ones except for CXG.
I feel a bit like this will just be read by oldskoolers, looking to reminisce, but thanks for trying at least ;D
Amazing write-up. I must say, I didn't realise there was that much money in esports between 2004 and 2006. I hope the advent of easy online streaming and an improved internet infrastructure in general allows esports to become a bit more mainstream and we don't experience another 2008-2009 crash again.
Good writeup {: A good general overview of esports. Makes me sad to think of all the stuff I've missed being stuck on terrible internet in the middle of no where for the past 10 years :{
A lot of detail there, thanks for the write up, I read all of it and learned a lot. Replacing WarCraft 3 and Counter-strike with Guitar Hero 2, possibly the worst blunder in e-sports history?
I knew most of the major bits you had in there, but specifics like prize money, exact time and date, sponsorships, player acquisitions, etc are greatly appreciated. I learned a lot
However, I think you could have written a bit more about the fighting game community. I feel you could have had bullet points for the first time Alex Valle and the West faced the Japanese in the early days, the rise of JWong's dominance, EG signing MaRN, JWong, RickO as first 'eSports' team to enter the scene, the fall of Empire Arcadia, and coL vs. EG rivalry getting rebooted with fighting game signings.
Well personally I think you should have included three things: FXO being invited to the team league, QXC + Huk beating Koreans, and fOu being purchased by FXO. Also, I think the whole Puma-EG thing had more importance than was stated in the article.
Well done!! I read the whole thing and I feel much more educated on esports outside of SC2... If it makes you feel any better I never ignorantly spewed esports info that I didn't know but now I can xD!!! Agian great job!!
On August 01 2011 09:31 GhandiEAGLE wrote: Well personally I think you should have included three things: FXO being invited to the team league, QXC + Huk beating Koreans, and fOu being purchased by FXO. Also, I think the whole Puma-EG thing had more importance than was stated in the article.
Other than that though, great post!!!!
I think the only importance of the Puma-eg thing is tighter contracts... not really huge for esports as a whole... imo
On August 01 2011 06:19 Roychez wrote: The fighting scene was only really big in Japan and the US, while all these other games had all three "major" continents (Asia, Europe, North America) following them.
There is a professional Tekken 6 league in Korea... Singapore and Taiwan also have burgeoning scenes.
However, I think you could have written a bit more about the fighting game community. I feel you could have had bullet points for the first time Alex Valle and the West faced the Japanese in the early days, the rise of JWong's dominance, EG signing MaRN, JWong, RickO as first 'eSports' team to enter the scene, the fall of Empire Arcadia, and coL vs. EG rivalry getting rebooted with fighting game signings.
Good point. Added this:
June 2010 Evil Geniuses signs the top fighting game players Justin 'JWong' Wongm Martin 'MaRN' Pham and Ricky Ortiz, becoming the first CS-grown organization to get involved in Super Street Fighter IV and other popular titles. Exactly one year later, compLexity opens a fighting game division with players such as Ryan 'gootecks' Gutierrez.
However, I think you could have written a bit more about the fighting game community. I feel you could have had bullet points for the first time Alex Valle and the West faced the Japanese in the early days, the rise of JWong's dominance, EG signing MaRN, JWong, RickO as first 'eSports' team to enter the scene, the fall of Empire Arcadia, and coL vs. EG rivalry getting rebooted with fighting game signings.
June 2010 Evil Geniuses signs the top fighting game players Justin 'JWong' Wong and Martin 'MaRN' Pham and Ricky Ortiz, becoming the first CS-grown organization to get involved in Super Street Fighter IV and others. Exactly one year later, compLexity opens a fighting game division with players such as Ryan 'gootecks' Gutierrez.
(and removed the EG remark in 2002)
Nice. I'd probably mention all their signings; Mike Ross, Combofiend, and FilipinoChamp (all top tier players). Additionally, EG signs the first Japanese players to traditional eSports team: Momochi and Chocoblanka.
On August 01 2011 09:41 FishStix wrote: Oh also, nothing about W:ET or RtCW? Team-based FPSs had a hayday... (more than just CS and Quake)
I played ET for two years, but I have to say it hasn't really contributed anything to esports' growth – same goes for Call of Duty which even has a bigger community. Nothing ground-breaking. I think there was this girl playing for a top ET team from the US and she took her clothes off for some "hot gamer girls" site, but I doubt it's relevant for this post, lol.
// added
Shortly afterwards, EG adds the first Japanese players: Yusuke 'Momochi' Momochi and Yuko 'ChocoBlanka' Kusachi.
It's amazing how much we take for granted in eSports. Especially western eSports- with all the recent focus on just SC2. There is a long history here with lots of ups and downs.
Tells you that we aren't really in uncharted territory here, and there is a lot of history out there to be learned from.
My goodness, that sure took me a while to read! Thanks for compiling all of this, there were some parts of ESPORTS history that I did not know of (surprise surprise)- very good read.
Good write up. Another big thing on this is the pro-gamers of the era before 1990.
Everyone should go watch movies like The King of Kong, and Chasing ghosts. It shows how games were played at the top level before player vs player games came out. It also shows how the same kind of ingenuity that we use to come up with builds was used back then. Top level gaming has evolved since then but its still the same core thing. Pretty entertaining movies about the root origins of pro gaming
This brought tears to my eyes. I can't believe I was there following from the first CPL's. The internet bubble was one hell of a roller coaster for us grandpa gamers.
I find it strange that you didn't mention DotA with a single word anywhere. It wasn't as large as CS but it is still running in Asia and has had a pretty large scene for many years now. With MYM, SK and similar companies having teams in it.
Starting somewhere around 2005 DotA has had tournaments (can't find good sources after Dota-Allstars closed down). Now a days China dominates while at the start Europe/Russia was the strongest with some decent teams in the US.
If I recall correctly it has been at a few DHs, some other European LANs, but mostly online. Then there are other large tournaments such as SMM and ESWC in recent times.
It has declined in EU/NA in favour of LoL/HoN while still staying strong in China, Malaysia, Singapore and that general area of Asia. Probably due to the low system requirements, the easy LAN modes and custom servers in those regions. A quick look at garena still shows decent activity (even though it isn't the only or even largest platform for DotA).
This could be used as a tie in with the recent surge of LoL/HoN tournaments taking the place of DotA ones and a bit more.
Great history lesson for everyone not knowing our roots.
On August 01 2011 10:38 GrapeD wrote: Good write up. Another big thing on this is the pro-gamers of the era before 1990.
