Esports Trivia
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48 free Esports trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Esports began with Stanford students playing Spacewar! for a Rolling Stone subscription in 1972 and now fills stadiums, hands out eight-figure prize pools and is heading to an Olympic Esports Games. In between came Space Invaders and Twin Galaxies, Quake's Red Annihilation and its Ferrari, Korean StarCraft on television, the Cyberathlete Professional League, Twitch, and the modern giants: League of Legends Worlds, Dota 2's The International, Counter-Strike Majors, Evo, the Fortnite World Cup and the Esports World Cup in Riyadh. This quiz spans all of it. There are questions on the tournaments and their records, the players (Faker, s1mple, Daigo, N0tail, Bugha, Ninja), the organizations (T1, OG, Team Liquid, FaZe, Fnatic, Astralis, Ninjas in Pyjamas), the leagues that rose and fell like Overwatch League, and the milestones on the way to the Asian Games and the Olympics. Some are easy for anyone who watches; others are for people who remember Justin.tv. Every answer is checked against a reference source and each question links to where the fact was confirmed.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The earliest known video game competition, held at Stanford in October 1972, was played on which game?
Spacewar
Spacewar, written at MIT in 1962, spread through university labs as programmers modded it; Stanford's variant let five ships battle at once.
Q 02What was the grand prize at the 1972 Stanford video game tournament?
A Rolling Stone subscription
A Rolling Stone subscription, for a year: the magazine paid for the night's beer and prizes and sent Stewart Brand and photographer Annie Leibovitz to cover it.
Q 03Which 1980 Atari contest, with regional finals across the US, crowned 16-year-old Rebecca Heineman national champion?
The Space Invaders Championship
The Space Invaders Championship launched Heineman's career: three years later she co-founded Interplay Productions with Brian Fargo.
Q 04Which high-score record-keeping organization did Iowa arcade owner Walter Day found?
Twin Galaxies
Twin Galaxies took its name from the Ottumwa, Iowa arcade Day bought in 1981, and its scoreboard became the official supplier of video game scores to Guinness World Records.
Q 05Which 1991 game popularized head-to-head tournament play over high-score chasing?
Street Fighter II
Street Fighter II revived the arcade business in 1991, and its one-on-one mode, where beating an opponent mattered more than a high score, set off a boom in rival fighting games.
Q 06What did Dennis 'Thresh' Fong win at the 1997 Quake tournament Red Annihilation?
John Carmack's Ferrari 328
John Carmack's Ferrari 328: Fong turned out not to be insured to drive it, so Carmack agreed to cover his insurance for a year.
Q 07Blizzard suspended Hong Kong pro Blitzchung in 2019 after he backed the city's protests on a stream for which game?
Hearthstone
Hearthstone: after a public outcry, Blizzard gave back Blitzchung's prize money and cut his one-year suspension to six months.
Q 08Which song did K/DA, a virtual girl group, debut at the 2018 League of Legends World Championship?
Pop/Stars
Pop/Stars debuted with an augmented-reality show created to promote new K/DA character skins, which players could then buy inside League of Legends.
Q 09Which company backed the World Cyber Games, dubbed the 'Olympics of esports,' launched in 2000?
Samsung
Samsung backed the World Cyber Games, held every year until 2013, before the event vanished for six years and was revived in Xi'an, China, in 2019.
Q 10Which country's LAN-party company Ligarena founded the Electronic Sports World Cup in 2003?
France
France: Ligarena scaled its small LAN Arena parties up into the ESWC, holding the early finals at the Futuroscope theme park near Poitiers.
Q 11Twitch launched in June 2011 as a gaming spin-off of which general-interest streaming site, later shut down by its parent?
Justin.tv
Justin.tv began in 2007 as one channel streaming founder Justin Kan's life around the clock; as Twitch outgrew it, the parent company shut the old site in 2014.
Q 12Which company paid $970 million for the streaming site Twitch in August 2014?
Amazon
Amazon: Google's reported deal to buy Twitch through YouTube fell through first, clearing the way for Amazon's all-cash bid.
Q 13What is the name of the trophy awarded to League of Legends world champions?
