Let's talk about e-sports

Imagine:

Welcome to the wonderful world of E-sports

You're in a crowded auditorium. People are chatting excitedly and music blares from speakers. Many are holding signs and the atmosphere is festive. The music cuts and the lights dim, an announcer comes out and says a name. The cheers begin. You turn to the big monitors on either side of the stage and see....video games?


You, my friend, were at an e-sport tournament. E-sports are, essentially, a collection of video games played at a professional level. This has been around for ages and ages, most notably it has been a huge success in South Korea with the release of Blizzard's Starcraft and expansion Starcraft: Broodwar in 1998. There are at least two television stations that are dedicated to broadcasting games, and the players there are treated like sports stars here. Cash prizes for tournaments can be upwards of $100,000. These guys are literal professionals that plug in 10-hour days of training to be as good as they are.

A Starcraft finals match in Korea looks like this.

Overseas, e-sports has had it's ups and downs, and is currently experiencing a rather large boom with the release of Blizzard's long awaited sequel to Starcraft, Starcraft II. There are a lot of competitive games out there, from first person shooters like Halo and Call of Duty to fighting games like Street Fighter. Of course the real time strategy king Starcraft cannot be forgotten, and there has been a growing interest in the MOBA genre, with the successful League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth. The picture above was from Anaheim, California, part of MLG's pro circuit. Huge crowds were in attendance to watch their favorite players from Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: Reach, and Starcraft II battle it out for cash  prizes.

But it's much older than that.

I recently came across this article about the legendary Nintendo gold cartridge. I had heard about this thing in passing, and I knew it was one of the most coveted game for collectors in existence (there were only 26 ever made). What I didn't know was the history behind this game.

You see, e-sports isn't something that just cropped up recently. These cartridges were prizes related to Nintendo's 1990 World Championship (with a prize of $10,000 and a new car). That means e-sports has been around for at least 20 years. The article details the quest of certain individuals in obtaining these rare games, as well as the stories of some of the kids who had participated in it. I honestly had no idea that e-sports had gone so far back. I think it is interesting to see that those who participated in Nintendo's event 20 years ago were all children. There has definitely been a paradigm shift (to borrow from Emig, whom we discussed in class) in how we view video games. The winner of the Starcraft portion of Anaheim was Korean veteran IMMVP, who is 21. In fact, the average gamer is around 37.

E-sports has definitely gone through some major changes through it's life. Here's a video from the 1990 Nintendo World Championship and one from the MLG Anaheim tournament earlier this year.