[Column] A league of their own: When did Koreans become so good at gaming?

The gaming skills of Koreans are the stuff of legend among gamers around the world

A still from the arcade game Galaga

One of the world’s biggest esports competitions is currently underway in Iceland. Popularly referred to as the Worlds, the League of Legends World Championships event is now in its 11th year.

It’s a competition along the lines of football’s UEFA Champions League, where teams represent different countries as they play the online game League of Legends. As an international competition, it draws major attention, with some 46 million people tuning in simultaneously to watch.

In the past 10 years, South Korea has won the Worlds six times and finished as runner-up four times. Korea also represents three out of four teams competing in the semifinals this weekend, which will determine which team goes on to the championship match.

South Korea truly is in a league of its own in the field — to the point where Riot Games, maker of the game and organizer of the championship, plans to send a private plane for all of the teams taking part here.

But in spite of that prestige, the idea of an online game championship being broadcast live around the world still comes across as somewhat unusual.

When we hear about “games,” many of us still think of the arcade games we used to play as children — things like “Galag” or “Boggle Boggle.” Those were actually illegally circulated versions of the games “Galaga” and “Bubble Bobble,” but they were so enormously popular at the time that they came to be known as the “people’s games.”

Describing the experience of living in Seoul at the time in a 1983 work called “Seobeol, Syeobal, Syeobal, Seoul, SEOUL,” the poet Hwang Ji-woo used onomatopoeic sounds from video games: “Shyong shyong! Diririk. Pyoong pyoong! Kwang!” His work illustrates how arcades truly served as the people’s entertainment.

At the same time, the experience of marveling as the local neighborhood gaming wizards took their gameplay to new heights may not have been much different from today’s “esports” culture.

That sort of underlying culture may explain why typing “why Korean” into Google will turn up the autocomplete suggestion of “why Korean good at gaming.”

Even outside the realm of esports championships, the gaming skills of Koreans are the stuff of legend among gamers around the world. It may be that this special ability arose out of Korea’s early introduction of high-speed internet and its internet cafes — but Koreans were proving their gaming proficiency long before that era.

In 1981, Han Ok-soo took the women’s title at the Atari World Championships in the US. With a pot of US$50,000, the tournament was the biggest among the early era esports competitions.

Han, who was living in Los Angeles at the time, practiced for six months on an arcade game in her home to pass through the regional qualifying rounds, before eventually winning the finals in Chicago to claim the women’s championship.

It may have seemed somewhat unusual at the time that an Asian woman captured the title in a competition pitting her against opponents from all across the American mainland. At a time when the concept of “esports” had not yet even emerge

Choi Yoon-ah

d and the medium of “gaming” was still a novelty, Han managed to win the women’s crown at a gaming championship.

In retrospect, her victory seems to suggest that Koreans’ special talent for gaming had already emerged by that point.

By Choi Yoon-ah, director of the Nexon Computer Museum

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]