StarCraft: Coming to a sports bar near you

-----

SAN FRANCISCO—One Sunday afternoon last month, a hundred boisterous patrons crowded into Mad Dog in the Fog, a British sports bar here, to watch a live broadcast.

Internet e-sports like Starcraft2 have big-name pro players, announcers who broadcast matches, and millions of fans who'd rather watch the action online or in bars than play themselves. WSJ's Amir Efrati reports.

Half the flat-screen TVs were tuned to a blood-filled match between two Korean competitors, "MC" and "Puma." The crowd erupted in chants of "M-C! M-C!" when the favorite started a comeback.

The pub is known for showing European soccer and other sports, but Puma and MC aren't athletes. They are 20-year-old professional videogame players who were leading computerized armies of humans and aliens in a science-fiction war game called "Starcraft II" from a Los Angeles convention center. The Koreans were fighting over a tournament prize of $50,000.

This summer, "Starcraft II" has become the newest barroom spectator sport. Fans organize so-called Barcraft events, taking over pubs and bistros from Honolulu to Florida and switching big-screen TV sets to Internet broadcasts of professional game matches happening often thousands of miles away.

"It was unbelievable," said Jim Biddle, a manager of Bistro 153 in Beaverton, Ore., which hosted its first Barcraft in July. The 50 gamers in attendance "doubled what I'd normally take in on a normal Sunday night."

For "Starcraft" fans, watching in bars fulfills their desire to share the love of a game that many watched at home alone before. During a Barcraft at San Francisco's Mad Dog in July, Justin Ng, a bespectacled 29-year-old software engineer, often rose to his feet during pivotal clashes of a match.

"This feels like the World Cup," he said. "You experience the energy and screams of everyone around you when a player makes an amazing play."

Millions of Internet users already tune in each month on their PCs to watch live "eSports" events featuring big-name stars like MC, who is Jang Min Chul in real life, or replays of recent matches.

In the U.S., fervor for "Starcraft II" is spilling into public view for the first time, as many players now prefer to watch the pros. In mid-July, during the first North American Star League tournament in Los Angeles, 85,000 online viewers watched Puma defeat MC in the live championship match on Twitch.tv, said Emmett Shear, who runs the recently-launched site.

The "Starcraft" franchise is more popular in Korea, where two cable TV stations, MBC Game and Ongamenet, provide dedicated coverage. The cable channels and Web networks broadcast other war games such as "Halo," "Counter-Strike," and "Call of Duty." But "Starcraft II" is often the biggest draw.

The pros, mostly in their teens and 20s, get prize money and endorsements. Professional leagues in the U.S. and Korea and have sprouted since "Starcraft II" launched last year. Pro-match broadcasts often include breathless play-by-play announcers who cover each move like a wrestling match. (A typical commentary: "It's a drone genocide! Flaming drone carcasses all over the place!").

Barcraft goers credit a Seattle bar, Chao Bistro, for launching the Barcraft fad this year. Glen Bowers, a 35-year-old Chao patron and "Starcraft" fan, suggested to owner Hyung Chung that he show professional "Starcraft" matches. Seeing that customers were ignoring Mariners baseball broadcasts on the bar's TVs, Mr. Chung, a videogame fan, OK'ed the experiment.

In mid-May Mr. Bowers configured Chao's five TVs to show Internet feeds and posted an online notice to "Starcraft" devotees. About 150 people showed up two days later. Since then, Mr. Bowers has organized twice-a-week viewings; attendance has averaged between 40 and 50 people, including employees of Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp., he said.

The trend ended up spreading to more than a dozen Barcrafts across the country, including joints in Raleigh, N.C., and Boston.

The "Starcraft II" game lends itself to sports bars because it "was built from the ground up as a spectator sport," said Bob Colayco, a publicist for the game's publisher, Activision Blizzard Inc. Websites like Twitch.tv helped "Starcraft's" spectator-sport appeal by letting players "stream" live games.

Two University of Washington graduate students recently published a research paper seeking to scientifically pinpoint "Starcraft's" appeal as a spectator sport. The paper posits that "information asymmetry," in which one party has more information than the other, is the "fundamental source of entertainment."