Gather round little gamers, I'ma tell you a story. Once upon a time, in a pop culture far, far away, young people put silver coins into enormous machines to play primitive video games. This was the era of the arcade. And it was glorious.

In just a few years, gaming had taken North America by storm as coin-op arcades popped up on every hill and dale. But games need winners. Each individual cabinet, from Space Invaders to Galaga to Ms Pacman, kept a record of its high scores and players thrived on getting their initials on the screen. (Think of how much of Seinfeld misanthrope George Costanza's self-worth was wrapped up in his Frogger high score.) But soon the best gamers from across the land started to compete against each other... and a new professional sport was born.

Yes, this sort of thing had been going on for decades with pinball -- The Who even wrote a whole rock opera about deaf, dumb and blind pinball wizard. But electronic gaming added a new competitive edge and cultural urgency that continues to this day.

The genesis of the modern cyber-athlete can be traced to a 1981 odyssey by one Walter Day, an arcade enthusiast who used a summer sales trip as an excuse to criss-cross the country collecting high scores for his national scoreboard. That fall he opened his first arcade in Iowa, Twin Galaxies, and few months later presented his stats to the world becoming video gaming's official scorekeeper (a title belatedly bestowed by the Iowa governor who also dubbed Ottumwa the "video game capital of the world"). The player-rankings soon attracted media, including Life magazine who snapped the above photo of America's top 16 gamers in 1982 and the following year TV show That's Incredible filmed the first world championship, the Coronation Day tournament.

That same year, the first US National Video Game Team was formed (with Day as captain) and they proceeded to challenge teams from Japan, Italy and the UK as well as touring the world. By the mid-'80s Day was hired by the Guinness Book of World Records to keep tabs on game scores and later published his own, more thorough Twin Galaxies world record book.

But the Golden Age of Arcade couldn't last. No golden age does. In this case, Nintendo's home console NES stormed onto the scene in the late-'80s and effectively killed arcade culture. But not totally. Re-dubbed classic gaming in the 2000s, arcade competitions continue and enjoyed a huge profile boost from the 2007 doc King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

Then-World Champion Billy Mitchell, a Florida hot sauce entrepreneur with a mullet who had squatted on several Twin Galaxies-officiated records since the '80s, faced his toughest competitor yet, a soft-spoken science teacher named Steve Wiebe. It's a brilliant look at the obsessions of a niche subculture, and a timeless story of good triumphing over evil as Wiebe eventually takes the Donkey Kong title. But it's a short-lived victory as Mitchell beat him by a mere 1100 points just after the film's release.

Oh, and that George Costanza score we mentioned earlier? It may have been a fictional 860,630 points but it was nonetheless shattered earlier this month by Pat Laffaye who nailed 896,980 on January 1st (verified by Twin Galaxies, natch).

"Even though it was imagined by television writers, Pat has broken one of the most famous scores in pop culture," said Twin Galaxies Division Manager Patrick Scott Patterson. "Pat's amazing score will now forever be attached to not only Twin Galaxies history, but pop culture trivia as well."

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In anticipation of the premiere of Pure Pwnage on Showcase, Joshua Ostroff's four-part series on the history of competitive gaming continues on February 9th.