The arcade operator Walter Day from Ottumwa in the state of Iowa founded the first referee service for video games on 09 February 1982 with the 'Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard'. The next steps in the direction of eSports again came from the USA.

The circle of people playing the early games was still limited to universities and similar institutions, since they had the technical facilities. But on October 19, 1972, the time had finally come: the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University hosted the world's first eSports tournament, the 'Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics.' Twenty-four players met on this day to compete in 'Spacewar! Incidentally, the winner at the time received a year's subscription to 'Rolling Stones' magazine. It is considered the world's first digital computer game and was named one of the ten most important computer games of all time by the New York Times in 2007. Interestingly, the spaceships already had a limited supply of fuel and ammunition and had to fight against the gravitational field of a planet. In it, two players play against each other with one spaceship each. The space game 'Spacewar!' had already been written in 1962 on a PDP-10 computer by computer scientist Steve Russel and some colleagues like Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen of the 'Tech Model Railroad Club' at MIT.

It would be a few years before the first eSports-like tournament would exist.

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