First Esports
The first eSports game
The roots of esports can be traced back to 1972, with the first ever known video game competition held at Stanford University. The event, called the “Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics”, was held to find the best players of the arcade game Spacewar!, a game that had become popular in academic circles. The winner of this event took home a year’s subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. While this was a rudimentary and informal tournament, it set the stage for the growing popularity of competitive gaming.
The Rise of Competitive Tournaments
While StarCraft (1998) is often credited as one of the first major games to help launch esports, competitive gaming had existed in various forms prior to that. One of the earliest examples was the 1972 Stanford University “Spacewar” tournament. Players competed in the game Spacewar, which was one of the first video games to include a competitive element. However, these early tournaments were relatively small, unorganized, and mostly limited to the university setting.
While Spacewar! was being played in various academic circles, it wasn’t until 1972 that the first esports tournament took place. This was called the Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics, which was held at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
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The Event: Organized by Steve Russell, one of Spacewar!'s creators, and a group of other early tech enthusiasts, the tournament had several students and computer scientists participate. The winner of the event received a prize: a year’s subscription to Rolling Stone magazine (quite fitting for the early 70s vibe).
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Significance: While it was a far cry from the multi-million-dollar prize pools we see today, this event marks a key milestone in the history of competitive gaming. It was one of the first instances where players gathered specifically to compete in a video game as part of a formalized tournament structure.
