First off, there's no such thing as the E-lympics. There are the World Cyber Games and Major League Gaming, but E-lympics is not a word. Or rather, it wasn't. I just called dibs.
Anyway, in our previous history lessons, we looked at the amateur arcade-era of gaming and the early PC days of Doom and Quake. That took us up to about the late-90s when niche competitive gaming began making inroads into mainstream culture. Kinda like raving. Except with less E and more RAM.
In 1997, Texas tech entrepreneur Angel Munoz coined the term "cyberathlete" -- thereby becoming the patron saint of every kid who forged a note to get out of gym class -- and launched the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL), the first official pro-gamer organization which staged 60 international events, 600 qualifiers and doled out $3 million over its decade-long run. The CPL turned eSports into a full-on phenomenon, but despite wowing the mainstream media and winning a massive following in first half of the 2000s, by mid-decade it all began to fall apart.
The CPL split the community in 2002 when it ditched Quake in favour of Counter-Strike, caused another uproar when it moved on to Painkiller and again when they flirted with console gamers by staging a million-dollar Halo 3 tournament in 2007. With pro-gaming's popularity waning, the league began to lose sponsors, stopped paying winners and engaged in an internecine battle with the G7 gamer organization (who boycotted the 2007 Winter Tournament and recently launched a petition to try and get outstanding prize monies awarded).
When the CPL's 2006 World Tour collapsed, one of the founders started the splinter league World Series of Video Games, though it died itself in only its second season. The CPL shut its doors for good in 2008, with Munoz citing "fragmentation of the sport" (though he later sold the name to a group in Dubai who are slowly resurrecting the league).
Perhaps thinking that pro-gaming's problems were caused by a lack of corporate know-how, satellite provider Direct TV started its own televised Championship Gaming Series league. They played hardball by refusing to allow their salaried players into other competitions, which not only damaged their competitors but the entire community when the plug was pulled after year two, saying "the concept
was ahead of its time and ... it became increasingly clear as this ambitious project
evolved that profitability was too far in the future for us to sustain
operations in the interim."
But if PC pro-gaming seemed to be dying in North America -- or at least being replaced by console competitions like Major League Gaming -- it was fragging just fine over in Asia. The Korean-run World Cyber Games, an international annual tournament which attracts an estimated million attendees, spent its first four years in South Korea but now changes host cities every year, moving between Asia, America and Europe.
It's no surprise WCG has been run so well since pro-gaming is a full-on spectator sport in Korea, where tens of thousands cram into Seoul stadiums and millions watch on two dedicated e-sports TV channels as gamers in various leagues go head-to-head, usually on real-time strategy title StarCraft.
In North America, only Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel became a real star, earning a half-million in CPL tournaments, becoming a spokesperson for the CGS, holding a Guinness World Record (for 672 frags in 60 minutes) and currently running several games-related businesses. But he's hardly Shaun White, much less Lim 'SlayerS_Boxer' Yo-Hwan, who claims a million-person fanclub and is probably the most popular gamer in history.
The celebrity of professional PC gamers in Korea must be frustrating for those slogging it out in North America. But given how they've been treated by corporate interests, maybe keeping their subculture underground and community-based is better for pro-gaming in the long run.
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In anticipation of the March 12 premiere of Pure Pwnage on Showcase, Joshua Ostroff's four-part series on the history of competitive gaming continues on March 9. Next time we'll take a look at how consoles are shaping competitive gaming's future.