Cedars, April 2019

April 2019 17 SPORTS How did esports come about? But how did these games get to this point? How did these competitive leagues and huge playerbases find their love for watching other players play the game? It’s main- ly thanks to two games: Starcraft: Brood War, a hardcore strategy game first released in 1998 that pits the armies of two players against each other, and League of Legends, a game that pits two teams of five players against each other to try to destroy the other team’s base. Of course, game tournaments did happen before the release of Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft in 1998. Start- ing in the late ’70s and for much of the ’80s and ’90s, the company Twin Galaxies organized large arcade game tour- naments all around the United States, pitting player against player to get the highest scores. As these tournaments wore off in popularity and video games moved from arcades into the home, people were eager for a new way to be able to ex- press their competitive tendencies through games. With the turn of the century came the internet, and with the internet came the abilities for online multiplayer games. The first of these games to hit it big in this space was Starcraft: Brood War. Starcraft wasn’t originally developed to be a large mul- tiplayer hit. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t actually very popular in it’s target market, North America. It instead became incredibly successful in South Korea, a country for which the game wasn’t even localized. It’s popularity — and the ongoing popularity of many multiplayer games in the country — can be largely chalked up to the rise of internet cafes, or PC bangs. These cafes feature large amounts of computers with many games loaded onto them, that users can then pay an hourly rate to play on. This was the main way that many people in South Korea played games then, and it’s how they play games now. Starcraft caught on in these cafes and soon caught on around the rest of the world. From this popularity sprung many pro teams and tournaments. Since the game’s incep- tion, over $4 million has been given out to various tourna- ments winners and teams. Once Starcraft caught on in popularity, other compa- nies realized that they too could make competitive, online multiplayer games that people would enjoy. Games such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Defense of the An- cients 2, Starcraft 2 and Call of Duty began to dominate the scene, gaining millions of dollars in sponsors and turning that money into prize payouts to grow their casual brand appeal. Then came League of Legends, the world’s most pop- ular game. Literally. Published by Riot Games in 2009, it now boasts a playerbase of over 120 million unique play- ers a month (slightly smaller than the entire nation of Ja- pan). One of its most recent premier tournaments, the 2018 World Finals, boasted 97 million unique viewers and had a prize pool of over $1 million dollars. “The League of Legends World Championship (LCS) is like the Super Bowl and the World Cup rolled into one,” Whalen Rozelle, director of esports operations at Riot Games said in an interview with Fortune. “We have a very similar World Cup format because League of Legends is truly a global sport with most of the continents and many different countries represented.” What’s next for esports? These esports are ubiquitous now thanks to the pop- ularity of the games involved and the size of their player- bases. They got popular thanks to people truly enjoying the type of gameplay that they offer. But what does the future of esports look like? Many are optimistic. Viewer numbers and sponsorship eagerness seems to be going only up and up. Statista, a pro- jection firm, thinks that esports viewership will grow to as high as 600 million people by 2020. Research firm Newzoo estimates that global esports awareness will reach 2 billion by 2021. One of the most exciting aspects to some is that it is probably not yet known which game will truly make the best esport. Rocket League, a game in which teams of players essentially play soccer with rocket powered cars, is the one that many professionals have selected, due to it’s possi- ble crossover appeal and easy-to-understand concept and gameplay. “[Esports] has had a straight-up trajectory,” said Peter Guber, co-owner of the Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Dodgers, Los Angeles FC and the Golden Guardians League of Legends professional team. “Esports and egaming hasn’t plateaued when somebody went off to college. It’s bigger in college; and after college, the audience continues to con- sume it both as players and watchers, and observers in lo- cation-based entertainment, on PCs, on mobile. You have a device that makes people digitally aware, and so this fits right into the sweet spot.” Callahan Jones is a senior journalism major and the digi- tal and design editor for Cedars. In his free time, he enjoys making coffee, being overly critical about music and play- ing games with friends. Photo from Wikimedia Commons Tournament competitors play in a League of Legends at a tournament in Paris. League of Legends tournaments are held across