Competitive gaming

Gaming

14 rabbit holes · 10 people exploring

Common starting questions

• Why do Melee players still use CRT TVs?
• Why does bunny hopping make you go faster?
• Why was StarCraft so big in South Korea?
• Can you go from a racing game to real racing?
• What was the first esports tournament?

Rabbit holes

1. Dota 2's prize pools were crowdfunded by cosmetics

   Valve put 25% of battle pass sales into the prize pool, so players basically crowdfunded the biggest prizes in esports. The 2021 edition hit around $40 million. Then Valve dropped the battle pass and the pool shrank to a small fraction of that.

   Tomás Rinaldi · 5 sources

2. from Deep Blue to AlphaZero to neural Stockfish

   Kofi Asante · 6 sources

3. why people still haul CRTs to Melee tournaments

   Melee's competitive play runs on frame-tight tech (wavedashing is an air dodge into the ground that turns into a slide), and most flat screens add enough display lag to throw it off. So CRTs it is. Then Slippi brought rollback netplay and kept the scene going through the pandemic.

   Dev Malhotra · 6 sources

4. Pakistan's Tekken scene and the 2019 run nobody saw coming

   A player from Lahore nearly missed Evo Japan 2019 because of visa delays, arrived hours before his matches after a multi-day trip, and won it. Then he won Evo in Las Vegas the same year. Turns out the arcade scene in Pakistan had been quietly strong for years.

   Ryo Nakamura · 5 sources

5. bunny hopping is a physics bug that became a skill

   Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources

6. how StarCraft became a TV sport in South Korea

   Leo Bergman · 6 sources

7. the Gran Turismo players who became real racing drivers

   Nissan and PlayStation ran a competition that took the fastest Gran Turismo players, put them through a driver boot camp, and raced them for real. The first winner, Lucas Ordóñez, finished second in class at Le Mans in 2011. Jann Mardenborough got an LMP2 class podium there in 2013.

   Gabriel Souza · 6 sources

8. the first esports prize was a year of Rolling Stone

   Stanford, 1972: an 'Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics', grand prize a year's subscription to Rolling Stone. 1980: Atari's Space Invaders Championship pulls in more than 10,000 players. 1997: a Quake tournament where the winner drives home in John Carmack's Ferrari.

   Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources

9. are pro gamers really past their peak at 24?

   Noor Rahman · 5 sources

10. people finally 'beat' NES Tetris by crashing it

    For decades level 29 was treated as the end, because pieces fall too fast to move across the board with normal tapping. Then came hypertapping, then 'rolling' (drumming your fingers against the back of the controller), and suddenly players were reaching levels the game was never tested for. At the end of 2023 a 13-year-old became the first person to make it crash.

    Sol Herrera · 5 sources

11. hall effect keyboards and rapid trigger

    Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources

12. combos started as a bug in Street Fighter II

    Ludovica Ferri · 4 sources

13. Evo Moment 37, frame by frame

    Evo 2004. Daigo's Ken is down to a sliver of health, Justin Wong goes for Chun-Li's super, and Daigo parries every hit, including the last one in mid-air, then finishes the match with a full combo. The crowd noise is half of why it's iconic.

    Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources

14. rollback netcode, explained to myself

    Arjun Pillai · 6 sources