1980-1990: The First Tournaments
Competitive gaming has existed almost as long as video games themselves. Even the earliest arcade games inspired some fierce competition. Early on, a lot of that competition took the form of friends challenging each other to best their high scores, but it didn’t take long for organized tournaments to begin popping up.
Atari held the first video game competition, the Space Invaders Tournament, in 1980. It attracted more than ten thousand participants. This tournament, and others like it in following years, sowed the seeds of what would eventually become eSports.
By the time the 1990s came around, tournaments for arcade and console games had become increasingly common, with companies like Nintendo and Blockbuster sponsoring world championships. Competitive gaming was at this point so new that some tournaments offered brackets for children and teenagers to compete in, a concession no longer necessary today.