Everyone should go watch movies like The King of Kong, and Chasing ghosts. It shows how games were played at the top level before player vs player games came out. It also shows how the same kind of ingenuity that we use to come up with builds was used back then. Top level gaming has evolved since then but its still the same core thing. Pretty entertaining movies about the root origins of pro gaming
Don't think I would say that Billy Mitchell and the other arcade masters at Twin Galaxies had much to do with esport. They took world records in games in the same way people can get themselves into the Guinness book of records. They competed against the games and the clock. Esport is about playing against other players, competing with each other.
Everyone should however watch The King of Kong. It's probably my favorite documentary.
Great write-up, very comprehensive summary of Western esport history. There are some terms that you should clarify, such as "mibr" and "mio." I don't blame you for not going into detail on the history of how esport developed in Asia, but Sky wining his first WC3 WCG should be worth a mention since it really opened the door to mainstream China, the guy is one of the biggest reason why WC3 boomed in China and it already is the next big esport nation for sure with SC2 coming out there. Taiwan's government approved TeSL organisation and them broadcasting games on live general cable TV is also a pretty big deal, but I don't know when that first occurred since I didn't live here then.
I still remember my copy of PC Gamer mentioning Thresh winning a Ferrari, man it's been so long since then already.
On August 01 2011 10:38 GrapeD wrote: Good write up. Another big thing on this is the pro-gamers of the era before 1990.
Everyone should go watch movies like The King of Kong, and Chasing ghosts. It shows how games were played at the top level before player vs player games came out. It also shows how the same kind of ingenuity that we use to come up with builds was used back then. Top level gaming has evolved since then but its still the same core thing. Pretty entertaining movies about the root origins of pro gaming
Don't think I would say that Billy Mitchell and the other arcade masters at Twin Galaxies had much to do with esport. They took world records in games in the same way people can get themselves into the Guinness book of records. They competed against the games and the clock. Esport is about playing against other players, competing with each other.
Everyone should however watch The King of Kong. It's probably my favorite documentary.
Not quite accurate.
They competed against each other. Indirectly, of course, but they definitely competed against each other in order to obtain higher scores. That was the whole point of the documentary you mentioned. Yes, they competed against a machine, but the end-goal was to get the high score, thus, bumping the previous holder down.
On August 01 2011 11:27 bubblegumbo wrote: Great write-up, very comprehensive summary of Western esport history. There are some terms that you should clarify, such as "mibr" and "mio." I don't blame you for not going into detail on the history of how esport developed in Asia, but Sky wining his first WC3 WCG should be worth a mention since it really opened the door to mainstream China, the guy is one of the biggest reason why WC3 boomed in China and it already is the next big esport nation for sure with SC2 coming out there. Taiwan's government approved TeSL organisation and them broadcasting games on live general cable TV is also a pretty big deal, but I don't know when that first occurred since I didn't live here then.
I still remember my copy of PC Gamer mentioning Thresh winning a Ferrari, man it's been so long since then already.
mibr = team name (can be gained from the context, though) and mio seems to mean million (easily gained from context)
On August 01 2011 10:38 GrapeD wrote: Good write up. Another big thing on this is the pro-gamers of the era before 1990.
Everyone should go watch movies like The King of Kong, and Chasing ghosts. It shows how games were played at the top level before player vs player games came out. It also shows how the same kind of ingenuity that we use to come up with builds was used back then. Top level gaming has evolved since then but its still the same core thing. Pretty entertaining movies about the root origins of pro gaming
Don't think I would say that Billy Mitchell and the other arcade masters at Twin Galaxies had much to do with esport. They took world records in games in the same way people can get themselves into the Guinness book of records. They competed against the games and the clock. Esport is about playing against other players, competing with each other.
Everyone should however watch The King of Kong. It's probably my favorite documentary.
They were the starting origins of competitive gaming. Maybe not in the sense of competitive gaming now but without them that base that started people competing against each other in gaming wouldn't be there (or wouldn't be the same).
I did an interview with ESFI today where I expressed my frustration that people don't bother to learn eSports history. (I hadn't seen this thread yet.)
Thanks for the writeup. It's an interesting read. Very imcomplete. Missing lots of information about early SC:BW tournaments, and referring to a FPS event in 1997 as the first e-sports event seems silly. There were e-sports events before that. Even if OP is coming from the FPS centric point of view, it's still interesting.
Amazing post. It's really great to see someone dive into the history that got us to where we are today. It's been a LONG road for everyone involved and it's nice to look back every so often.
Great article. I "grew up" in the area of wc3 around 05. You missed maybe the NGL? Great team wars that time in wc3. I really miss those prestigous leagues for sc2. And i hope sc2 can remain strong
Nice to see you expanded my article, I sent you in 2010. You got more into detail. However a pity it is now "your" work as well as I was thinking on my own to expand the article ...
wow... what a massive flashback.. I still go to some old cpl and wcg cs vods from time to time.. broodwar wasnt really something you could access in the subcontinent.. ppl only played wc3 and cs..
That is Tasteless and Day9's dad doing the commentary.
Everyone needs to set down what they're doing and go watch the King of Kong, it really is a documentary focusing in on the original ESPORTS scene in USA.
This really fills out my ESPORTS knowledge, I've definitely kept track of StarCraft history but never really delved into the rest of the games histories. It's nice to see how the release of SC2 is going to bring the "seperated" communities back together to really only strengthen how pro-gaming will be held in the future.
I'd like to thank you for this amazing lesson, and a new song to add to my list :D.
A review on esports without including one of the most hardcore esport game ever, Dota? No fighting games either? Great article really but you need to complete it.
Wow, still remember when I first heard the news that 4kings disbanded due to money problems. WC3 never felt the same when that team broke up. Still a huge fan of th000 however!
NaVi for best CS team EVER!! (even Element agrees) Those guys are ridiculous to watch. If it weren't for my steam account getting hacked i'd still be playing cs today.
Awesome stuff, i did skip a fair bit of the non-RTS stuff. I'm sure its relevant, but i don't really care about FPS and fighters (i do love my fighters though, just not as an esport).
The financial aspect is quite staggering. I'm pretty confident that people today are smarter than they were then with respect to the potential of a current #ESPORTS bubble.
What scared me the most was the Orc / NE map stat adjustments. I hope to God that's not possible in SC2.
Missing the part where GOM first started doing professional english casting for Korean BW(starring Tasteless), which paved its way to the GSL a couple years later.
