History of Esports

History of Esports

The Fathers of Gaming

Harry Williams

Harry Williams played a significant role in the history of gaming as an early arcade game designer and engineer. He paved the way for the industry by being one of the most important contributors to electrifying pinball machines and other mechanical games.

Nolan Bushnell

Nolan Bushnell is an American entrepreneur and pioneer in the video game industry. He famously founded early video game giant Atari with his co-founder Ted Dabney, using the money the two made from creating one of the first arcade game devices, Computer Space (1971). Atari would later establish itself by releasing iconic video games such as Pac-Man (1980) and Pong (1972).

Allan Alcorn

Allan Alcorn's journey into the world of video games began in 1971 when he was a budding engineer at Atari, a young video game company co-founded by Nolan Bushnell. As Atari's first employee, besides its two founders, Alcorn was tasked with designing a simple game to showcase his and Atari's abilities in new arcade cabinets. This undertaking would quickly result in the global phenomenon and the first commercially successful video game, Pong (1972).

Ralph Baer

Ralph Baer was a German-American inventor, engineer and video game pioneer. During his stint as a military supplier, he conceived the idea of creating an interactive television-based entertainment system. This concept eventually led to the development of the first home video game console, Magnavox Odyssey (1972), which would light the spark of the home gaming industry.

Gabe Logan Newell

Gabe Logan Newell, often nicknamed "Gaben", is a prominent figure in the video game industry and is best known as the co-founder and managing director of Valve Corporation, one of the most influential and successful video game development and distribution companies. Some of its popular video games include Half-Life (1998), Counter-Strike (2000) and Dota 2 (2013).

Object Highlight: Pinball Machine

Ever wondered when we first began talking about "gaming"?

One possible origin lies in the electrification of classic machines like pinball.

Between 1931 and 1933, American entrepreneurs David Gottlieb and Harry Williams transformed pinball from a simple table game into an electrified device. Their innovations spread rapidly across the United States, inspiring countless variations. A tabletop pinball machine manufactured by Joseph Schneider Inc. in New York, dating from the early 1930s, illustrates this moment just before the first electronic devices appeared in 1933. This introduction signalled the start of gaming's modern history and, ultimately, the long journey toward today's esports.

Early Gaming

Tennis for Two

The year 1958 marks one of the most significant years in gaming development. The first multiplayer game was born with the creation of Tennis for Two by physicist William Higinbotham. The idea of the game was a digital tennis simulation, played on an oscilloscope, with each player acting on one side of the two-dimensional playing field through a controller with two different buttons. This step from human-to-computer action to human-to-human interaction in gaming paved the way for the birth of esports.

Naughts and Crosses 

In 1952, British computer science professor Alexander Shafton Douglas created the first known graphics-based computer game that established a human-to-computer interaction with the OXO. The game was devised using Cambridge's famous Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, sometimes called the first computer. The device enabled users to play the classical Tic-Tac-Toe game against the computer on a 35 x 16-pixel screen. In comparison, a 2023 smartphone with 4K ability operates on a 3840 x 2160-pixel screen - so around 15,000 times more detailed.

Spacewar!

In the early 1960s, a significant milestone in the history of gaming unfolded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A revolutionary group of computer scientists developed a game called Spacewar! (1962). Steve Russell, Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen programmed the game for PDP-1 computers based on the science-fiction novel Spacewar. Regarded by many to be the first true esports-capable computer game, Spacewar! became the first title played in the history of esports.

University Computers 

The early stages of the video game era took place in American universities, specifically within their physics and math departments. It was during the period when university computers were still gigantic in size compared to the personal computers used today and utilised to run evaluations that were time-consuming when done manually. Faster PCs introduced in the late 1940s accelerated calculations, allowing some free time, which the university employees took advantage of to create the first video games.

Growing Market

First Commercial Game Developers

First Esports Titles: StarCraft, Warcraft, Counter-Strike