Sh!t by that logic let’s bring pac man, pong, and centipede into this Convo. Hey we can even throw pinball in the eSports Convo.
pinball not so much, but pacman? oh HELL yes.
Tetris too.
The first-ever video game competition took place at Stanford University in 1972
We need to draw a line somewhere doom could be the line but battle net should be the line as it was the first online server for gaming.
The 1988 game Netrek was an Internet game for up to 16 players, written almost entirely in cross-platform open source software, Netrek was the [third Internet game], the first Internet game to use metaservers to locate open game servers, and the first to have persistent user information. In 1993 it was credited by Wired Magazine as “the first online sports game”
Don’t think for a moment that Blizzard invented metaservers, or esport, or any of that stuff.
Hell, starcraft becoming an esport was a surprise to them.
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Why do you keep saying StarCraft with battle net diablo was the first game on battle net
Doom had DWANGO matchmaking service in 94.
Also i forgot age of empire, it also had online matchmaking with up to 8 players with microsoft gaming zone service and was before sc bnet.
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The real game project i would call “Project: L” is OW2
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why are you replying to yourself? Hell, you are arguing with yourself…
Because I clicked wrong button
Ok, so, lets review.
Battlenet wasn’t the first metaserver.
Blizzard didn’t invent the esports scene.
Blizzard didn’t invent networked games, or online gaming.
Blizzard didn’t make the first RTS, and Starcraft while polished and good wasn’t anything all that new.
OW is VERY heavily based on TF2, and Starcraft was heavily based on stuff like Dune, and Cnc and other games.
WOW was heavily influenced by things like Everquest.
Blizzard is good at making polished games, but hasn’t had a history of making new things, BUT… that said, there is a lot to be said for a place which can take a genre and make a stand out game from it, there isn’t any shame in that.
But networked games, meta servers, esports, etc all existed WELL before Blizzard existed.
If you want to see companies which DID make a lot of new genres in gaming, you would have to look at companies like Sega, Atari, Bullfrog, and weirdly enough EA.
But early EA is a very different company than modern EA is.
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Check mate you win. I still feel blizzard is the king of eSports never lost the crown but your Google skills are fantastic! But to your standards pong if the first eSports and all companies copied pong because it was the first game ever.
That would be spacewar. it predates pong.
And most of this is from memory, because you know… I was playing the early games, it is a lot easier to remember stuff when you were playing at the time.
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Wiki said pong was first in 1970 so you are like 60 years old?
I wasn’t around for spacewar, but I do remember pong hitting the home market. That was later. I was around for the early home computers as a thing.
I was writing code for system which had 16k of memory. (an old Apple ][+, not even a ][e)
I was lucky in that I was able to get at a computer when I was young, but yes, I was doing stuff in late 70s early 80s. Well before Blizzard existed.
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Props on being the oldest gamer ever! Not an insult it’s actually impressive
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I not even oldest on this forum 
Oldest I have ever knowingly talked to
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The sad thing is the companies which should have survived didn’t, or were utterly changed.
EA was an amazing company back in the day, but isn’t a thing now. Bullfrog was incredible.
Also the hacker culture changed a lot. The stuff we could get up to as kids would put you in jail now. The Phreaking scene was a thing, I remember places like Cult of the Dead Cow, and L0pht. It was a bunch of really weird things, now all lost to time.
But, you will have the same weird things where you talk to people when you are older.
It is crazy to see games like Carrier Command become a thing (yet again) or seeing UFO (xcom) be recreated for like the 10th time.
or, Elite become Frontier and then the X series.
or dungeon keeper get a remake ever 5 years or so.
It is like there was a MASSIVE flurry of new games, new ideas, and then remakes as far as the eye can see.
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Hacking is way more common now you actually had to be smart to hack back then now you pay 10 a day
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Yeah, I think the culture around it changed.
Actually doing something bad to the systems would get you excluded from the community once.
Someone needs to do a podcast on Cult of the Dead Cow - literally no one would believe it. Or Steve Jacksons Games getting raided because the FBI were after the hard drives with the conversation of people they were talking with.
RPG companies were also just as weird as the computer game companies.
Hell, games like fallout were meant to be based on GURPS (that is a name which some people here will remember), but SJG pulled up at the last moment because they didn’t like that the game was too edgy, so they make the SPECIAL system at the last moment (which lasts kinda to this day).
Sorry, rambling now, it happens when you are old 
Anyway.
My childhood, (but it was on a green screen)
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