Really nice writeup. I never followed the shooter genre too closely, so it was really informative. Well i knew NiP, SK and NaVi but thats about it, oh and Fatality ^^
Amazing post. While I have had some interest in Esports for a very long time (Everyone who played games at all in Sweden knew about SK.swe at the time. HeatoN and Potti ftw.), it was great to find out about when WCG started etc.
eSports is such a ghey term. theyre not sports they are games, players are not athletes they are gamers. hate the term esports, way too much credit going to undeserving nerdz!!
This is great. I would love to work with the OP to add some awesome detail to this.
It's a great start but even as I read it I realise so much is missing (not necessarily absolute have to have facts, but interesting things fans would lobe to know!!)
On August 01 2011 13:50 t0bs3n wrote: Nice to see you expanded my article, I sent you in 2010. You got more into detail. However a pity it is now "your" work as well as I was thinking on my own to expand the article ...
Ehh no, I didn't use your article. tbh I don't even have it on my hard drive anymore, sorry. Honestly. Thanks for the effort you put into it nonetheless; I'll have it sent to me and see if I can extract some interesting stuff from it.
On August 01 2011 18:27 djWHEAT wrote: This is great. I would love to work with the OP to add some awesome detail to this.
It's a great start but even as I read it I realise so much is missing (not necessarily absolute have to have facts, but interesting things fans would lobe to know!!)
Sounds great, feel free to get in touch with me/PM me.
Just be aware that my main problem was to not let it get out of hand. I'm pretty sure a lot of the stuff people think I "forgot" was simply left out or even removed. Or do you guys really not mind if it gets even longer?
Specific things I'd like to add. I'm from the UK, so some of these events may have a UK/European focus.
- Deathmatch95 in Seattle (Doom2) - Clan Nine vs Deathrow: The first real intercontinental event that I can at least remember. - The QW US vs Europe event at Rapture99. - The TGI (True Gamers Invitational). - The WCGC (trail for WCG) - The event everyone seems to have forgot happened. - The Barrysworld European Quake3 TDM Championships, at The Playing Fields in London (Barrysworld are a great example of a victim of the first gaming recession).
"Frod vs. 4Kings on cbble. One of the best POV"s I've ever seen."
Holy crap, obscure reference or what ;D <3 GotFrag before MLG killed it.
EDIT: I still really think the OP should mention CXG since it's one of the most important lessons to learn from US esports. Basically they ofterred $1mill prize money and failed to prepare for the event. They had net problems and the like and basically just called off the whole thing, pocketing (presumably) most of the prize pool.
Mmmh, I guess you're right, I should mention it (it was "only" 600 000 $ though).
added:
January 2004: The Cyber X Games in Las Vegas, USA turn out to be a huge disaster. They are announced as a revolutionary tournament for CS, WC3, UT2003 and other games, with over 600 000 $ in prize money. However, the event is very poorly organized and network issues force the organisers to cancel the majority of the tournaments, including the Counter-Strike one. In the end, a big part of the prize money isn't distributed at all and many teams and players travel all the way to Las Vegas for no reason.
On August 01 2011 12:13 jlake02 wrote: Super happy about your post!!
I did an interview with ESFI today where I expressed my frustration that people don't bother to learn eSports history. (I hadn't seen this thread yet.)
Thank you and well done!
Thanks! You know, someone had to do it.
Just watched your ESFI interview – omg, it's just great. Everyone should watch it.
Great trip down memory lane, love reading all the old CS stuff(<3 Na 'Vi, <3 Complexity). After reading this im amazed at how much of this stuff I had forgotten about, and how much I didn't know, especially how large the prize pools were back then.
Great work mate, looking forward to any updates too.
Also felt DotA was missing from it, some revolutionary things there such as links to streams from the ingame menu screen, massive funding being provided by the company behind DotA, DotA being a subscribe game (i think? no expert here) etc.
added this to please all the MOBA fanatics – however, it still remains true that DotA never played a huge role for the development of esports despite its huge player numbers.
August 2008: For the first time in its history, the ESWC doesn't take place in France, but in San Josè, USA, near the corporate head quarters of main sponsor Nvidia – in terms of spectator attendance, it flops. The event features Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike Female, WarCraft 3, Quake 3, TrackMania Nations ESWC (a special edition of the racing game specifically created for the tournament) as well as the WC3 mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA) – it's the first major tournament to host a tournament for the increasingly popular game. It's the first one of its kind; today, games like DotA, LoL and HoN are usually called Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA). This is the time when DotA becomes present in esports and successful organizations like SK Gaming, MeetYourMakers and mousesports field own teams, even though they are usually haunted by lineup instability and other problems. League of Legends being added to the Intel Extreme Masters in 2011 marks the esports breakthrough of MOBA games.
was really hoping to see you get a warning for first posting with that crap
amazing OP my case is a sad cause cause I had no ideal all this was going on when I played online games for fun, I was very good at counter strike but never knew I could possibly make money from it being a pro <.< was to focus on other things in life I guess
Nice read. I remember you from the W:ET community where you had a short stint. If I recall correctly you were sporting a ukrainian flag back then.
Would've loved some mention of that game. Quakecon has had a couple of pretty big tournaments featuring the game, as well as RtCW. Though I guess coming from that community myself bias can't be ruled out :p
I only knew about a small fraction of this - I have to say that I didn't know much about the CS scene, though I played a lot of CS:S on pubs. Good info, thanks for taking the time to write all of this.
On August 01 2011 12:13 jlake02 wrote: Super happy about your post!!
I did an interview with ESFI today where I expressed my frustration that people don't bother to learn eSports history. (I hadn't seen this thread yet.)
Thank you and well done!
Thanks! You know, someone had to do it.
Just watched your ESFI interview – omg, it's just great. Everyone should watch it.
On August 01 2011 21:51 D.Devil wrote: added this to please all the MOBA fanatics – however, it still remains true that DotA never played a huge role for the development of esports despite its huge player numbers.
August 2008: For the first time in its history, the ESWC doesn't take place in France, but in San Josè, USA, near the corporate head quarters of main sponsor Nvidia – in terms of spectator attendance, it flops. The event features Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike Female, WarCraft 3, Quake 3, TrackMania Nations ESWC (a special edition of the racing game specifically created for the tournament) as well as the WC3 mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA) – it's the first major tournament to host a tournament for the increasingly popular game. It's the first one of its kind; today, games like DotA, LoL and HoN are usually called Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA). This is the time when DotA becomes present in esports and successful organizations like SK Gaming, MeetYourMakers and mousesports field own teams, even though they are usually haunted by lineup instability and other problems. League of Legends being added to the Intel Extreme Masters in 2011 marks the esports breakthrough of MOBA games.
