Bing Esports Quiz: 15 Questions From Stanford's 1972 Showdown to Today's Mega-Prize Finals

Esports did not begin in a packed arena. It began in October 1972, inside Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where a small group of students competed at a space-combat game. The grand prize was a one-year subscription to Rolling Stone. No sponsors, no livestream, no crowd chanting a player's name.

Compare that with today. Championship finals now fill famous venues, prize pools have crossed tens of millions of dollars, and esports has earned a place on the medal table of a major multi-sport event. Somewhere between those two worlds sits a great deal of trivia, and that is exactly what this Bing esports quiz is built around.

The 15 questions below move roughly in chronological order. You'll start with the arcade and LAN era, move through the games and trophies that define modern competition, and finish with record-breaking prize money and the players who became household names. You don't need to be a gamer to do well. Careful reading and a little logic will carry you further than you might expect.

Instead of a plain list of questions, this quiz plays like a tournament run. Each stage has five questions, one shown at a time. Pick an answer and you'll instantly see whether you got it right, along with the story behind it. Your score, your current streak and a power bar update as you go, and the bracket at the top lights up as you clear each stage.

Finished the bracket, or want a refresher before your second attempt? These are the turning points that the quiz draws from, plus a few extra that any esports trivia fan should know.

A surprising number of esports quiz questions come down to matching a game with its maker or its flagship event. Keep this table handy and you'll rarely be caught off guard.

Esports trivia rewards pattern-spotting as much as raw knowledge. These habits will help on this quiz and on any gaming question that turns up in a daily quiz.

One quiz rarely satisfies a trivia habit. Esports questions are a great way to stretch beyond the usual history and geography topics, and the same skills you just used, like reading carefully and ruling out impossible options, carry straight over to general-knowledge quizzes. Once you've posted your bracket score, try a fresh topic or catch up on the week's headlines.