50 Fun Facts About Esports

The earliest known video game competition, held at Stanford in October 1972, was played on which game?

The 'Intergalactic spacewar olympics' offered a magazine subscription as its prize; Bruce Baumgart won the free-for-all.

What was the grand prize at that 1972 Stanford tournament?

Rolling Stone writer Stewart Brand covered the event, one of the first mainstream articles on gaming culture.

Which 1980 Atari event, with over 10,000 entrants, was the first big video game competition?

It was won by Rebecca Heineman, and the same year Walter Day founded a high-score record-keeping body in Iowa.

Which high-score record-keeping organization did Iowa arcade owner Walter Day found in 1980?

It supplied Guinness with video game records and created the U.S. National Video Game Team in 1983, making minor celebrities of players like Billy Mitchell.

Guinness lists the largest organized video game competition ever as a 1984 tournament for which arcade game?

Konami and Centuri drew more than a million players across Japan and North America; Play Meter called it 'the coin-op event of the year.'

Which 1991 game popularized head-to-head tournament play over high-score chasing?

Its face-to-face format paved the way for deathmatch modes and led to the founding of the fighting-game tournament Evo in 1996.

What did Dennis 'Thresh' Fong win at the 1997 Quake tournament Red Annihilation?

The id Software CEO's own car; Fong, a student, discovered at the ceremony that he was not insured to drive it.

Which former Dallas stockbroker founded the Cyberathlete Professional League in June 1997?

The CPL hosted biannual hotel tournaments and later spawned the amateur CAL league built around Counter-Strike.

Which country first licensed professional gamers, in 2000?

Korean pro leagues were televised on channels like Ongamenet and MBCGame; Japan's anti-gambling laws long blocked prize pools.

Which company backed the World Cyber Games, dubbed the 'Olympics of esports,' launched in 2000?

The Korean event had opening ceremonies and gold, silver and bronze medals, and doubled as a marketing showcase for its sponsor.

Which country's LAN-party company Ligarena founded the Electronic Sports World Cup in 2003?

The ESWC grew out of the LAN Arena events and paid out over €1.7 million between 2003 and 2010.

Twitch launched in June 2011 as a spin-off of which general-interest streaming site?

By 2014 it was the fourth-largest source of peak U.S. internet traffic; the parent rebranded as Twitch Interactive and shut the old site that August.

How much did Amazon pay for Twitch in August 2014?

The all-cash deal was Amazon's third recent gaming acquisition; Google had been widely reported as the front-runner.

What is the name of the trophy awarded to League of Legends world champions?

It weighs about 22 pounds. The Aegis of Champions is Dota 2's International trophy.

Which team has won the most League of Legends World Championships?

The South Korean organization, formerly SK Telecom T1, has six titles — the first in 2013 at the Staples Center.

Where was the first League of Legends World Championship held, in June 2011?

The prize pool was just $100,000; Fnatic won. A year later a Taiwanese team took $1 million of a record $2 million pool.

Which Taiwanese team won the 2012 League of Legends World Championship and its $1 million first prize?

They beat Korea's Azubu Frost 3–1; the $2 million pool was the largest in esports history at the time.

What is the real name of Faker, the League of Legends mid-laner who has played for T1 his entire career?

Born in Seoul in 1996, he debuted in April 2013 with a solo kill on Ambition and became a part-owner of T1 in 2020.

Which company runs League of Legends and its World Championship?

Riot also runs the Valorant Champions Tour; Valve runs Dota 2's International, Blizzard ran the Overwatch League and Epic staged the Fortnite World Cup.

Where and when was the first Dota 2 International held?

Valve announced it on August 1, 2011, to promote the game; a Ukrainian team beat China's EHOME 3–1 for the $1 million top prize.

How has The International's prize pool been funded since 2013?

A quarter of Compendium/Battle Pass revenue goes to the pool, which is how it ballooned past $40 million at its peak.

Which team won back-to-back Internationals in 2018 and 2019, the first repeat champion?

They had to fight through open qualifiers in 2018 after last-minute roster changes; captain N0tail's grandfather was a Faroese prime minister.

Which Ukrainian team won the very first International in 2011?

Na'Vi beat EHOME 3–1, then lost the 2012 final to China's Invictus Gaming.

The Evolution Championship Series (Evo) began in 1996 under what name?

It was a 40-player Super Turbo and Alpha 2 event at Golfland in Sunnyvale; Evo has been in Las Vegas since 2005.

'Evo Moment #37,' the famous full parry, was performed by Daigo Umehara against whom at Evo 2004?

Daigo's character parried every hit of Wong's super in 3rd Strike; he won the match but lost the final to KO.

Which characters were used in Evo Moment #37?

