The first video game tournament took place at Stanford in 1972, where students competed in Spacewar for a one-year subscription to Rolling Stone. Today a single Dota 2 tournament can hand a team nearly 10.9 million dollars. This deep dive traces how competitive gaming compressed centuries of sporting evolution into a few decades, from Sega's 1974 arcade tournament and the touring Gremlin Girls of 1977 to Atari's 10,000-person Space Invaders championship and Walter Day's Twin Galaxies leaderboards.

The conversation moves through the face-to-face revolution of Street Fighter II and Doom deathmatch, South Korea's post-1997 broadband boom and PC bang culture that put StarCraft on 24-hour cable, and the legendary EVO Moment 37 in which Daigo parried 15 consecutive hits with one pixel of health. Then Twitch arrives in 2011, League of Legends sell ...