50 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 50 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!
The 'Intergalactic spacewar olympics' offered a magazine subscription as its prize; Bruce Baumgart won the free-for-all.
Q 02What was the grand prize at that 1972 Stanford tournament?
A Rolling Stone subscription
Rolling Stone writer Stewart Brand covered the event, one of the first mainstream articles on gaming culture.
Q 03Which 1980 Atari event, with over 10,000 entrants, was the first big video game competition?
The Space Invaders Championship
It was won by Rebecca Heineman, and the same year Walter Day founded a high-score record-keeping body in Iowa.
Q 04Which high-score record-keeping organization did Iowa arcade owner Walter Day found in 1980?
Twin Galaxies
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.
Q 05Guinness lists the largest organized video game competition ever as a 1984 tournament for which arcade game?
Track & Field
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.'
Q 06Which 1991 game popularized head-to-head tournament play over high-score chasing?
Street Fighter II
Its face-to-face format paved the way for deathmatch modes and led to the founding of the fighting-game tournament Evo in 1996.
Q 07What did Dennis 'Thresh' Fong win at the 1997 Quake tournament Red Annihilation?
John Carmack's Ferrari 328
The id Software CEO's own car; Fong, a student, discovered at the ceremony that he was not insured to drive it.
Q 08Which former Dallas stockbroker founded the Cyberathlete Professional League in June 1997?
Angel Munoz
The CPL hosted biannual hotel tournaments and later spawned the amateur CAL league built around Counter-Strike.
Q 09Which country first licensed professional gamers, in 2000?
South Korea
Korean pro leagues were televised on channels like Ongamenet and MBCGame; Japan's anti-gambling laws long blocked prize pools.
Q 10Which company backed the World Cyber Games, dubbed the 'Olympics of esports,' launched in 2000?
Samsung
The Korean event had opening ceremonies and gold, silver and bronze medals, and doubled as a marketing showcase for its sponsor.
Q 11Which country's LAN-party company Ligarena founded the Electronic Sports World Cup in 2003?
France
The ESWC grew out of the LAN Arena events and paid out over €1.7 million between 2003 and 2010.
Q 12Twitch launched in June 2011 as a spin-off of which general-interest streaming site?
Justin.tv
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.
Q 13How much did Amazon pay for Twitch in August 2014?
$970M
The all-cash deal was Amazon's third recent gaming acquisition; Google had been widely reported as the front-runner.
Q 21How has The International's prize pool been funded since 2013?
Crowdfunded via in-game Battle Passes
A quarter of Compendium/Battle Pass revenue goes to the pool, which is how it ballooned past $40 million at its peak.
Q 22Which team won back-to-back Internationals in 2018 and 2019, the first repeat champion?
OG
They had to fight through open qualifiers in 2018 after last-minute roster changes; captain N0tail's grandfather was a Faroese prime minister.
Q 23Which Ukrainian team won the very first International in 2011?
Natus Vincere
Q 14What is the name of the trophy awarded to League of Legends world champions?
The Summoner's Cup
It weighs about 22 pounds. The Aegis of Champions is Dota 2's International trophy.
Q 15Which team has won the most League of Legends World Championships?
T1
The South Korean organization, formerly SK Telecom T1, has six titles — the first in 2013 at the Staples Center.
Q 16Where was the first League of Legends World Championship held, in June 2011?
DreamHack Summer in Sweden
The prize pool was just $100,000; Fnatic won. A year later a Taiwanese team took $1 million of a record $2 million pool.
Q 17Which Taiwanese team won the 2012 League of Legends World Championship and its $1 million first prize?
Taipei Assassins
They beat Korea's Azubu Frost 3–1; the $2 million pool was the largest in esports history at the time.
Q 18What is the real name of Faker, the League of Legends mid-laner who has played for T1 his entire career?
Lee Sang-hyeok
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.
Q 19Which company runs League of Legends and its World Championship?
Riot Games
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.
Q 20Where and when was the first Dota 2 International held?
Gamescom in Cologne, 2011
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.
Na'Vi beat EHOME 3–1, then lost the 2012 final to China's Invictus Gaming.
Q 24The Evolution Championship Series (Evo) began in 1996 under what name?
Battle by the Bay
It was a 40-player Super Turbo and Alpha 2 event at Golfland in Sunnyvale; Evo has been in Las Vegas since 2005.
Q 25'Evo Moment #37,' the famous full parry, was performed by Daigo Umehara against whom at Evo 2004?
Justin Wong
Daigo's character parried every hit of Wong's super in 3rd Strike; he won the match but lost the final to KO.
Q 26Which characters were used in Evo Moment #37?
Ken vs. Chun-Li
The finals took place at Cal Poly Pomona on August 1, 2004; the two players had never faced each other before.
Q 27Who won the 2019 Fortnite World Cup solo final and its $3 million prize?
Kyle 'Bugha' Giersdorf
The 16-year-old American won at Arthur Ashe Stadium; Aqua and Nyhrox split the duos prize the day before.
Q 28Where was the 2019 Fortnite World Cup held?
Arthur Ashe Stadium, New York
The tennis venue hosted the finals from July 26 to 28 after ten weeks of online qualifiers.
Q 29Which rapper joined Ninja on a March 2018 Fortnite stream that broke Twitch's peak viewer record?
Drake
Travis Scott and JuJu Smith-Schuster were on too; Ninja, born Tyler Blevins, had started in competitive Halo 3.
Q 30How much did each of the 12 founding Overwatch League teams pay in franchise fees for the 2018 season?
$20M
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.