The Summoner's Cup
The Summoner's Cup, first crafted by Thomas Lyte for the 2012 final, was redesigned by Tiffany & Co. in 2022; Dota 2's International trophy is the Aegis of Champions.
Q 21Which team won back-to-back Internationals in 2018 and 2019, the first repeat champion?
OG
OG had to fight through the 2018 open qualifiers after last-minute roster changes, won the title anyway, then beat Team Liquid 3–1 in 2019 to repeat.
Q 22Which Ukrainian team won the very first International in 2011?
Natus Vincere
Natus Vincere beat China's EHOME 3–1 for the $1 million prize, then lost the 2012 final to another Chinese team, Invictus Gaming.
Q 23The Evolution Championship Series (Evo) began in 1996 under what name?
Battle by the Bay
Battle by the Bay grew from a grassroots fighting-game contest into a tournament so big that a joint venture of Sony and RTS bought it in 2021.
Q 14Which team won the League of Legends World Championship in 2013, 2015 and 2016?
T1
T1, then SK Telecom T1, won those titles with Faker in mid lane, then went years without one before winning three straight from 2023 to 2025.
Q 15Where was the first League of Legends World Championship held, in June 2011?
DreamHack Summer in Sweden
DreamHack Summer in Sweden hosted that first final inside a LAN party, and just two years later the championship final filled Los Angeles's Staples Center.
Q 16At the 2017 League of Legends world final, an augmented-reality dragon swooped over the crowd at which Beijing venue?
The Bird's Nest
The Bird's Nest, Beijing's 2008 Olympic stadium, hosted that final, and a year later the same augmented-reality trick put K/DA's singers beside animated champions.
Q 17What nickname do fans give League of Legends star Faker?
The Unkillable Demon King
The Unkillable Demon King: Faker solo-killed veteran star Ambition in his April 2013 debut, and in 2020 he became a part-owner of his team.
Q 18Which company runs League of Legends and its World Championship?
Riot Games
Riot Games sold a majority stake to China's Tencent in 2011, and Tencent bought out the remaining shares in 2015.
Q 19Where did Valve stage the first Dota 2 International tournament, in 2011?
Gamescom in Cologne
Gamescom in Cologne: Valve announced the tournament just over two weeks before the show opened, and it doubled as Dota 2's first public showing.
Q 20How was The International's record $40 million prize pool of 2021 mostly funded?
Crowdfunded via in-game Battle Passes
Crowdfunded via in-game Battle Passes: a quarter of sales went into the pool, and when spending slipped in 2022 the pool shrank for the first time in a decade.
Q 24'Evo Moment #37,' the famous full parry, was performed by Daigo Umehara against whom at Evo 2004?
Justin Wong
Justin Wong's super was parried hit for hit in a 3rd Strike losers' final; Daigo won that match but then lost the grand final to Kenji 'KO' Obata.
Q 25Which characters were used in Evo Moment #37?
Ken vs. Chun-Li
Daigo's Ken, down to a sliver of health, parried all 15 hits of Chun-Li's super, then finished her with a combo.
Q 26Who won the 2019 Fortnite World Cup solo final, taking home the $3 million prize?
Kyle 'Bugha' Giersdorf
Kyle 'Bugha' Giersdorf, 16, scored almost double the points of his closest rival, and hours later hackers hijacked his Twitter and Twitch accounts.
Q 27Where was the 2019 Fortnite World Cup held?
Arthur Ashe Stadium, New York
Arthur Ashe Stadium, New York staged those finals, but Epic cancelled the next Fortnite World Cup, planned for 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Q 28Which rapper joined Ninja on a March 2018 Fortnite stream that broke Twitch's non-tournament record for peak viewers?
Drake
Drake: the stream peaked above 635,000 viewers, and in 2019 Ninja quit Twitch for Microsoft's Mixer before returning to Twitch a year later.
Q 29Roughly how much did each of the 12 founding Overwatch League teams pay to join the league in 2018?
$20 million
$20 million: after team owners hired lawyers to push for a break, the league agreed in 2023 to waive the fees they still owed.
Q 30What made the Overwatch League's structure unusual for esports?
Permanent city-based franchises, like U.S. pro sports
Permanent city-based franchises, like U.S. pro sports: the model ended in November 2023, when two-thirds of team owners voted to leave the league.