Maybe that is true, you probably know more about the subject then me. However it is also a bit to early to say what the long-term impact will be. LoL is doing a lot of interesting things, from an "E-sports" perspective.
* Riot are, or at least rumored to be, aggressivly bying themselves into E-sports events, and possibly forcing other more hard-core games out (Quake). * LoL are free-to-play, and are boasting some frigging huuuuuge player numbers: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=247901¤tpage=23 * Riot is actively supporting LoL events by linking to streams from within the game client, i belive they are the first developer to succesfully pull this off? That is probably a big reason why there where sick wiever numbers at DH:Summer.
All in all the buisness model might be the future for E-sport games, or it might just die out. Hard to say, people where saying that Farmville was going to die and it is going stronger than ever i belive. I find it quite interesting, despite never having even played a MoBA game.
But that might be going a bit off-topic from your OP, you tried not to focus to much on different games and more on the events as such, and not to much on current events and possible futures.
This is amazing, I still remember when I first got into PC gaming when I was about 12, seeing all this stuff about Quake, Thresh etc. being a complete noob and not following it because I only wanted to play my Age of Empires 2 on Microsoft Zone.
Eventually getting curious about the FPS scene, getting Team Fortress mod for Quake and suddenly losing so much sleep. Getting HalfLife and thinking it was the best game ever until my friend recommended me some random mod called Counter Strike.
The professional gaming world has come so far. Hats off to you.
On August 01 2011 12:13 jlake02 wrote: Super happy about your post!!
I did an interview with ESFI today where I expressed my frustration that people don't bother to learn eSports history. (I hadn't seen this thread yet.)
Thank you and well done!
Thanks! You know, someone had to do it.
Just watched your ESFI interview – omg, it's just great. Everyone should watch it.
thanks! another wave of eSport-chills around @9minute mark <3
This is my favorite from the coL CS days. They kind of give you a little bit of a more in depth experience as to what he's talking about.
A funny anecdote, Quite a few months ago, maybe a year ago actually, I ran into Storm (holy shit ) and a few of coL's WoW PvP players on HoN. I talked to them a little, and asked if the team had any interest in SC2. They basically said they enjoyed BW and WC3, but didn't see a move to SC2 happening.
I read the first event and then went "HEY! How can he miss FragFest '96?!?!" :D Where DOOMer, the swedish legend, won when still playing only with the keyboard.
Fucking awesome write-up though. I remember just about everything from this haha, getting too old.. Some things really feel as though they happened yesterday while its already 7/8 years ago >_>
On August 02 2011 00:31 Beyonder wrote: Kinda missing the ClanBase story here though. Their EuroCups were really the bomb for Q3/CS esports for a while
Clanbase is missing, but the question is in which month did it start. Clanbase was founded in 1998 and the first EuroCup was in 2000.
Very awesome, I'm constantly digging through google for history stuff and have never seen a reference anywhere near this complete. Incredible work, how much did you do from memory?
It might be worth noting that while modern competition has existed since Doom had netcode, the word ESPORTS didn't appear anywhere until around 99 (or 98 depending on which version of KeSPA history you believe). CPL had its own trademarked nomenclature for gamers (cyberathletes) they were pushing to brand things, in contrast to how we view it now as a collective industry.
Also I don't entirely agree with Red Annihilation being "the first real competition", modern LANs had existed for years before that and Microsoft had been putting a lot of energy towards pushing them to showcase Windows 95 networking. Deathmatch '95 had a full set of regional online qualifiers that flew the winners to MSHQ to compete offline -- and even had a video of Bill Gates holding a shotgun against a backdrop of a Doom tileset (apparently shown exactly once). The quote Thresh gave about it is pretty funny too.
By virtue of having already played most of the top players around the country and beaten them, I was considered one of the favorites to win the tournament. Another player who went by the handle "Merlock" was considered the other favorite. Due to a random draw, we ended up facing each other in the semi-finals. I ended up beating him something like 10-5. Merlock got so upset he slammed the keyboard and threw his chair off-stage. It was quite the scene, particularly since LAN tournaments weren't all that common back then.
Semantics, though. RA got a lot of press from non-gaming outlets because of the Ferrari which makes it the most remembered of that era. I remember reading about it in something like Reader's Digest at 11.
Great article! There is more history in the making. Would be great for you to continue to add to it and maybe add some things that were missing. Make this article a separate site with links to the various companies and such that you talk about in the article. This could end up being a great resource for eSports. Great work!
Wow. Incredible write up. Admittedly I didn't know most of this as while I knew vaguely of esports before none of the games captured me enough to really investigate the scene.
Great read, I had to do a ton of research on things like this for one of my essays and it's quite scary how much I could remember from around 2002 onwards, the rise and fall of the esports scene at times looks so dramatic, but we love it
On August 02 2011 01:12 branflakes14 wrote: Interesting read, thanks for posting! Who'd have thought the first ever real eSports prize was a god damn Ferrari.
Even more Tresh co-founded xfire and sold it for 102 million to Viacom
This is so awesome! I've been following/studying up on the WC III, SC BW, and SC II History but i'm glad someone was able to write about all the counter strike and quake stuff that I knew very little about! Thanks for adding a little bit more perspective on things!
Damn fine article - having been around Counter-Strike and its communities for a good 8ish years it all rang a familiar tune - Can't take away from us Danes that we might be a small nation, but we damn sure know how to play us some Counter-Strike.
Took a while to read it all but I'm glad I did! Very informative, thanks for enlightening us. I am (was) pretty much clueless about anything not related to Starcraft. All those [other game]-events just went under my radar.
Nice writeup, I actually learnt something today. But there is too little mention of SC:BW scene in Korea which by far imo is the only country that really promote the concept of a game to become a SPORT.
This article is awesome, I can't believe I read it all.
I didn't realise that I had been following eSports for so long... back when elemeNt was my favorite player and I was watching SK etc..
I have been at ESWC 2006 in Paris Bercy by the way! The most awesome eSport event I have ever been to! This event showed that Quake was THE game that was best suited for a live event. Most of the people who had come to the event were there for Warcraft 3 or CS, but the Quake matches were fascinating everyone with an intensity that no other game has.
