Esports and media coverage

 the esports world has been looking for signs that competitive video games are breaking through to the mainstream and getting their due consideration as a legitimate part of the sports world. One such highly visible sign came last month, when ESPN The Magazine announced Tyler "Ninja" Blevins would be the first esports athlete featured on its cover, as part of a special "Gaming Issue" of the magazine.

That highly visible moment didn't come out of nowhere, though. As an organization, ESPN has been covering esports seriously for years now. The "worldwide leader in sports" gave esports its own dedicated section (or vertical) on the ESPN website back in early 2016. That's the first time a "new" sport had been added to that high-level lineup since the launch of a poker vertical in the early 2000s (a pro wrestling vertical followed later in 2016).

For ESPN Senior Esports Editor Ryan Garfat, the moment he got hooked on the scene came at the 2014 X Games Invitational, the first to give medals for a Call of Duty LAN competition. "I walked in the room and there were more people outside in 115 degree heat waiting to get into that [Call of Duty] tent than they could fit," Garfat told GameDaily. "I sat in that room and I said, 'We need to be here and tell these stories, this isn't going anywhere."

For Garfat, a veteran ESPN editor for years before that X Games moment, the impact of seeing that live crowd was apparent even before he knew how to follow the intricacies of competitive Call of Duty. "That visceral experience of watching something and rooting for something, it's such a core principle to how we cover sports," he said. "It's so familiar. And it didn't even matter to me at the time whether or not I understood the game, the nuances, the meta. It didn't matter..."

"I've covered Super Bowls, national championships, and it is the exact same feeling of being in that arena, in that stadium, rooting for the same thing that made it so familiar," Garfat said of the extremely excitable and loud fans he's seen at esports events. "I said we need to be able to tell these stories. We need to be there."