When Was the First Video Game Tournament?

Atari isn't the only one with a birthday in October. 40 years ago on October 19th, the first video game tournament was held in California at Standford University. 

Video game tournaments are common these days. In fact, competitions in video games is so common that we don’t even have to leave the house to participate anymore. We can just join an online tournament or fight opponents all vying for supremacy on a ladder.

Gamers can just log in to their favorite MMOs, consoles, computer games, or even tablets and cell phones and participate in any number of challenges, competitions, ladders, and all sorts of competitive-minded activities. The competition isn’t just your town, but international. There are even professional gaming associations around now that police proper play.

But it wasn’t always this way. It used to be that video games required you to be present, ready to perform live in front of audiences. With so many people participating in video game tournaments now, when did all of this begin?

Apparently it all began on October 19, 1972 at Stanford University in California.

Walter Day, the now-retired official score keeper of the video game industry and founder of the score-keeping website, Twin Galaxies, recently declared tha

t the very first video game tournament was sponsored by Rolling Stone for the video game Spacewar! on October 19, 1972. This tournament was titled “The First Intergalactic Spacewar! Olympics" and the music magazine Rolling Stone offered participants beer as well as prizes. 

The tournament was played at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab and had two different events: "free-for-all" and "singles." Bruce Baumgart won the “free-for-all” competition and Slim Tovar secured the singles bracket.

Twin Galaxies calls themselves the official high score keepers of video gaming. They have been the focus of a number of video game documentaries like King of Kong and Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade and have been responsible for a number of video game related entries to the Guinness Book of World Records. To commemorate this event, Twin Galaxies released a new card for their growing set of video game history trading cards.

The cards can be purchased from the Twin Galaxies website.