Spacewar! was the game played at the 1972 Stanford Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics, often regarded as the first esports tournament.
The competition took place on October 19, 1972, at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Students competed on a PDP-10 computer running Spacewar!, a two-player space-combat game created in the early 1960s. The winner received a year-long subscription to Rolling Stone magazine.
Spacewar! was not a modern league event, but it established several recognizable esports features: a competitive video game, organized matches, named participants, spectators, and a prize. The event is sometimes confused with later commercial arcade tournaments, especially Atari’s 1980 Space Invaders Championship.
Spacewar! itself was designed by Steve Russell and collaborators at MIT. Its influence spread through university computer networks and helped inspire later arcade and home-console games.