Beginning secondary research - Where Esports started

As stated on yesterdays post (14/09/21), for the rest of this month (September), i want to begin some secondary research on multiple factors. Today's research is on the origins of Esports, Where did it all start and on which game? Were there any prizes? Who won? so many questions needed to be answered.

So i wanted to start with a simple google search 'What was the world's first video game tournament?'

Initially the first website i found was a link relating an online degree website by 'The university of New Haven' which gives an overview about the history of Esports. It refers to a "Spacewar tournament", which awarded the winner a year's subscription to the rolling stone magazine.

However, i found that there wasn't any in depth information regarding the event itself as the article focused on providing a vague history instead, it seemed pretty trustworthy as it was based on a qualification from a university but I wanted to find more information, maybe even find the original news article posted, so i decided to search further by searching 'The first Spacewar tournament'. No questions just something simple that would bring in a lot of different results.

After a scroll past Wikipedia, hoping to find something more linked to the tournament, i found exactly what i was looking for a rolling stone article titled 'Stewart Brand Recalls First 'Spacewar' video game tournament'

[Stopped at 15:00 16/09/21]

[Continued 9:02 17/09/21]

The article recalls the event stating that 'the first video game tournament was held on October 19th 1972' also stating that it was held at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in California which according to the article was 'one of the only a handful of locales in the world with hardware sophisticated enough to run it'

The event was ran by Stewart Brand who at the time was a 33 year old writer and editor who was writing a magazine feature story for Rolling Stone, the magazine states that brands story focused on 'the tremendous potential of computers to unleash creativity and change society. And as far as Brand was concerned, nothing seemed to embody that potential more than video games'

The story Brand would go to write would run in December 1972 and was 9-000 words. Even back then Brand was apparently credited as the magazines 'sports reporter' (this might come into play later on in my project)

At this point Brand had written the first ever Esports article ever which presented the first ever video game tournament, even Brand at this point knew the amount of skills these players had referring them in the original article according to Rolling stone as “those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology.”

So what was the prize for these amazing pioneers well since Rolling Stone had a key role they awarded the winning player a Years subscription to the magazine and an opportunity to be in the very article that Stewart Brand was writing however even all that according to Rolling Stone wasn't as great as the star prize, bragging rights that came with being titled 'the Intergalactic Spacewar Champion of 1972'

So who was the Intergalactic Spacewar Champion, Bruce Baumgart a grad student who was at Stanford AI Lab for what Rolling Stone described as 'basically, eyesight for mobile robots'. Apparently Bruce first encountered Spacewar in the late 1960's when he studied applied mathematics at Harvard. According to the article what most drew Bruce in was the impressive visuals. Even back then according to Rolling stone 'The backdrop looks like arbitrary dots, but it’s actually an accurate depiction of every star in the night sky above a certain magnitude of brightness,' even Bruce said that “The starfield was the real star of that game.”

As soon as he got to Stanford Bruce apparently according to the article 'adopted a Morlock lifestyle so he’d have easier access. “I would sleep during the day, roll in at night, and work for 12 hours,”. Pretty soon Bruce was one of the best players and even 'began handicapping himself to make matches more of a challenge. Like Inigo Montoya, he would play with the controller in his non-dominant hand to give less experienced opponents a sporting chance. He even mastered steering two ships simultaneously, with a controller in each fist'

Image from the source showing the original article:

This article was perfect as it encompassed all of the information i originally wanted and more, however some of the article had some fluff information that i needed to sift through, but this made sense as the article focused on Brand as well at the tournament. I believe this is a trustworthy and viable source of information as a lot of quotes come from the man who wrote the original article along with Rolling Stone Being the original publishers it does seem trustworthy to call back to their summary of events even if it is 48 years later.

i just wanted to put here a digital version of the original article just in case i need it later or if anybody was interested in reading it