I can't thank you enough for this article, I think anyone who cares about e-sport should read this at least once. I came into e-sports with sc2, so I really needed it (eventhough I knew about some of the stuff like CGS thanks to DJWheat shows)
i've been around since the beginning and it was nice reading some of the events you highlighted and just remembering the shit storms that came up. great post
Reading this reminds me of how I was pretty aware of early esports in the U.S. but I never got a chance to experience or know a lot about the big European scene. It also is funny to me that I was playing SCBW before CS, yet I was introduced to the CS pro scene first.
Someone needs to start finishing thick histories of the major competitive games and a compilation of the failed ones. I would definitely buy a book series on those (♥ Starcraft Bible).
On August 01 2011 21:51 D.Devil wrote: added this to please all the MOBA fanatics – however, it still remains true that DotA never played a huge role for the development of esports despite its huge player numbers.
August 2008: For the first time in its history, the ESWC doesn't take place in France, but in San Josè, USA, near the corporate head quarters of main sponsor Nvidia – in terms of spectator attendance, it flops. The event features Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike Female, WarCraft 3, Quake 3, TrackMania Nations ESWC (a special edition of the racing game specifically created for the tournament) as well as the WC3 mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA) – it's the first major tournament to host a tournament for the increasingly popular game. It's the first one of its kind; today, games like DotA, LoL and HoN are usually called Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA). This is the time when DotA becomes present in esports and successful organizations like SK Gaming, MeetYourMakers and mousesports field own teams, even though they are usually haunted by lineup instability and other problems. League of Legends being added to the Intel Extreme Masters in 2011 marks the esports breakthrough of MOBA games.
I'd be glad to provide you info for more Dota related stuff. Cause it is a major part of esports despite the lack of big prize tours. Good adition though, gj.
Perhaps add in the FiOS HL2DM Grand Tournament in 2006. It was for $100,00 1st place prize, worth mentioning imo.
May 2006 Verizon FiOS announces a Grand Tournament for Half-Life 2: Deatmatch with a 1st place prize of $100,000. The top 8 players were taken to Hermosa Beach, CA for a LAN to compete for top prize. Micah "Micahwave" Ernst walks away champion with a check for $100,000.
i feel like we need someone to go and do a short history of starcraft, both bw and sc2. to be honest i dont give a shit about the rest of esports, i just want my sc.
Disregard my last post. Valve announced a 1mil tourny with the top 16 Dota teams in the world, to showcase Dota 2 in 17th-21th August. That's huge news for the esports world.
It's amazing reading about all the Counter Strike stuff back in 2004 & 2005 because that's when I use to play it 24/7 pretty much and would watch all these games. Seeing Complexity get 5th place was amazing especially since all their players were more unknown.
AWESOME post. I started following eSports because of CS and eventually started following other games like WC3, SC, Quake, etc. Reading this gave me nerd chills because eSports has gone a long way.
So it took 14 pages of posts for me to actually get through reading the whole thing A nice read and always entertaining to be reminded of the SK-fnatic duel :p it's also interesting to see the evolution of titles that are included at major events particularly the influx of MOBA games LoL/DotA etc
Man that ESWC 2006 picture is sick. I went to the ESWC website out of curiousity and it looks like the finals will be in the same venue this year, and SC2 will be included.
Though going further than that, back in 1992 I used to take part in Street Fighter 2 competitions at my local arcade. I thought I was pretty decent at the game but going there demonstrated to me that I knew jack shit about that game. Was good fun though, and I met some awesome players, very much enjoyed the EVO SF4 last weekend before MLG kicked off.
Here's hoping e-sports keep going and keep growing.
No idea how long it took to read through it all, probs like 40 mins to an hour, totally worth it! Was very nice to learn a lot more of the E-sports scene.
I think more could be said about smash. After all, people have been playing melee almost as long as they played brood war. Even though the community is kind of an iceberg in the sea of esports they deserve some coverage.
It would be neat if some day, somebody put together a book or documentary about the history of esports, going all the way back to TG and stuff.
1.It made for a great ride on the train where internet cuts out a lot. 2.It was incredibly informative and gave me a much deeper understanding of the full esports scene (rather than the one I've come to know in my few short months with SCII) 3.Evo and other big tournaments now make a loooot more sense to me. So it was a well-timed article as well.
Wow, didn't realize so many games were so big. However, I gotta ask, were these people actually proper pro gamers, to the extent of sc bw pros. I know about fatal1ty and all, but I've also heard statements such as "true progaming doesn't exist outside of Korea." from the sound of this history lesson, this wasn't true at all. But I want to ask anyway.
Also, I've been brainwashed by the casting of artosis and tasteless about how starcraft is the most difficult and has the best players in general in gaming and how the mastery reached by players like flash and jaedong is beyond anything of another player of another esport. I want to know whether these other games were just as hard as starcraft and how much dedication each person actually had. Were people in training houses practicing 14 hours a day?
Don't think Daigo Umehara was mentioned even once? Actually fightning games in general were pretty much completely ignored. I'm not a fanatic fightning game fanboy but it just seems quite ignorant.
On August 02 2011 09:20 Vaelone wrote: Don't think Daigo Umehara was mentioned even once? Actually fightning games in general were pretty much completely ignored. I'm not a fanatic fightning game fanboy but it just seems quite ignorant.
No doubt. If you want to understand complete domination of a scene you need to look at Daigo.
On August 02 2011 09:13 Micket wrote: Wow, didn't realize so many games were so big. However, I gotta ask, were these people actually proper pro gamers, to the extent of sc bw pros. I know about fatal1ty and all, but I've also heard statements such as "true progaming doesn't exist outside of Korea." from the sound of this history lesson, this wasn't true at all. But I want to ask anyway.
Also, I've been brainwashed by the casting of artosis and tasteless about how starcraft is the most difficult and has the best players in general in gaming and how the mastery reached by players like flash and jaedong is beyond anything of another player of another esport. I want to know whether these other games were just as hard as starcraft and how much dedication each person actually had. Were people in training houses practicing 14 hours a day?
Not quite like korea, but some of the cs pro's earned some good cash. CGS was a good time (money wise) for the lucky players to be selected. And both yes and no to the skill level inside the games, starcraft takes alot of thinking and I think its the game that takes the most skill to reach the top. But than agian, cs and quake is also hard. Its more than just aiming that goes into those games, and you have to play for a long time to understand it.
On August 02 2011 09:13 Micket wrote: Wow, didn't realize so many games were so big. However, I gotta ask, were these people actually proper pro gamers, to the extent of sc bw pros. I know about fatal1ty and all, but I've also heard statements such as "true progaming doesn't exist outside of Korea." from the sound of this history lesson, this wasn't true at all. But I want to ask anyway.
