A Braindead introduction to esports

Let’s do a thought experiment. Just quickly, we don’t like to do TOO much thinking here. Imagine you power up your trusty Nintendo Switch, connect a controller, and boot up a game most people from ages 5 to 50 have at least heard of: Super Smash Bros Ultimate. A Nintendo classic, and the 5th installment in a series of Mario fighting games dating back nearly 25 years.

Even if you’ve never heard of Super Smash Bros., if you haven’t heard of Mario, you must be a caveman because you don’t just live under a rock, you live within the rock. For the uninitiated, Super Smash Bros is a Mario fighting game with 82 characters representing 39 different video game franchises such as Pokémon, Sonic, Donkey Kong, and many more. Animated characters using their special powers to beat the living shit out of each other. Obviously, it’s a bit more kid-friendly than that, but you’re trying to cause as much damage to your opponent until they go flying off the map like a goddamn fighter jet. You get the gist of it.

Ok you know enough about the game now, even if you do live in a cave down by the river.

Lets get back to our thought experiment.

So out of these 82 characters you choose Diddy Kong…basically a monkey. If you know Smash, right now you’re probably thinking something along the lines of “you ignorant dipshit why the hell would I choose Diddy Kong when Fox is sitting right there”. Probably. Anyway, your opponent is a red headed anime girl. Now I’ve been playing smash since the first one came out in 1999 (thanks mom and dad) ((happy mother’s day mom)), but I have no goddamn idea who ‘Pyra’ is, the aforementioned scarlet haired anime girl. Lucky for you, I did some intense research. The first lines of her wiki says she is a “legendary blade who can grant tremendous fire-elemental power”. Whatever that means. I assume she has a sword? Again, you’re a monkey. But alas, that is your opponent.

Now here’s the kicker – $50,000 is on the line for this match between your monkey in a baseball cap and your opponents flame goddess teenager. 90,000 people are watching. For some perspective, the biggest NFL stadium in the country is MetLife stadium that holds 82,500 people (according to the very first result on google).

Now this may sound like a fever dream, and honestly it kind of is, but this isn’t the future. This is the present. This is esports baby. The $50,000 match between Diddy Kong and Pyra was the very real Grand Final of Super Smash Summit between runner-up Leonardo 'MKLeo' Perez from Mexico and Gavin 'Tweek' Dempsey of the States. Tweek was the monkey.

And while Super Smash Bros may be an easily recognizable name, other games like League of Legends, DOTA, and CSGO are turning young kids into millionaires overnight.

To put it in the simplest terms possible, esports is competitive gaming. But not the kind of competitive gaming your teenage children do when you hear them saying the most absurd, but low-key impressive, amalgamation of obscenities to strangers online.

Just like when you watch Steph Curry pull up for a 3 from Pluto and get that pit feeling in your stomach because you just know somehow that bastard is going to make it, professional esports players are on another plane of existence from us mere mortals. They have trained for 12 hours a day for years upon years, most have sacrificed much of their childhood to honing their craft. Again, just like any other professional athlete would have.

And as the years go by, the proof is in the pudding. Now I will be posting an article later this week detailing all the different ways esports players are making money today, but just know there are many ways for players to make money in addition to tournament prize money, like sponsorships and live-streaming. Still, the tournament prize pools continue to grow and as I said earlier, are making young gamers richer than they could have ever imagined.

The biggest example of how much money is to be made in esports tournaments is known as “the International”. The International is the name of the biggest tournament of the year for the game known as DOTA 2. DOTA 2 is a MOBA, or ‘Multiplayer Online Battle Arena’. If you have no idea what these words mean, I’ll explain them in a future article too. For now, all you need to know is that in 2021 the prize pool at The International was 40 MILLION MF’IN DOLLARS. With 18 Million of that going to the winning team, Team Spirit. In a single night, 5 kids aged 19 to 25 became multi-millionaires.

This article is just a crude introduction to esports, and in the coming week/s I will be writing some actually helpful information rather than stories about flame princesses and Steph Curry. I’ll teach you about the games I’ve mentioned in this article, just what the hell it is your watching when you turn these matches on, the top players, how/where to watch, and much more.