20 years since the days that I avidly played Starcraft as a junior high schooler, I no longer play any games on a daily basis. But I still watch esports matches on a daily basis. Not the recent esports, but the good old Starcraft 1 Leagues. Over Youtube. Most of the matches that I watch happened like a decade ago, but they are still very entertaining to watch. Obviously, I’m not the only watching these in the universe — some matches are still viewed with millions of viewership. And you can tell that the ones that still remain on Youtube are the good, selected matches out of perhaps thousands that happened back in the days.
I found it weird that despite I might have watched most of these matches several times before, but they are still bloody entertaining! Why is that? It’s not like I watch the same episode over and over. But I may have stumbled upon the same episode sometime and still the magic works. I wonder, do many sports fan still watch the old games as a daily entertainment? Do EPL fans watch the good ole Arsenal days when Berkamp and Henry were invincible and the team was just never losing? I’m sure they must be available over some streaming channel in this digital age. Perhaps I need to interview some fans in the sports world to figure this out.
The other day I met a well-known Chinese game publisher as a client, and one of the guys who came visit us were also from the same Starcraft 1 era. In his word, he described the era as the “esports utopia” and there has been nothing like that since. I was very happy to hear that as I wasn’t the only one reminiscing back the old days and on top of the fact the guy was Chinese so the era wasn’t only about Korean nationalities, I felt somewhat vindicated too.
Just eSports 