Also, I've been brainwashed by the casting of artosis and tasteless about how starcraft is the most difficult and has the best players in general in gaming and how the mastery reached by players like flash and jaedong is beyond anything of another player of another esport. I want to know whether these other games were just as hard as starcraft and how much dedication each person actually had. Were people in training houses practicing 14 hours a day?
There where and still are full-time pro gamers for other games than starcraft. As far as dedication i belive they rival that of Korean BW pros when they practise as most, might argue that BW scene has held together longer but you would need someone with a real insight into the top top CS scene to answer that.
As for most difficult game that has always made me cringe a bit, like when a F1 rally commentator says that F1 is the most difficult sport there is. It begs the question: Based on what?
SC:BW is increadibly demanding from a APM standpoint, while in CS you talk about aim instead. Completely different skillsets. And one is a shooter and a teamgame, other is RTS and 1v1.
This text isn't supposed to be a 100% complete history of esports. Instead, its objective is to educate new SC2 fans about the backgrounds of what they see today. This is why I specifically left out many things that have no relevance to today (NiP, ClanBase, NGL ONE, ...) – almost everything I mentioned somehow gives more insight into today's esports (this is also why the guy who asked for a SC- and SC2-only history missed the point). This being said, the Korean SC:BW scene has been really constant. This is great for Korea, but gives me little to write about (I could have mentioned bonjwas and revolutions in strategy, but decided against it; if you know which OSL final was the biggest in terms of spectators, let me know and I'll add it). The same applies to fighting games and other communities.
On August 01 2011 22:42 hellgoat wrote: Nice read. I remember you from the W:ET community where you had a short stint. If I recall correctly you were sporting a ukrainian flag back then.
Would've loved some mention of that game. Quakecon has had a couple of pretty big tournaments featuring the game, as well as RtCW. Though I guess coming from that community myself bias can't be ruled out :p
Oh man, Enemy Territory used to be so great, haha. It's how I got introduced to competitive gaming. Yes, I've had an Ukrainian citizenship until I turned 18 (even played for the Ukrainian ET national team, lol). Well yeah, as much as I enjoyed ET, I don't feel there's anything I can write about it. QuakeCon games were great, but all I could mention is their outcome, and as you can see I tried to avoid just listing tournament results.
On August 02 2011 02:11 Synapze wrote: How inflated was the wc3 salaries? I played a lot of wc3 but I never really looked into stuff like that.. was WC3 really that big?
Of course, the WC3 salary story was more complex than it might seem at a first glance. Organizations weren't blindly throwing too much money at WC3, but there were several relevant factors. First of all, many WC3 tournaments especially in China became limited to a small amount of invited players and the ones that weren't regularly invited to such events were screwed. This was also the time when WC3 started to become smaller instead of growing further (also linked to the fact that SC2 would eventually replace it), and of course the financial crisis contributed to it strongly. In August 2008, Michal 'Carmac' Blicharz, full-time writer for SK Gaming at that time, wrote an article about it. Excerpt: "The monthly wages that players want to receive are between $500 for players that never win anything and above $5,000 for the good ones. If you want to have the absolute superstar team, then you need to be prepared to pay over $15,000 each month. Or closer to $30,000 if you are willing to believe the crazier rumours that go around."
On August 02 2011 09:13 Micket wrote: Wow, didn't realize so many games were so big. However, I gotta ask, were these people actually proper pro gamers, to the extent of sc bw pros. I know about fatal1ty and all, but I've also heard statements such as "true progaming doesn't exist outside of Korea." from the sound of this history lesson, this wasn't true at all. But I want to ask anyway.
Also, I've been brainwashed by the casting of artosis and tasteless about how starcraft is the most difficult and has the best players in general in gaming and how the mastery reached by players like flash and jaedong is beyond anything of another player of another esport. I want to know whether these other games were just as hard as starcraft and how much dedication each person actually had. Were people in training houses practicing 14 hours a day?
People who say that true pro-gaming only exists in South Korea have pretty high standards for what they consider progaming. Of course, South Korea is leading in terms of professionalism, esports is part of its culture and everything – and the rigid training schedules of SC:BW pro-teams are unmatched. But it's less ahead than many people say, and interestingly, not only hardcore SC:BW fans, but also Western fans who were taught it from PR-focused interviews and articles (noone ever gets tired of mentioning how big esports is in South Korea).
Yes, there were and are plenty of full-time players outside of Korea. The thing is just, most of them don't make a big deal about it, so there's no real list or anything. Some teams also consist of both full-time players and students – actually, quite many top players officially go to university but only invest very little time into their studies. But yeah, SK, fnatic, Na`Vi, mTw, etc. all make a living off Counter-Strike just like Grubby, ToD, HoT and others used to play WC3 full-time. Quake was also played by full-time players other than Fatal1ty.
As in regards of mastery, this is really hard to compare. For instance, some people say SC2 will never be mastered in the same way as SC:BW was because the game requires less mechanics. Anyway, I think most people will agree that the level of competition is insanely high in Western esports, as well.
Also if this is in fact the real Lindsey Sporrer (which I have no reason to believe), this is now the sexiest thread on all of TL.
LOL at the "NASL invited players to offline finals.............
I know what you meant, but with this being such a fantastically big issue of contention between blizz and the esports community you could have chosen a different term.
Thank you good man for writing this. Best read since i am on TL.
I remember first hearing about E-sports when Guillaume "Grrrr..." Patry won the OSL. Well i just remember that i saw it on TV and was amazed you could get paid to play video games. I am just sad it didn't push to follow the SC:BW scene at that time. I lurked on TL a few years later but never registered until last year. Shame on me.
Anyway, hope you make a longer version out of this.
He didn't mention Smash at all, and tbh, since MLG dropped melee and recently dropped Brawl too, it is hard to take it seriously. As technically demanding Melee is as a game, the community is still childish to me. Recently at Genesis 2 (the most recent major international tourney), a member of the clan that organised the event thought it would be really cool to steal the $6000 prize money and then lied about stealing it and all that. A major before that, no prize money was given out at all due to poor organisation. At venues, there are plenty of thieves and immature adults. Basically, things that happen in that community are 'hurting esports', but it matters less because it isn't mainstream anymore (no teams, no sponsors, community based,).
MLG even dropped Brawl mainly because they were forced to DQ the top 2 seeds for match fixing (they chose to split the prize money, and so didn't play serious). You talk about Ken Hoang but did you know his brother organised a huge tournament, took all the attendance fees and ran off with the money? Ken isn't condemned for this act, but no one knows whether he was part of it or not. Basically, a general lack of professionalism. (the current best player at melee is banned on smashboards and this isn't even like Idra ban)
I am one of those guilty of acting like western E-sports has only been around since SC II came out.
