In 1986, two kids were playing against each other at a Nintendo game, which was televised live by ABC. That was when e-sports came into being. In 1990, Nintendo held the Nintendo World Championships, a video game competition, across 29 cities in the United States. This was the very first official e-sports competition, which was 10 years earlier than the World Cyber Games (WCG).

In Asia, e-sports first gained popularity in South Korea, and then percolated through to China, Japan, Vietnam and Thailand. The General Administration of Sport of China (GAS) nominated e-sports as the 99th official sport on November 18, 2003, and changed it to the 78th in 2008. E-sports was featured as a demonstration sport at the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta and Palembang. At the 39th OCA General Assembly held on December 16, 2020, e-sports was approved as the official medal sport at Asian Games Hangzhou 2022. There were 7 events under the sport, namely, League of Legends, Arena of Valor Asian Games Version, Game for Peace Asian Games Version, Dota, Three Kingdoms 2, Street Fighter 5, and FIFA Online 4. Among them, five were PC games and two were mobile games, covering MOBA, SPG, and CCG, which were all surefire genres for the e-sports programme at Asian Games Hangzhou 2022. As an emerging sport, its competition forms vary with game genres and platforms, which means the competition schedule, format and rules are more complicated. At present, the most common formats for well-known e-sports events such as WCG, IEM, WEG, CPL and NEST include single elimination (usually for individual events), double elimination and round-robin. The formats also vary with disciplines. For example, most team events at 2018 Asian Games adopted round-robin, while most single events used single elimination. Technical issues such as the competition format and venue arrangement for the e-sports programme at Asian Games Hangzhou 2022 will be jointly addressed by the Hangzhou Asian Games Organising Committee and the Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF).