First esports event

The first eSports event was the Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics, a tournament held at the Stanford University AI Laboratory on 19 October 1972. The event was organized by Rolling Stone writer Stewart Brand as part of piece he was writing about hacker culture. The contest was won by a PhD student called Bruce Baumgart, who walked away with a year's subscription to Rolling Stone and some free beer.

Spacewar was developed in 1962 by Steve Russell and some other collaborators at MIT. It started out as a tech demo to test the capabilities of the university's new PDP-1 minicomputer (mini- in this context meant the size of a large wardrobe, rather than the size of a house). It features two rockets (nicknamed "needle" and "wedge") which can be directed around the screen and shoot projectiles at each other. In the centre of the screen is a star which pulls the rockets inward. With skill, players can use their limited fuel to loop around the star and jockey for position with their opponent.

The game was simple, but strangely compelling, and allowed for a great deal of tactical complexity in the hands of skilled players. It soon spread to universities all over the USA where other hackers added features and ported the game to a wide variety of different machines. By the late sixties it had spread to computer labs across the US and beyond. As one contemporary scientist put it “The game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer.”

Stewart Brand was a journalist who had become fascinated by the countercultural hacker scene that was beginning to emerge on college campuses across America, but particularly in the Bay Area (around San Francisco, California). In addition to being ground zero for the hippie movement, this area was also home to cluster of well-equipped computing facilities, including the Stanford University AI Lab, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Brand saw in Spacewar a glimpse of the future of computing, where these machines designed for advanced mathematics became a new field of human expression and culture. Writing in 1972, he said, "Reliably, at any night-time moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in frenzied mashing of control buttons, joyously slaying their friend and wasting their employers' valuable computer time." He added, "Something basic is going on."

The tournament, which attracted a few dozen players and onlookers, featured both an individual free-for-all event, won by Baumgart, and also a team event. The team event was won by Slim Tovar and Robert E. Maas. The event was captured by a young Rolling Stone staff photographer called Annie Leibovitz.