1983 · Various arcade games · Walter Day / Twin Galaxies · Touring the United States
In the summer of 1983, at the height of the arcade boom, Twin Galaxies put America's best players on a 44-foot bus full of arcade machines and sent them on tour as a national team.
Twin Galaxies, the arcade and scorekeeping organisation founded by Walter Day in Ottumwa, Iowa, had spent the early 1980s recording and verifying high scores. In 1983 it went further and tried to turn top players into a team. In March of that year it assembled professional players for the Electronic Circus, a touring show scheduled for 40 cities. It did not get far — the Boston run closed after five days, on 19 July — but its players are believed to be the first professionally contracted video game players in history. On 25 July 1983, Twin Galaxies established the U.S. National Video Game Team. That summer the team toured the United States in a 44-foot GMC bus filled with arcade games, appearing at arcades around the country and running the 1983 Video Game Masters Tournament along the way. The results of that tournament were published in the 1984 US edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, giving competitive arcade play a kind of official recognition it had never had. The timing was unlucky. The North American video game market was already starting to collapse, and the arcade boom that had made a national team seem natural would soon be over. But the idea — that the best players could represent a country, travel and compete — anticipated much of what competitive gaming would become.
A national team implies international competition, leagues and a structure to compete within. In 1983 there was none of that. The U.S. National Video Game Team was a team before its sport existed — a demonstration that top arcade players could be presented as athletes and representatives rather than as teenagers who spent too much time in arcades.
The crash that followed swept most of this away, and competitive gaming spent the next decade rebuilding in other forms: Nintendo's promotional championships, then PC tournaments and fighting game events. When national teams and professional contracts came back, they were built on ground Twin Galaxies had marked out in 1983.