How Hockey Earned its Spot Among eSports

Hockey has been around for decades, going through all the phases of video game evolution, from coin-op machines to home console games and simulators built for your PC. Today, you can play hockey games in pretty much every form, on every platform: on your phone, in an online casino, on consoles and PCs, and everything in between. The games range from simple tributes to the sport like the Break Away slot machine you can try at JackpotCity that pays homage to the sport as a whole to complex simulators like the recently released NHL 21.

With video games becoming a brand new spectator sport, playing virtual hockey may soon become a sport in its own right.

Competitive gaming

Competitive video gaming has been around since the 1970’s but it only became truly popular in the last decade or so. Today, eSports is slowly becoming a mass phenomenon, maybe even an Olympic sport. At the same time, game developers are eager to build communities around their titles, focusing on their eSports potential.

EA Sports, the company behind the NHL video game series (among others) has pushed its hockey simulator into the eSports vortex, too. And the NHL (the real one) is also in on it, supporting official “Chel” tournaments – including the one this April involving the Montréal Canadiens.

Hockey as eSports

The first official hockey eSports tournament was organized in 2018 by the National Hockey League and (of course) EA Sports. The game of choice was (of course) EA Sports’ NHL 18 video game, released a year prior. The competition took place in the summer, days after the NHL season ended, and had a prize pool of $100,000 – small, compared to how much money other eSports events offer up for the grabs.

The event wasn’t a small thing either – the NHL Gaming World Championship was broadcast by the NHL’s global media partners including Sportsnet in Canada and Viasat in Europe’s Nordic regions.

The competition is ongoing to this day. Actually, the North American NHL eSports champion – US-based Matthew Grenier (Gren-35-) – was crowned champion of the NHL Gaming World Championship North American Champion this July, defeating Canada’s Justin Reguly (Regs84), last year’s Canadian Champion. You can see the recorded stream of the event on the NHL’s official Twitch channel here.

There are dozens upon dozens of video games inspired by hockey, from the simplest ones to complex and realistic simulators. Slowly but steadily, the sport also finds its way into the increasingly popular eSports scene, reaching a whole new generation of fans – and maybe turning them into fans of the real thing, too.