I've always loved gaming, but competitive gaming seemed some far off thing. All I knew about it was that the Koreans owned everybody and counter-strike was involved.
Then in 2009 I started following Pro Brood War in Korea, but I still had no idea about the western e-sports scene.
So its good to have it all laid out in an article like this. Excellent work.
Might want to mention some stuff from the Brood War History threads, I think they are still around on TL. Mainly that the Blizzard ladder tournies used to be the biggest "pro" tournies, until PGL/CPL/Various korean leagues popped up. Not sure how much you would want to get into details, but it is the PGL and blizzard tournies that started Grrr toward Korea and going pro.
That's not even that much; quite a few professional CS, WC3 and Quake players have winnings in the six-digit $ area throughout their careers.
On August 03 2011 01:24 Anchen wrote: Might want to mention some stuff from the Brood War History threads, I think they are still around on TL. Mainly that the Blizzard ladder tournies used to be the biggest "pro" tournies, until PGL/CPL/Various korean leagues popped up. Not sure how much you would want to get into details, but it is the PGL and blizzard tournies that started Grrr toward Korea and going pro.
I consider adding more stuff about SC:BW in Korea, but rather about its prime, not its beginnings.
On August 03 2011 01:54 D.Devil wrote: I consider adding more stuff about SC:BW in Korea, but rather about its prime, not its beginnings.
Shrug, up to you, it's your post, but if you are going to label something as the history of esports, especially the formation of KESPA, the leagues that led up to it, Blizzard's own tournies back when they used to have them, etc, starting at the beginning, but the prime stuff is good too.
tyty, i always read up on old esports stuff when it seems interesting, and i always hear a lot of figure heads in sc2 (DJWheat.... all the time ) talk about the old days. I may not be an old timer myself (although i did watch some pro smash bros melee and played some online MLG brawl. i know, not too old) but i sure can talk like one xD
One thing i was reading about when i was looking up Nal_ra, is that he had a rival series with savior that fans reffered to as "the holy wars" (i think). so even though that seems pretty random, i mention it because it sounds epic and i hope sc2 reaches huge rivalries with names like legendary battles ^^
On August 02 2011 09:13 Micket wrote: Wow, didn't realize so many games were so big. However, I gotta ask, were these people actually proper pro gamers, to the extent of sc bw pros. I know about fatal1ty and all, but I've also heard statements such as "true progaming doesn't exist outside of Korea." from the sound of this history lesson, this wasn't true at all. But I want to ask anyway.
Also, I've been brainwashed by the casting of artosis and tasteless about how starcraft is the most difficult and has the best players in general in gaming and how the mastery reached by players like flash and jaedong is beyond anything of another player of another esport. I want to know whether these other games were just as hard as starcraft and how much dedication each person actually had. Were people in training houses practicing 14 hours a day?
This is a really interesting question that people rarely approach correctly. Yes, progamers have existed forever. Todd Rogers was being paid thousands a month in 1980, Thresh was making money solely through gaming in 1996, there are tons of people paying their rent based on their performance in games and in that sense they are professional gamers. They have existed and will continue to exist as long as games are around.
That being said, nothing (currently or in the past) can compare to Korea's industry. Korea is the only place on Earth where it exists nearly in tandem with how traditional sports are run and operated. You're not going to find any other competitive game that has full time training houses for B-team members who don't play in tournaments. It's very much like baseball in that regard -- there are people who spend years learning fundamentals before they move up to the big leagues (on 12+ hr/day schedules). I absolutely love that aspect, there are so many elements to your game that you get to see people develop and it takes them absurdly long periods of time to get it all right. In that regard Korea's BW scene is incredible unique, SC2 still can't match that kind of regiment required to be the very best (though it is getting there).
That isn't to say other games are easier or less worthwhile, it's much more a matter of infrastructure and industry size, though we here at TL like to pretend it has to do with the game itself. Being very good at any game takes a lot of time and dedication, probably about the same amount. Fatal1ty was incredible because he realized he needed to practice 12 hours a day long before anyone else did, you can see this in the MTV documentary about him where they show repeated clips of him saying "sorry can't talk gotta practice. practice, practice, practice, thats all I have". He was the absolute unquestionable best of his era because of it.
All in all it comes down to how you personally view progaming. Myself, I prefer the crazy regiment of BW progaming as "the test of real sports" but I can understand why people feel that is too extreme.
On August 02 2011 09:13 Micket wrote: Wow, didn't realize so many games were so big. However, I gotta ask, were these people actually proper pro gamers, to the extent of sc bw pros. I know about fatal1ty and all, but I've also heard statements such as "true progaming doesn't exist outside of Korea." from the sound of this history lesson, this wasn't true at all. But I want to ask anyway.
Also, I've been brainwashed by the casting of artosis and tasteless about how starcraft is the most difficult and has the best players in general in gaming and how the mastery reached by players like flash and jaedong is beyond anything of another player of another esport. I want to know whether these other games were just as hard as starcraft and how much dedication each person actually had. Were people in training houses practicing 14 hours a day?
The best counter-strike players back in the day (~2002) did practice a lot, HeatoN and Potti for instance did not have jobs but lived solely of gaming which meant they practiced pretty much full time. However, since there were no leagues and events were fewer and farther between teams took more breaks. The top teams used to gather a couple of weeks before a major event and hold a bootcamp where they did nothing but practice. Then after the events it was possible to have a couple of weeks off.
One of the few things that I missed in this great write-up was the fact that CPL had quite a few events in Europe from 2000 to 2003/2004. Here are the results from CPL Cannes 2003 for instance:
On August 03 2011 01:54 D.Devil wrote: I consider adding more stuff about SC:BW in Korea, but rather about its prime, not its beginnings.
Shrug, up to you, it's your post, but if you are going to label something as the history of esports, especially the formation of KESPA, the leagues that led up to it, Blizzard's own tournies back when they used to have them, etc, starting at the beginning, but the prime stuff is good too.
To be fair, he only brushed over the origins of the other games structured leagues as well. Not a problem for me, this thing is a trove of information as it is. I think all that might be better suited to a history of SC:BW specifically, that sounds bad ass TBH, maybe you can write it ^^.
On August 04 2011 10:28 rza wrote: only mentioning halo 2 times? its the reason there is esport in north america
I'll let someone more equipped to answer this go into detail, but they were and are completely different beasts.
