History
In 2000, the World Cyber Games was formed, and an event was held titled "The World Cyber Game Challenge", which began with an opening ceremony on 7 October. The event was sponsored by the Republic of Korea's Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Ministry of Information and Communications, and Samsung. It brought together teams from 17 countries to compete against each other in PC games including Quake III Arena, FIFA 2000, Age of Empires II, and StarCraft: Brood War. The tournament ended on 15 October 2000.
In 2001, the World Cyber Games held their first main event, hosted in Seoul, Korea, with a prize pool of $600,000 USD. National preliminaries were held between March and September, with the main tournament running between 5 December to 9 December. The World Cyber Games quoted an attendance of 389,000 competitors in the preliminaries, with 430 players advancing to the final tournament; teams from 24 countries in total were involved in the tournament.
In 2002, the World Cyber Games held a larger event in Daejeon, Korea with a prize pool of $1,300,000 USD; 450,000 competitors took part in the preliminary events, with 450 ultimately making it through to the final tournament. The 2003 tournament, which took place in Seoul again, saw an even bigger prize pool of $2,000,000 USD, and was the first World Cyber Games tournament to feature a console based competition, with the game Halo: Combat Evolved on the Xbox.
In 2004, the World Cyber Games held a tournament in San Francisco, in the United States - its first tournament outside of its home country. At this stage, the prize pool was at $2,500,000 USD; with 642 players competing in the grand final. The tournament has since been hosted in various countries around the world; including Singapore in 2005 and Monza, Italy in 2006 - at this time Microsoft became a major sponsor to the event, who would provide software and hardware for all the events through to 2008. In addition, all games played at the tournament would be based exclusively on Windows PC's or the Xbox console.
In 2007, the event was hosted in Seattle, United States, with a total prize pool of $4,000,000 USD. In 2008, the tournament was hosted in Cologne, Germany; it was the first World Cyber Games tournament to incorporate a mobile-game based tournament, with the title Asphalt 4: Elite Racing, In 2009, the tournament was held in Chengdu, China, and featured a special promotion of the game Dungeon & Fighter. The tournament was also coincided to run alongside the World Cyber Games debut reality television show, WCG Ultimate Gamer. Season 2 of WCG Ultimate Gamer was aired between August and October 2010.
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