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Counter-Strike Finally Gets the League It Deserves
An anonymous reader writes: Counter-Strike is the oldest eSport in the world today, with its roots stretching back to the dawn of the millennium. But unlike rival games like League of Legends or StarCraft 2, its pro scene has been mostly reliant on sporadic tournaments instead of a regularised league. That's changed with the announcement of the ESL ESEA Pro League, the first Counter-Strike Global Offensive league with a seven-figure prize pot. As one writer points out, this is a huge boost for the pro scene even without developer Valve's involvement: everything from paid travel expenses to regular viewing schedules will help the scene, and let the top players play even better than before: "it has taken over 15 years to happen, but now Counter-Strike has a tournament that can potentially elevate it to become one of the biggest eSports in the world."
Quake III Arena
Didn't CS have the Cyber-athlete Amateur/Pro Leagues?
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in Counter-Strike, that's why I gave up on it. It has even been shown recently that some of the top players were cheating during competitions in public settings.
eSports consists of the most cancerous, bottom-feeding, sociopathic and dysfunctional people the gaming world has to offer. So in that sense it's very much like many real sports.
I feel bad cs1.6 competitions are not played in international matches anymore. I am a fan of cs1.6 (and not GO)
there were leagues back for qwtf in '97... so if you're gonna call Counter-strike across versions, you may as well do so for TF which has it beat by a couple years.
People are still playing CS?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I guess that depends on how you define "oldest" and "eSport". Even Counter Strike's official release predated Quake III Arena's.
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
Starcraft came out over a year before Counter-Strike, and apparently before Quake III Arena as well.
I explicitly release the above into the public domain.
Counter-Strike is the oldest computer game feigning it's some sort of sport in the world today.
Sorry but the whole notion of "eSports" is idiotic.
Sure, there's a bit of temporal glory for the guy who rolls over Pac-Man, etc, etc. But it isn't a sport.
The fact that the supposed "league" is rife with cheating/hacks with no real way to catch creative cheaters simply detracts from the notion of "sport" even more.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
All I can tell you is that I played way too much of both of them.
The original Quake obviously pre-dates Quake III and is still by far the highest skill game. Quake III was dumbed excessively in terms of movement control, speed and tolerance for mistakes.
Quake III was still good, and I played it for many years until Id destroyed the game with their endless tweaking (further dumbing down). After that I went back to duelling on Quakeworld and was shocked by the sheer brutality of the game. It's just so harsh on the player, but so much better than Quake III.
In Europe you can still find opponents on Quakeworld fairly easily. If you just sit on a public server it's not that long before somebody turns up.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sport
I think the definition of "sport" that gaming falls into is number 6:
"an object of derision; laughingstock. "
Since when is redbull.com a reasonable source for news? Seriously, editors. Fucking edit.
Going back way before these there were plenty of professional gaming competitions for things like Mario. Fuck, this is basically the plot of the 1989 film The Wizard, whose premise isn't exactly based wholly in fiction.
Even in the FPS world, Quake 1 also had a number fairly large scale professional multiplayer leagues and that was released in 1995. Thresh (Dennis Fong, the guy that went on to found Xfire) was part of a pretty high profile event in 1997 where he won Carmack's Ferrari.
Thus, talk of CounterStrike and Quake III Arena are laughable. They're not even close to the beginning of professional competitive gaming, which is surely what eSport actually means.
Obligatory Wikipedia reference says that eSports may well go back to at least 1972:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
The summary's claim of Counterstrike as the first eSport reminds me of the time some kid posted here a few years back saying he was part of anonymous and he was proud that him and his friends were part of the internet's first counter-culture as if the whole of the fucking 80s with cDc, Mitnick, LoD et. al. never happened. Even then I'm not convinced that even they were the first, but they sure as hell long pre-date anonymous!
Counterstrike as earliest E-Sport is stupid. Let me guess, whoever came up with that one also thinks George Bush was the first president, 9/11 was the first ever terrorist attack and Afghanistan was the first ever war?
I'd say get off my lawn, I'd say I must be getting old, but this is Slashdot, and I know that someone even older than me is going to come along and tell me about competitive gaming events on some ancient long forgotten computer somewhere in California in the 60s, and even older Manhattan internet counter-cultures in the 70s or something. So er, over to you grey beards :)
A lot of people forget about Quake 2 multiplayer CTF with Lithium mod. Even Unreal Tournament had many people on it.
You mean TribalWar or TWL weren't good enough? [/troll]
A lot of people forget about Quake 2 multiplayer CTF with Lithium mod. Even Unreal Tournament had many people on it.
Oh Lithium... it was so bloody awesome, grappling-hook jousting in big open levels.
Gosh, was 2001 that long ago? I remember it like it was only 14 years ago...
now get off my lawn!
I'd bring up the Pong tournament at the local pizza parlor...but I'm too young for that.
I refuse to sign
It says that CS is the oldest in the world TODAY... meaning it is the oldest one still being played regularly.
Going back way before these there were plenty of professional gaming competitions for things like Mario.
But would Nintendo object to public broadcasts of Super Mario Bros. competitions? I know it's been claiming Let's Plays.
