By most accounts, the first official eSports tournament took place on October 19, 1972, when Stanford University held the Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics for the game, Spacewar. Bruce Baumgart went home with the Free For All championship title and the top prize: a year's subscription to Rolling Stone magazine.

The impact of Space Invaders on the video game industry has been compared to that of The Beatles in the pop music industry, and The Space Invaders Championship held by Atari in 1980 was the earliest large scale video game competition, attracting more than 10,000 participants across the United States and establishing competitive gaming as a mainstream hobby.

The first League of Legends World Championship was held in 2011 in Sweden. The event featured a $100,000 prize pool with the first place winners Fnatic taking home the top prize of $50,000. By the following year, the grand prize had jumped to $1 million.

In June 2016, Twitch added a new feature known as "Cheering", a special form of emoticon purchased as a microtransaction using an in-site currency known as "Bits". Bits are bought using Amazon Payments, and cheers act as donations to the channel.

In 2014, Robert Morris University added eSports to its athletic program and began recruiting students to compete in League of Legends, offering qualified gamers scholarships of up to 50% tuition and 50% room and board. By 2019, there were over 115 colleges and universities offering eSports scholarships.

The 2019 League of Legends World Championship had over 100 million unique viewers, matching, for the first time, viewership of the Super Bowl (100.7 million).

Starcade originally aired on TBS from 1982 to 1983 and ran for a total of 133 episodes. It set the blueprint for similar game shows like Video Power, Nick Arcade, and Arena.

In September 2018, Tyler Blevins. a.k.a. Ninja became the first professional esports player to be featured on the cover of ESPN The Magazine. Prior to retiring his Twitch profile as part of an exclusive partnership with Microsoft's Mixer streaming platform on August 1, 2019, Blevins had over 14 million followers and was the most-followed active Twitch channel.

Previously, video games most often relied on high scores to determine the best player, but this changed with Street Fighter II, where players would instead challenge each other directly, "face-to-face," to determine the best player.

Thiago Lapp, a.k.a. "kinG", was just 13 years 106 days old when he crossed over the million dollar mark at the first Fortnite World Cup, on 28 July 2019.