The finals took place at Cal Poly Pomona on August 1, 2004; the two players had never faced each other before.

Who won the 2019 Fortnite World Cup solo final and its $3 million prize?

The 16-year-old American won at Arthur Ashe Stadium; Aqua and Nyhrox split the duos prize the day before.

Where was the 2019 Fortnite World Cup held?

The tennis venue hosted the finals from July 26 to 28 after ten weeks of online qualifiers.

Which rapper joined Ninja on a March 2018 Fortnite stream that broke Twitch's peak viewer record?

Travis Scott and JuJu Smith-Schuster were on too; Ninja, born Tyler Blevins, had started in competitive Halo 3.

How much did each of the 12 founding Overwatch League teams pay in franchise fees for the 2018 season?

Expansion teams paid $35–60 million a year later; by 2023 sponsors had fled and Blizzard folded the city-based league into the Overwatch Champions Series.

What made the Overwatch League's structure unusual for esports?

The model ran from 2018 to 2023, with teams such as San Francisco Shock and London Spitfire, before it was dissolved.

Which Ukrainian Counter-Strike star was ranked the world's No. 1 player by HLTV in 2018, 2021 and 2022?

Oleksandr Kostyliev won his first Major, and its MVP award, with his long-time Ukrainian club at PGL Major Stockholm 2021.

In which country is the Counter-Strike powerhouse Astralis based?

The Astralis Group also once ran the League of Legends team Origen before consolidating everything under one brand.

Ninjas in Pyjamas, best known for Counter-Strike, is based in which country?

The team spent time under the SK Gaming banner as SK Scandinavia and SK Sweden before reforming as a Swedish company in 2005.

Team Liquid started in 2000 as a fan site for which game before signing its first pros for its sequel?

Victor 'Nazgul' Goossens launched teamliquid.net in 2001; the Dutch-founded organization is now one of the biggest multi-game clubs.

FaZe Clan was founded in 2010 as a YouTube 'trickshotting' clan for which game?

FaZe Sniping's personality-driven videos made it one of the first big gaming YouTube channels long before it fielded pro teams.

At which 2023 event did esports appear as a full medal sport for the first time at the Asian Games?

It had been a demonstration sport in 2018; the SEA Games had already awarded esports medals since 2019.

Where and when are the first Olympic Esports Games scheduled to take place?

The IOC confirmed the date in February 2025 after an online Olympic Virtual Series in 2021 and an Olympic Esports Week in 2023.

Which organization won the inaugural Esports World Cup Club Championship in Riyadh?

The Saudi organization took the cross-game crown; the event bills itself as the world's largest by prize pool at over $70 million.

Which unlikely game did the Esports World Cup add in 2025, with Magnus Carlsen as ambassador?

The addition came as the Riyadh event grew to a prize pool of more than $70 million.

Which country's broad anti-gambling laws long prevented prize pools for pro gaming tournaments?

That is a big reason esports took off in Korea and China first, despite Japan's central role in the arcade era.

Which 1990 event toured the U.S. and held its finals at Universal Studios Hollywood?

Nintendo ran a second, PowerFest '94, for the SNES; the surviving 1990 competition cartridges are now among the rarest NES items.

Which 1980s US TV show, running 133 episodes, had contestants battle for arcade high scores?

It ran from 1982 to 1984; the BBC's First Class and That's Incredible! also featured competitive video game segments.

In the early 2010s, roughly what share of the esports audience was estimated to be male?

Most viewers were 18 to 34; forecasts had the global audience passing 450 million by 2020 with China providing 35% of revenue.

Which 1988 game did Wired later credit as 'the first online sports game'?

It supported up to 16 players and was the first Internet game to use metaservers to find open servers and to keep persistent user records.

Which band played at the 2014 League of Legends World Championship in Seoul before 40,000 fans?

The year before, the Season 3 final had sold out the Staples Center in Los Angeles, a sign of how quickly live esports audiences were growing.

In 2013 Danny 'Shiphtur' Le became the first pro gamer granted a US P-1A visa; what country is he from?

The P-1A category is reserved for 'Internationally Recognized Athletes', a milestone in esports being treated as a real sport.

Which US school created the first officially recognised varsity esports programme, in 2014?

By 2019 around 125 US colleges had varsity esports programmes, most of them members of the National Association of Collegiate Esports.

In 2018 the AP Stylebook settled on which spelling for competitive gaming?

The change mirrored the way 'e-mail' became 'email' with common usage; that September Ninja became the first pro gamer on the cover of ESPN The Magazine.

Which multi-sport competition first included esports as an official medal event, in 2007?

Its successor, the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games, has kept esports ever since, and the Commonwealth Games ran a pilot esports championship in 2022.