Electronic sports , abbreviated e-sports or eSports , is used as a general term to describe the play of video games competitively. Other terms include competitive gaming , cybersports , cyber athletics (used by the CPL) and V-Sports (used by the GGL).
These games which are considered electronic sports normally belong to the first-person shooter, real-time strategy, or sports game genres. They are played competitively at both amateur and professional levels. Professional levels are played competitively at the professional league and tournament.
Over the Internet
The easiest way to play an electronic sports match is over the Internet. General online play is subject to the lessened ability to detect cheating and the more unpredictable network latency not being the ideal environment for high level competition; however, due to its convenience, even players who are used to LAN games use Internet games for fun and practice.
Usually teams, or clans as they are called; will need to contact each other prior to matches. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is very popular for doing this due to the ability for each clan, league, or other gaming related organisation to set up its own chat channel on the network, making them easy to find. IRC has become so popular among gamers that the largest IRC network is QuakeNet, a network originally created for players of the first-person shooter Quake and now used by players of many different games. The matches are then carried out on the server according to the rules of the leagues the teams are familiar with.
Popular online leagues include the Canadian league, Pro Gaming League, along with Cyberathlete Amateur League, Cyber Evolution (CEVO), Major League Gaming, ClanBase, and the Electronic Sports League.
The largest online gaming network on the PC is Battle.net, used to play Warcraft , Diablo and StarCraft (two of the three oldest and biggest competitive games with Counter-Strike ) online. Having over 12 million active users with an average of 200,000 online at any given moment with peaks up to 400,000.
This service provided by Blizzard Entertainment is especially important for Warcraft III for which it features integrated ladders and advanced anti-cheating. The best of the one-one ladders compete in seasons stretching over a period of months, after which the top finishers gather at offline events to compete for a seasonal championship and tens of thousands of dollars in prize money.
PlayStation Network is currently the most popular console online gaming network with over 29 million users. While Xbox Live is currently the most subscribed subscription-based console online gaming service with over 17 million subscribers.
Over a local area network
Playing over a LAN has a number of advantages: the network conditions are much better suited to playing computer games than on the Internet, and when the competitors are in the same building it is a lot harder to cheat without someone knowing (at professional events administrators will normally be present to ensure fair play). It is also a much more social atmosphere. Due to the advantages of LAN many gamers organize LAN parties or visit LAN centres and major tournaments are always conducted over LANs.
Electronic sports history
Arcade era
Video games have been played competitively since their inception. Twin Galaxies is known for keeping track of high scores on many classic arcade games, and they created the U.S. National Video Game Team in 1983. The team ran a number of competitions, including the 1987 Video Game Masters Tournament for Guinness World Records.
Nintendo held their World Championships in 1990, touring across the United States, with the finals in Universal City Studios, California. There were 90 finalists, and the champions were Jeff Hanson (11 & under), Thor Aackerlund (12–17), and Paul White (18 & over). The Nintendo championships are notable for the gold cartridges distributed to all of the finalists, which now fetch high prices on eBay.
Nintendo held a 2nd World Championships in 1994 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) called the Nintendo PowerFest '94. There were 132 finalists that played in the finals in San Diego, CA. Mike Iarossi took home 1st prize.
Blockbuster Video ran their own World Game Championships in the early 1990s, co-hosted by GamePro magazine. Citizens from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Chile were eligible to compete. Games from the 1994 championships included NBA Jam and Virtua Racing.
The first ever televised eSports event has been noted as the Australian gameshow A*mazing, which would show two children competing in various Nintendo games in order to win points.
Early PC Era
Doom
The release of Doom on December 10th 1993 introduced multi-player death match games. Doom spawned newsgroups, chat rooms and among the first known users of IRC for gaming. Players connected to each other modem-to-modem and online competitive gaming was born. A handful of Doom fan sites report the favored maps of the time being e1m4 and e1m5.
Doom was swept aside by the release of its predecessor Doom II on October 10th 1994. Shortly thereafter the DWANGO (Dial up Wide Area Network Gaming Operations) firm launched their services. DWANGO, charged users the cost of a local telephone call to connect to their dial-up bulletin board services. With 20+ servers scattered throughout urban locations in North America DWANGO became the early hub of competitive gaming.
Initially, online gaming was available only to those with superior internet connections. These included ISP employees, university/college students and large businesses. Early client side software includes iDoom, Kali and iFrag.
Doom II
To accompany the launch of Doom II, Microsoft held the first offline tournament for PC players, Deathmatch '95.Deathmatch 95 (aka Judgment Day Deathmatch 95 & Dwango’s Deathmatch 95) was aimed to be a competitive offline gaming tournament featuring, the most popular title of the year, Doom II. This format, gamers attending a single location and using standardized hardware, has defined eSports competitions since.
The tournament took place in Richmond, Virginia in October and a handful of national qualifiers witnessed players from Europe flying to play in the tournament. Prior to these events many players had competed online. Early favorites for the competition included Dennis Fong and Merlin.
Dennis Fong later recalled the tournament as follows:
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. Although I didn't practice the game much, it was pretty evident that most players really favored the Cleric class as it was the easiest to learn and had a homing-type weapon that seemed more powerful than anything else in the game. Since everyone expected the finals to be played Cleric vs. Cleric, I decided to go against the grain and learn the Mage class. Anyway, to make a long story short, I found a way to counter the Cleric super-weapon and ended up shutting out my opponent in the finals, beating him 8-0.”
Quake
Formal events have grown dramatically since the release of Quake in 1996. At the earliest offline Quake tournament, "Red Annihilation" in May '97 of that year, Quake co-creator John Carmack promised his own red Ferrari 328 GTS convertible to the winner, Dennis Fong aka "Thresh".
Global Tournaments Era
Cyberathlete Professional League
In June 1997 Angel Munoz launched a league for computer video gamers, known as the Cyberathlete Professional League or CPL. Since then, the attendance and size of the venues for these events has grown and thousands of spectators typically connect over the internet to watch the final matches.
In 2005 the CPL moved to a World Tour format. The 2005 CPL World Tour focused on the one-on-one deathmatch game Painkiller and had a total prize purse of $1,000,000. The winner of the CPL Grand Finals event, Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, went home with the grand prize of $150,000, while Sander "Vo0" Kaasjager took home the MVP trophy for having the most tournament wins.
World Cyber Games
In the year 2000, the first World Cyber Games event was held in Seoul, Korea. There were competitions for Quake III Arena , StarCraft , FIFA 2000 , and Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings . The competition initially had 174 competitors from 17 different countries with a total prize purse of $20,000. In 2006, the prize purse had risen to $462,000, and the event had grown to 9 different competitions and 700 qualified participants from 70 different countries.
Electronic Sports World Cup
In 2003, the first Electronic Sports World Cup event was held, with a total of 358 participants fr
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