What do you think of this fact?
Today, esports tournaments fill entire arenas, with millions on the line. It all started on a much smaller scale: at what was probably the world’s first video game tournament, held at Stanford in 1972, the winner got a year’s subscription to a music magazine.
Space battle in a university lab
On October 19, 1972, students and researchers gathered at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in California. The event’s name sounded a lot bigger than it was: the “Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics”.
The game was “Spacewar!”, one of the very first computer games, originally created by Steve Russell and colleagues at MIT. Spaceships battle around a star whose gravity pulls everything toward it. It all ran on the one PDP-10 mainframe Stanford had at the time.
The prize: reading material
There were two events. Slim Tovar and Robert E. Maas won the team competition. Bruce Baumgart took the five-ship free-for-all. The top prize: a year’s subscription to Rolling Stone.
There was a reason for that. Writer Stewart Brand covered the tournament for the magazine, and according to Kotaku, a young photographer named Annie Leibovitz took the pictures. She went on to become one of the most famous photographers in the world.
You can still play “Spacewar!” on an original PDP-1 computer at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, on selected Saturdays.
You could see it coming
Decades later, Brand told Rolling Stone: “It may seem extraordinary that you can now fill arenas with people who want to watch videogames. But it’s a perfectly reasonable outcome of what you could already see in 1972.”
He was right. One evening in a lab turned into an industry with pro teams, leagues and sold-out stadiums.
So the world’s first esports champion didn’t get prize money. He got mail. For twelve months.