I agree that Halo was crucial, but saying it is the "reason" that "e-sports [exist] in North America" is flat out wrong. Quake and CS both came out before Halo and have been huge since they were released. $50,000-$100,000 events, gamer houses, paid contracts, massive sponsorships, etc. all existed in those games as well, and were around at the same time (if not before) it all existed in Halo, all of it in NA.
CS has remained bigger for longer (in terms of payout, contract salary, and professional player pool (note: different from amount of people who simply participate in events; I am talking about serious contracted teams)), and is more culturally relevant to SC2 (PC-based competition (and yes, I know Halo came out for PC, but the majority of competition was for console)).
Compare e-sports coverage of CS back in the day to Halo. Every single day, dozens of news posts went up about every small local event, player transfer, demos, "drama", etc. in the CS world, and continued to do so in the U.S. for almost 8 years until it finally slowed down in the U.S. This all still exists overseas, but that's neither here nor there. The sites that cover(ed) games like CS and Quake are the same ones that covered SCBW and are now covering SC2 (for the most part).
Yes, Halo is massively important to the development. But to say it is the "reason" for e-sports in NA is ridiculous. CS and Quake were as big for as long, if not bigger for longer, and just as crucial (if not more so) than Halo was or is.
Fighting games are also MASSIVELY important to e-sports, but again, they are a different beast. Shoryuken.com and rarely mingled with the likes of GotFrag, because they were just different.
On August 04 2011 10:28 rza wrote: only mentioning halo 2 times? its the reason there is esport in north america
I have no interest in writing about results – and I believe I mentioned all events that had a real impact on the industry. CS/WC3/Quake have simply been the games where the most stuff happened because there's a huge variety of event organisers and professionally organized teams.
On August 02 2011 17:24 D.Devil wrote: This text isn't supposed to be a 100% complete history of esports. This is why I specifically left out many things that have no relevance to today [...] This being said, the Korean SC:BW scene has been really constant. This is great for Korea, but gives me little to write about (I could have mentioned bonjwas and revolutions in strategy, but decided against it; [...]). The same applies to fighting games and other communities.
Yeah, this is more accurately the "history of PC e-sports in the west relevant to SC2" We'd get less posts about fighting games and Halo. Off-topic: I'd love to see SFIV at MLG.
I've always been familiar with "esports" though I've always just called it competitive gaming before people started to call it that. Knew about Quake. Knew about Korean BW. Knew about the CS scene while I was playing CS. Not that I was not interested, those communities didn't feel very accessible. Tucked away in some corner. I mean... look at the amount of people who simply don't know. The word just doesn't get out. In SC2 beta, it would be impossible to not be linked to a match or matches talked about. I just got addicted. Watch more than I play actually.
Nice to know what happened to CPL. I tried to login into CAL a year or so ago and I was like WTF? :<
" January 2007: The Championship Gaming Series by DirecTV starts – and brings esports to the TV. It's a global league with over 1 000 000 $ in prize money, and it's completely exclusive: If you sign one of CGS' lucrative contracts, you aren't allowed to participate in any other tournaments. The selected games are rather controversial: CS:Source... "
Great post, enjoyed the read. I'm glad there are people out there who appreciate eSports for its history, and will actually try to promote it properly.
You should add something to the end, a summary of where some of the major games are going. Something like this:
SC:BW: Korean scene is still going strong, although recently is under threat, as MBC is thinking of turning from eSports to a music channel. Foreign scene is pretty much the same as it has been for the last 10 years, although it is only just recovering from some of its players moving to SC2.
My example is BW because I have been out of touch with SC2 for a few months, and I don't think I am qualified to summarize what is going on.
Anyway, good luck with your The Rocketjumper site, if you get it going you might hear from me again.
There's a whole side of ESports you're forgetting which is fighting games. You did a great job of covering the PC side of E-Sports but Arcades and Consoles also started E-Sports in their own side.
Wow I read like half of this, and its really cool to see how all of the events slowly grew and it all came together. I plan on reading the rest of it later today.
I think one big thing you are missing here is madden nation giving away $100,000 for four years 2005-2008 and broadcasting on ESPN giving major exposure to what would be a otherwise oblivious viewers of ESPORTS
On August 08 2011 17:39 Onegu wrote: I think one big thing you are missing here is madden nation giving away $100,000 for four years 2005-2008 and broadcasting on ESPN giving major exposure to what would be a otherwise oblivious viewers of ESPORTS
Oh, cool. First time I hear about this – thanks. Can you provide me a link with some further information?
I read a slightly shorter write-up which was captioned "esports history" and thought is was somehow missing all the important and good stuff.
Thank you so much for this write-up which contains everything i wanted to have read in the last one i wasted my time on for reading^^ And halfway through i thought this guy writing it must be german and i was right
Thank You again sooo much!!!
ps. the cyx accident and video makes me cry everytime RIP :'(
I think you've missed 2 legendary esport events. The first is clan 9 vs death row in quake which was an all expenses paid showdown between the best of their respective continent, huge at the time. Clan 9 in particular was a very well respected internet café which sponsored their players ( although I don't recall any details ). They also had a very strong CS team for a while. The second such encounter was NiP vs X3 in CS a few years later. NiP totally dominated the CS scene at their top. Truly feel like an old geezer when one is reading TL and hearing all the talk about "esport", because I remember very well back in the day when pretty much exactly the same were being discussed over at geekboys.org, which was a huge CS community ( which originated from the clan with the same name, which also was very strong before the NiP era ).
Fantastic write-up! Thanks for linking to that BoxeR candybar commercial, haven't seen that one! :D Bookmarked it, everyone in the esports scene should read a few paragraphs every day (or if you feel intrigued, read it all at once) to learn about how their passion has developed and established itself to what it is now!
great article you skipped out on the pgl(professional gamers league) which was an important league in the 90s for quake and starcraft the pgl had online tournaments before the cpl had tourneys and was bigger than the cpl in the 90s it wasn't until the 00s that the cpl took over
i also think sf2 should have been mentioned because it was the first major competitive game (man vs man) out there and influenced the entire esports scene it could be labeled proto-esports for lack of a better term
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but then noticed what you were the same person who wrote the OP...LOL!
The fighting game scene is relatively sheltered from the rest of the eSports world but companies like Evil Geniuses and Complexity have already realized the huge potential that this scene has and have added the best names to their roster (EG.Justin Wong, coL.CC Mike Ross, etc).
