OnGameNet and MBCGame: The Two TV Channels That Invented Esports

On 17 July 2004, roughly 100,000 people sat on the sand at Gwangalli Beach in Busan to watch two StarCraft teams play on a giant screen. Fans had queued since seven in the morning. The final between Hanbit Stars and SK Telecom T1 lasted about five hours and finished close to one in the morning, with Hanbit winning 4-3. It was the biggest crowd esports had ever drawn, anywhere. The prize was modest by today's standards: 30 million won and a place in the season's championship series the following February. Hanbit's coach said afterwards that he felt like he had "come back from hell."

The event was a television show. It existed because Korea had something no other country had at the time: two cable channels, OnGameNet and MBCGame, that broadcast competitive gaming every day. Between them they invented most of what esports still does on stream today, from the league format to the caster booth. Neither survives in its old form.

A game channel before games were on TV

The story starts with a one-off. On 2 October 1999, a cable broadcast of the 99 Pro Gamer Korea Open (PKO) showed StarCraft matches to a TV audience, won by Choi Jin-woo. It is now seen as the forerunner of the Starleague. In February 2000, the Hanaro Telecom Tooniverse Starleague became the first broadcast league to use the word "Starleague". Its winner was a Canadian, Guillaume "Grrrr..." Patry, the first and last foreign champion of the event.

Later in 2000 the league got its own home. OnGameNet, part of the On-Media cable group, launched as Korea's first channel dedicated to games, and the Freechal Starleague was the first tournament it aired, won by Kim "Garimto" Dong-soo. From 2001 the OnGameNet Starleague (OSL) became fully professional, and BoxeR's two titles that year made it a national habit.

MBCGame and the rival league

OnGameNet's rival came from a broadcaster everyone in Korea knew. MBC's cable arm launched a game channel in 2001 as GeMBC, soon renamed MBCGame. Its flagship, the KPGA Tour, was won first by BoxeR and then three times running by NaDa. In 2003 it became the MBCGame StarCraft League (MSL), the OSL's great rival for the next eight years and more than twenty tournaments.

The two channels competed the way football leagues do. Each had its own trophies (the OSL's Golden Mouse and the MSL's Golden Badge, both for three titles), its own commentary teams and its own rhythm of seasons. A player who won both in the same era was a true king. Fans argued about which league was harder, and they still do.

MBCGame also tried things OnGameNet did not. It ran Warcraft III leagues, a Tekken league in 2009 and a long-running StarCraft variety show, Star Muhan Dojun (2005 to 2012). In 2006 it even had its own pro team, MBCGame Hero, which won the Proleague that year.

Inventing the team league and the all-kill

Individual leagues made stars. Team leagues made sponsors happy. In 2003 MBCGame launched the KPGA Team League, the first major team competition in Brood War. It introduced the all-kill format, where one player could keep playing until he lost, so a single hot player could beat an entire rival team alone. The phrase "all-kill" is still part of everyday Korean esports slang.

The same year, the Proleague began, a KeSPA-run competition between corporate teams that both channels broadcast. In its Brood War form it ran from March 2003 to September 2012 across 31 events. Telecom companies, banks and electronics groups owned teams: SK Telecom, KT, Samsung, CJ and even the Air Force. The Gwangalli finals became its summer tradition, with fans arriving the night before to sleep on the sand because entry was free, and in 2005 another crowd of more than 100,000 watched SK Telecom T1 beat KTF on the same beach.

How the screens went dark

The decline came in three blows. First, the 2010 match-fixing scandal shattered trust: a dozen matches had been thrown for illegal gambling sites, and some of the scene's biggest names were banned for life. Second, StarCraft II arrived in 2010 as a separate game with its own rights holder, Blizzard, which had long disputed KeSPA over broadcast rights. Third, younger viewers were moving to new games and to internet streaming.

MBCGame went first. In 2011 its parent decided to turn it into a music channel, and the last broadcast went out in February 2012, after eleven years. Its final individual league, the ABC Mart MSL 2011, was won by Flash. The channel's goodbye message ended with a simple "Thank you for your love."

OnGameNet's Brood War Starleague ended on 28 July 2012, thirteen years after it started. The Proleague moved to StarCraft II and kept going until KeSPA announced on 18 October 2016 that it was closing after 14 years, as SK Telecom, KT, CJ, Samsung and others disbanded their StarCraft II teams the same day.

OGN after StarCraft

OnGameNet did not die with StarCraft; it changed games. In March 2012 it launched Champions, a League of Legends league that became the world's strongest. In 2015 Champions was rebranded as League of Legends Champions Korea (LCK), with broadcast rights shared between OGN and SPOTV, and in 2019 Riot took production in-house at LoL Park in Seoul.

OGN also ran Overwatch APEX from late 2016, a league that ended after four seasons when Blizzard launched the Overwatch League in 2018. After a 2010 merger the channel had become part of CJ's entertainment division. Its linear TV channel shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2022 the stats site OP.GG acquired OGN from CJ ENM.

Why these channels matter

Today Riot, Valve and Krafton run their own broadcasts, and anyone can stream a tournament. In 2000 none of that existed. OnGameNet and MBCGame had to invent a visual language for a sport nobody had filmed before: split screens, observer cameras, a caster and an analyst side by side, a studio crowd, sponsor-branded seasons. OGN commentator Um Jae-kyung even gave Jaedong his nickname, "the Tyrant."

They also invented the business model, with corporate sponsors naming leagues and owning teams, and they showed how fragile it was. When the betting scandal hit and ratings fell, the money left quickly.

By the numbers

• About 100,000: the Gwangalli Beach crowd on 17 July 2004
• 4-3: Hanbit Stars' winning score over SK Telecom T1 that night
• 32: official OSL tournaments by May 2011
• 8 years: the MSL's run under that name, from 2003 to 2011
• 31: Brood War Proleague events, March 2003 to September 2012
• February 2012: MBCGame's last broadcast
• 14 years: how long the Proleague lasted before closing in 2016

What to watch next

Some of the old OSL and MSL finals are still online, and the ASL on SOOP carries the Brood War torch with many familiar names. For the players those channels made famous, read our bonjwa feature, and for the scandal that hastened the end, see the 2010 match-fixing story.

WGC's take: Every time an LCK final fills an arena or a caster yells "all-kill," a little of OnGameNet and MBCGame is still on air.