The Recent Rise of E-sports

E-sports are great. They're like playing games normally, except you're not good enough. Although video games have been played competitively since their conception, only recently have they become commonplace among gamers and slowly seeping into society as a regular form of sport. Without the physical exercise, of course.

They've have become more popular than ever, since their rapid growth in the early 1990s. At the time, these competitions were of a much smaller scale than they are now, and they tended to focus around console games. Take the 1990 Nintendo World Championships. This tournament toured across 29 US cities and used the SNES, along with Super Mario Brothers, Tetris and Rad Racer as the virtual arenas in which contenders fought with their thumbs and fingers, hammering at controls rather than keyboards.

In comparison to these much simpler times, E-Sports are now held in huge event halls and arenas, with ridiculous amounts of money up for grabs. Instead of genre-defining First Person Shooters such as Doom and Quake, Action RTS and MOBA games such as StarCraft 2 and DoTA 2 have become the proven base of E-Sports.

These games and their contests are also no longer the exclusive activity of American enthusiasts. Thanks to the explosive expansion of the sport, competitiors come from all corners of the globe. Even the home of E-Sports has changed, with the concept now intertwining itself into the youth culture of South Korea. The foundations for this degree of popularity have been in place for decades in South Korea, and this has certainly helped games like StarCraft 2 essentially become a national pastime.


The original StarCraft was a hit in countries like these due its fairly low system requirements and free online play at the time. The high rates of broadband connectivity and accessibility for online games such as StarCraft meant that its predecessor was set to become a game which integrates itself into a nation. The lack of sports dominating culture and desire to avoid inevitable military conscription, on top of endorsement from large companies like Samsung, meant that children in South Korea are essentially driven towards the idea of video games. Because of all the build-up over previous years, games like StarCraft 2 and the E-Sports they are involved in have accordingly boomed in popularity.


The influence of the gaming culture in these countries is easily shown if you look at the standings of the World Championship Series for StarCraft 2; currently, out of the top 16 players in the world, 12 of them are South Korean. Instead of being live-streamed, E-Sports in South Korea are broadcast on national television, just as most Western sports are. 

The scary thing about all this, on top of South Korean dominance when it comes to strategy games, is how quickly E-Sports have spread as a legitimate and serious form of competition. Huge endorsements and celebrity treatment for players is now essentially commonplace.

Around 18 months ago, few actual gamers had even heard of E-Sports, never mind watch them. I was part of the majority who were unaware of its existence. And now, these events are incredibly accessible and entertaining, through a vast array of video sites or live streaming. 

Although some will ask "Why bother watching a game when you could play it yourself?", I can assure you that the levels of skill and effort put into some of these matches are unparalleled. It’s like football or any other physical sport; you could do it yourself, or you could watch someone else do it far better than you. I mean, it is easy to sit in front of a TV and proclaim "I could do that." 

Across the world, TV stations are slowly covering E-Sports as their popularity continues to grow. Sponsorship deals and prize money are becoming huge factors, just as with any other sport. In a fairly recent DoTA 2 event, the largest prize pool in E-Sports history was created, at $2.8 million. With such large amounts of money on the line, it’s fair to say that companies have begun taking virtual sports rather seriously when the rest of the world has not.

Some people love these events simply due to the difference from what’s always been on offer. Instead of the boiling feuds between teams in football matches, some would say that E-Sports are a lot calmer, yet simultaneously more energetic. Some also love it for the skills and according atmosphere. Competitors need to know everything about a game, down to the last smallest detail. For the audience, events such as these give a live buzz like attending any sporting event, with the intellectual reward of studying a game like chess. It’s a unique combination which is refreshingly new, and one of which we are unlikely to see anything similar to in the near future.

Despite all this, I can hardly imagine the day when fathers in America ask their sons to practice League of Legends rather than baseball. However, the groundwork for E-Sports is most certainly in place, it's now just up to gamers, and the wider world, to begin taking it seriously.