Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
So it should air on ESPN 8, the Ocho?
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 :)
eSports are eSports. They have a different name than "sports" because it's not the same thing. It has a similar name to "sports", because it's a similar thing.
Regarding cheating: Yes, because real sports, especially the professional/competitive level, is known to be free of cheaters.
Arguably, eSports cheaters are much easier to catch because by definition, everything is controlled by a computer and most cheaters leave some sort of trace that can be tracked. I'm pretty sure that you will find no physical sport that has as strict an enforcement of anti-cheating rules as even the most lenient/lazy competitive eSports games. Especially at the highest level of play, during tournaments where competitors are physically present, with hardware provided by and players under observation of judges, cheating is practically impossible. Many physical sports would be better off if their tournaments had the same ratio of cheating as eSports.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
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.