I became one of the best players in the world in Counter-Strike back in 2001 (possibly THE best). It wasn't worth it.
The key difference is that nobody owns tennis, baseball, cycling, chess, poker, or archery. There's no Tennis Holding LLC that can pull videos off YouTube and pull merchandise out of stores. With video games, on the other hand, a game's publisher owns exclusive rights to make and show the game and can use copyright to shut down a league's broadcasts if the league doesn't toe the game's publisher's party line.
Anybody can make table tennis or chess equipment. Only Valve can make Counter-Strike equipment.
Anybody can change the rules of chess and start a league around, say, randomized starting positions or a particular set of unconventional pieces. Only Valve can authorize the modding of Counter-Strike.
Anybody can broadcast a table tennis or chess match. Only Valve can authorize the public performance of Counter-Strike.
Someone needs to get the rights to Jazz Jackrabbit and make a FPS that includes bunny jumping as part of its premise, just as later Tribes games are about skiing.
While Starcraft was released in 1998, Quakeworld was released in 1996 - three years before CS.
um no Quake is the oldest esport that would be considered an esport from it's earliest days, there may be some other games predating competitive quake on the pc but Quake was the first to garner a well developed scene with money tournaments, if you include console games than certainly Street Fighter 2 will predate everything else for competitive pvp play with money tournaments, though it wasn't until the 2000s that things started to be more organized
I don't like it, hihi
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Meh, who cares if CS was 'first', whatever that is worth. The more important fact is that when it came out, it was a crappy looking game compared to everything else that was out at the time, and loaded with cheaters from almost day 1. I honestly didn't know that anyone bothered to play it anymore. If it wasn't 'getting respect', it is probably for a good reason...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
slashdot is fucking retarded
The broadcast is a derivative work of the game, which is a copyrighted audiovisual work. Otherwise, Nintendo wouldn't be able to keep claiming Let's Play videos on YouTube.
Quake 2 was the peak. Quake 1 wasn't quite right yet - it was the most moddable, and had some of the most entertaining mods, but Quake 2 is just as raw and fast, with a lot more richness to the base game (and it's own amazing world of mods), and the 3D is done right.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
quake2 was quake1/quakeworld's slower cousin, made seemingly solely so idiots that complained quake1 online was too hard could have a chance. When it came out the only reason it was ever use in tournaments was because graphics card manufacturers were the biggest sponsors out there. Almost all the biggest prize winning pros in quake3 were holdouts from quake1/quakeworld scene that couldn't stand quake2. The whole selling point of quake2 was better graphics and "weapon balance" except nobody at ID has a clue what made the games fun or players skillful, instead they saw the people that were extremely good as a problem and went about limiting them with less movement control and slower weapons/weapon switching.
I'm still bitter that quake2 fragmented the community with people following money for such a shit game. Quake3 was basically the middle between the two and neither felt as good to play as quakeworld even into the 2000s.
Woohoo. Now tea-bagging and nut shots get a 7 figure purse.
Don't you need eThletes to be an eSport?
I imagine that skills transfer from one stock car oval track promotion to another more readily than, say, Counter-Strike skills would transfer to Call of Duty, or even Tetris skills to Dr. Mario. It'd be like competitors having to switch to badminton or pickleball when The Tennis Company starts winning lawsuits.
Good ol' QuakeWorld, didn't need Kali anymore. Then came QuakeSpy. Ping 3 servers at a time, filter the list to servers under 300ms. Let it run for 10 minutes, don't use the internet.
Super Mario Bros. 3, as Ninja Gaiden was only used as in the qualifying round and didn't count towards final ranking.
Competition in general was developed back in the Neanderthal era. Doesn't mean that throwing rocks at each other over a scrap of meat makes a good eSport...
Even in the FPS world, Quake 1 also had a number fairly large scale professional multiplayer leagues and that was released in 1995.
While I agree that it is laughable to call counterstrike the first e-sport I would like to point out that those large scale multiplayer leages weren't around at the time of the release. Back when Quake 1 was released competitive gaming wasn't as accessible as it is now.
Counterstrike is also fairly old. It was released 1999. I recall that I thought it looked slow and boring, mostly because the Half Life 1 engine doesn't support strafejumping.
Instead I kept on playing Quake 1 Team Fortress and ActionQuake2.
Quake 1 with the Team Fortress mod was the best thing ever! Quake 2 didn't take off until the ActionQuake mod.
"First" and "Oldest" are not the same. I don't care if Quake tournaments came before, there hasn't been a Quake tournament for a long long time.
I think you're confusing "oldest" with "oldest active". Those are different things, in the context of merely the oldest, oldest and first most definitely are the same thing.
I'm remarking the difference between eSport (competitive gaming tournament) and not eSport (every other game). Quake wasn't the first (there has been gaming tournaments since the early 70s) and it's not the oldest eSport because it hasn't been an eSport for nearly a decade (3 years if you count in the last QuakeLive tournament). My point is, you can't claim it to be the oldest eSport if it's not an eSport anymore :-)
And just seeing the word "eSport" makes me feel like punching something.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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