2002 · Halo (and later Halo 2) · Sundance DiGiovanni and Mike Sepso · New York City, USA
Two men in New York decided console gaming deserved a professional league with a season, a circuit and a television deal — and then went and got one.
Major League Gaming was founded in 2002 by Sundance DiGiovanni and Mike Sepso in New York City, with a stated aim that sounded faintly absurd at the time: to elevate computer and console game tournaments into viable competitive and spectator events. The competitive scene that existed in 2002 was almost entirely PC-based — Quake, Counter-Strike, StarCraft — organised around LAN events and, in Korea, a genuine broadcast infrastructure. Console competition was regarded as a contradiction in terms, the domain of party games and split-screen rather than of professionals. MLG built its circuit around Halo, and then Halo 2, running official tournaments across the United States and Canada with a season structure, standings, and professional teams. The bet paid off in 2006, when MLG became the first televised console gaming league in the United States: the Halo 2 Pro Series was broadcast by USA Network as the Boost Mobile MLG Pro Circuit. The organisation went on to define North American console esports for a decade, and on 31 December 2015 it was reported that substantially all of MLG's assets had been acquired by Activision Blizzard for $46 million.
Winner: N/A — a league rather than a single event
MLG's founding premise was, in 2002, close to disreputable. Competitive gaming meant a keyboard and mouse. The prevailing view among PC players — held with some vehemence — was that a thumbstick was too imprecise an instrument for serious competition, and that console play was therefore recreational by definition. Building a professional league on Halo was, in that context, a deliberate provocation as much as a business plan.
It was also correct, for reasons that had nothing to do with input precision. Console games had vastly more players, sold through retail channels that reached ordinary households, and — critically — Halo was designed for four people in a room, which meant its competitive scene was social and local before it was ever professional. MLG did not have to persuade people to start playing Halo competitively. It had to find the people already doing it in living rooms and give them a structure, a season and somewhere to go.
The USA Network broadcast in 2006 is the moment the argument was settled, and it is worth remembering how strange the proposition was. Televising video games had been tried — Starcade in the 1980s, various one-off specials since — and had reliably failed, because a game designed to be played is not automatically a game that can be watched. Halo 2 on a split-screen feed, with commentary, running as a series on a mainstream cable network, was a genuine test of whether spectating was a thing an American audience would do.
The answer, in 2006, was a qualified yes, and the qualification mattered less than the precedent. Every subsequent attempt to build a spectator business around console competition in North America is working in a market that MLG demonstrated existed — and Activision Blizzard's $46 million valuation of the assets in 2015 is the industry's own assessment of what that demonstration turned out to be worth.