Gaming Gets UNREAL!

• Unreal Tournament is an online MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game) and europes best gamers came to Wembley Stadium to play Unreal Tournament 3 and in the process battle it out for a share of £50,000.
• 200 gamers contest the prize, with the winner of the one-on-one tournament collecting 20,000 and the winners of the 5-on-5 contest picking up 30,00 between them.
• eSports (pro gaming) is huge in the UK. most players are semi-professional at best due to the paultry amount of money involved, howecer many spend entire weekends playing in LAN tournaments. this shows the influence the internet has.
• Some playeers are as young as 16. Play.com hosted a massove gaming event with a wall of 44 interconnected PC's with a pro gamer glued to each one. there are up to 20,00 vistors come to watch these furious concebtrating 'geeks'.
• in the US, eSportsmen do battle in the Championship Gaming Series, run by Fox Sports, contesting a gross $500,000 top prize. many of the top gamers are contracted to this tournament. Fox Chairman David uses the gaming series as sport to combat such attractions as ESPN's BMX championships, the X-Games.
• he saw it, that if he bought the rights to host thst the sports, and brought it to the summit of sports entertainment, then he would effectively own a part of it, making it a great money earner.
• Championship Gaming tournaments and leagues are shown on primetime TV, on DirecTv in the U.S.A, Sky in the UK, and Star in the Far East, which gives it a potential audience of 350 million people.
• Also hugely popular in the US is Major League Gaming, which puts on glitzy pro-gaming events in cities up and down North America - attracting 10,000 spectators a time.