To some people of a certain age, the idea that someone could fill an arena and earn millions of pounds for playing a video game sounds faintly ridiculous.

And yet, eSports has allowed people to do exactly that, growing from something teenagers did in their bedrooms into a global industry with sold-out stadium shows, salaried professionals and prize pots that would make a Premier League footballer consider a change of career.

Most people have button-mashed their way through a game of FIFA or Mario Kart against their mates at some point, but it is only a select few that have managed this.

Whether that all sounds alien to you and you want to learn more or you’re a seasoned eSports aficionado who likes to delve a little bit deeper, these documentaries are sure to tickle your fancy.

Free to Play

There are few better places to begin than Free to Play, if only because it captures the precise moment that competitive gaming stopped being a niche curiosity and made the move into big business. Made by Valve, the studio behind Dota 2, it follows three professional players as they prepare for the inaugural International tournament in 2011, which carried a then-unheard-of first prize of $1 million.

The three subjects are Danil ‘Dendi’ Ishutin from Ukraine, Benedict ‘hyhy’ Lim from Singapore and Clinton ‘Fear’ Loomis from the United States, with the film doing a lovely job of explaining what each of them has given up to get there.

One of the key groups that we hear from are the parents, who worried that their sons were throwing their lives away, which is a tension that anyone who grew up being told to turn the console off and do their homework will remember all too well. What gives the film its real value is the way it treats its subjects, offering the seriousness that they were so often denied at the time.

When the tournament reaches its climax, you find yourself genuinely invested in the outcome, regardless of whether you have ever played a single second of Dota in your life. This is the film that made an awful lot of people take eSports seriously for the very first time.

State of Play

If Free to Play is about the moment eSports went global, State of Play takes a look at the one country that got there years ahead of everyone else. Directed by Steven Dhoedt, it heads to South Korea, where competitive StarCraft was being broadcast on its own dedicated television channels and the top players were treated as bona fide celebrities long before the rest of the world caught on.

The film follows a handful of figures at different stages of their careers, from a young hopeful grinding away in a team house through to a veteran who is quietly working out whether his best days are already behind him.

The sense of pressure is extraordinary, with players practising for ten or twelve hours a day in conditions that would test the resolve of any elite athlete. What makes it such a rewarding watch is the way it captures a culture rather than just a game, showing how a single title became woven into the fabric of an entire nation.

Anyone who has ever wondered why South Korea is so often described as the spiritual home of eSports will find their answer somewhere in here, with the film not being afraid of being rather partisan in its findings. When you consider that gaming was once compared to doing drugs, it is a remarkable turnaround.

The Smash Brothers

For a reminder that not every eSport was dreamed up in a boardroom, The Smash Brothers is essential viewing. This nine-part series, made by Travis Beauchamp and released for free on YouTube, tells the story of the competitive community that plays Super Smash Bros. Melee, which is a community that kept a Nintendo party game alive as a serious competitive pursuit for years.

That was in spite of them getting next to no support from anyone. It is, at its heart, a story about a group of friends and rivals who simply refused to let their game die. Given the more professional nature of other games, the small community here is a joy.

Players like Ken Hoang, Isai and Joseph ‘Mango’ Marquez became folk heroes within the scene as a result of their dedication to the game. The fact that they were doing it largely for the love of the thing, rather than for any meaningful financial reward, gives the whole series an enormous amount of charm.

There is a slightly rough-and-ready quality to the production that only adds to its appeal, feeling like something made by people who were actually there rather than a glossy corporate product. If the bigger films on this list show you the business of eSports, this is the one that shows you its beating heart, which is what most of us can relate to.

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

Strictly speaking, King of Kong predates the modern eSports boom entirely, but no list about competitive gaming would be complete without it. Directed by Seth Gordon and released in 2007, it tells the story of one man’s quest to topple a world record on the 1981 arcade classic Donkey Kong.

That man is Steve Wiebe, a likeable schoolteacher who sets out to beat the long-standing high score of Billy Mitchell, who was a hot-sauce entrepreneur with a mullet and a real talent for playing the pantomime villain. What ought to be a simple tale of a record attempt turns into something far stranger, full of accusations, alleged sabotage and disputed videotapes.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007) pic.twitter.com/N7jT9LsYGp

— Men on Film Pod (@menonfilmpod) March 7, 2023

There is an argument that this is one of the most entertaining documentaries you will ever watch, sporting or otherwise, precisely because the stakes seem so absurd and yet clearly matter so enormously to the men involved.

Anyone who has ever taken a pub quiz or a frame of darts far too seriously will understand exactly what is going on here, whilst the documentary also does well to explain precisely how it is that a video game can become so all-consuming. In its own way, the battle between the two players involved in this documentary set the ball rolling for the creation of the eSports world that we know and love today.

All Work All Play

For a look at the machinery that helped turn eSports into a billion-dollar industry, All Work All Play is the documentary to watch. Directed by Patrick Creadon and released in 2015, it follows the Intel Extreme Masters circuit and the people working to drag competitive gaming firmly into the mainstream.

Much of the focus falls on the teams competing in League of Legends, but the film is just as interested in the promoters, broadcasters and organisers trying to make something lasting out of what plenty of people still dismissed as a passing fad. It works as a neat counterpoint to the grassroots story told by The Smash Brothers.

There is an obvious extent to which it doubles as a promotional vehicle for the people who made it and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise. Even with that in mind, it still offers a genuinely interesting snapshot of a particular moment in time, when eSports was straining every sinew to convince the wider world that it deserved to be taken seriously.

Creadon spoke to numerous professional gaming teams when making the film, giving it a sense of grounding. As long as you’re able to ignore the more ‘sales’ aspects of the documentary, you will get a film that explains how eSports became what it is in the modern era of gaming.

League of Legends: Origins

League of Legends: Origins is a film that tells the story of the game that, more than any other, came to define modern eSports. Directed by the Oscar-nominated Leslie Iwerks, it charts the unlikely rise of Riot Games, moving from being a tiny start-up to the company behind the most-played title on the planet.

The film blends interviews with the game’s creators and the players and fans who turned it into a genuine phenomenon, doing a good job of conveying quite how improbable the whole thing was. The fact that a free-to-play game dreamed up by a couple of university friends ended up filling arenas and spawning a worldwide league still feels hard to believe.

It is, perhaps, the most conventional documentary on this list in terms of its structure, but the story it has to tell is remarkable enough to mean that such conventionality isn’t a bad thing. For anyone trying to understand how we got from teenagers in bedrooms to sold-out stadiums, there are few better places to look.

If Free to Play shows you where it all began, this is the film that shows just how far it ended up going. For many, the very notion of eSports being as important as the likes of football, cricket and tennis seems wild, but League of Legends: Origins shows exactly how popular it is and why it’s such big business.