The birth of cybersports

The definition of the word "cybersport" itself could not be found for a long time, and the debate on the topic "Is cybersport a sport?" has not subsided to this day. For a long time, an extremely niche activity has been stagnating in the shadows. For so long it's hard to remember where it all started these days...

For the recognition of its very existence, eSports has come a long, thorny way. The competitive element in video games was first talked about back in the days of the PDP-1, the first personal computer released back in 1960.

It was this monster machine that would host the first cybersports competitions. On October 12, 1972, Stanford University hosts the first cybersports competition for the game Spacewar! Spacewar! would later grow into the hit arcade game Galaxy Game. The principle of the first cybersports competitions was very simple, even primitive: two players controlled spaceships between stars and tried to knock each other out. The difficulty was that the contestants had to both dodge their opponent's projectiles and shoot at the same time.

Conceptually the game was very simple, you had to play with switches on the front panel, which quickly fell into disrepair.

The engineers of the time faced a difficult task. They solved it in a peculiar way: they created a separate control panel with buttons and triggers. This is how the world's first gamepad was born.

The first cybersport competition was covered by journalist Stuart Brand. At that time he was working as an editor of Rolling Stone magazine, dedicated to music and culture. It was in Rolling Stone magazine that the first article about cybersports was published, about that very game - Spacewar!

In 1978, the legendary Space Invaders was released. The game quickly gained popularity, attracting more and more attention to the industry. As early as 1980, a tournament organized by Atari on Space Invaders attracted 10,000 participants.

However, the arcade competition of those days was only about how many points each participant would score. No multiplayer was out of the question; only a ranking where whoever lasted the longest would win.

December 10, 1993 - This day goes down in history as the starting point of eSports as we know it today. On this day, Doom was released. It was in the first Doom that online multiplayer first appeared. Although Doom had more network connectivity issues, it was the one that opened Pandora's Box, giving the shooter genre a boost. This type of competition allowed players to fight face-to-face. Ideological successor was not long in coming. Already in 1996 the first Quake game appeared. Technologically, Quake surpassed Doom, offering players a more dynamic gameplay and responsive controls and, importantly, full 3D. The outcomes of online battles became more dependent on fine motor skills and knowledge of game mechanics. The first Quake was doomed to success.

A year later, in May 1997, the developers of Quake organized a tournament based on their game, the Red Annihilation tournament. They showed the world the face of cybersport that had not yet arrived in the masses. About 1900 people took part in Red Annihilation online and 16 people in the LAN tournament. For the first time in the history the prize money was measured not in hundreds, but in thousands of dollars, and the winner of the tournament - Dennis Fong, took as a prize no less than Ferrari 328 GTS.

At the end of that same 1997, Quake II was released. Technologically, the second part surpassed all of its competitors by orders of magnitude. The developers took into account the flaws of the previous part and optimized the network connection at once: no high pings and crashes. Quake II was of such technical quality that it still gives a head start to many releases with their "early access" and "open beta testing"...

Also in 1997, along with the development of Quake II, the first eSports league was born. A wealthy man named Angel Munoz founded the CPL. Earlier Munoz used to work as a stockbroker and investment banker, but he got bored with the banking sector and decided to invest into the development of eSports. The idea came to Muñoz at one of the QuakeCon. Years of experience in the financial area allowed Angel to attract investors to his CPL, including such huge companies as Intel, NVIDIA, and Logitech. With such sponsors, the CPL quickly became the premier eSports league in the United States...

In 1998, the first worthy competitor to Quake II, Unreal, was released. However, it suffered the same fate as the first Doom at the time of its release: poorly optimized network code. Players had to wait a whole year to enjoy full-fledged online battles. In 1999, Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament were released. Both games were released almost simultaneously, which resulted in a war of ideas on the shooters of the time. For the first time in history, not one discipline fought for a place in the sun, but two. Quake III had more action and spectacle, whereas Unreal Tournament had more tactical approach to gameplay, variety and atmosphere. Sound familiar? :)

However, closer to 2005 arena shooters began to gradually become obsolete. Hurricane shooters ceased to amaze viewers. Around the same time in the shadows was gaining popularity game, on the basis of which will later create the most popular mod. A mod that would grow into a separate discipline and forever change the idea of online battles. Of course, we're talking about Half-Life and Counter-Strike respectively...

Min Lee, who was still a student at the time, worked with Jess Cliff to develop a mod based on Half-Life. Min was inspired by the movie "Combat" and came up with a superficial plot about the confrontation between terrorists and special forces. For a long time young developers did not succeed, and in the same 1999 Valve turned their attention. The idea for the new shooter Counter-Strike stunned the imagination. The game required both personal shooting skills and teamwork.

In less than a year Counter-Strike would become the main cyber sport discipline. In North America the real battles for the title of the best national team are unfolding. While Counter-Strike previously only required players to react quickly and know the map, now there's another variable in the cyber sports equation...