Yusuke Goto of Japan competes in the Gran Turismo motor sport at Olympic Esports Week in Singapore ... More in 2023. The event served as a trial run for the Olympic Esports Games that will take place in 2027. (Photo by Yong Teck Lim/Getty Images) Getty Images The Olympics’s dalliance with Esports has leveled up with the announcement that the first Olympic Esports Games will take place in Saudi Arabia in 2027. The event is a win for Esports aficionados, who have been talked up on the Olympics’s digital platform for several years, and for the Middle Eastern kingdom, which has indicated it may bid for the Summer Olympics in 2036 or 2040. It could also be a victory for an International Olympic Committee continually preoccupied with engaging young fans of the TikTok generation. “Younger generations are taking up online gaming in droves, and we need to go where people are going,” said David Lappartient, the Frenchman who heads up the IOC Esports Commission. “We believe there are a lot of challenges but also a lot of opportunities to make the world an even bigger sporting place.” Pegged to each recent IOC session has been a decision of major consequence for the Olympic movement. In its session two days before the Tokyo 2020 Games Opening Ceremony, the IOC announced that Brisbane, Australia would host the summer Games in 2032. At the next session, the provisional sports program for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics was announced, revealing a schedule peppered with archetypical Californian sports like surfing and skateboarding. As the world basked in a very Parisian Olympics last summer, the IOC’s surprise was something unexpected: a new iteration of the Games, for gamers. MORE FOR YOU Florida Special Elections: Republicans Win Gaetz And Waltz’s Seats 200 Million X User Records Released — 2.8 Billion Twitter IDs Leaked NYT Mini Today: Hints, Clues And Answers For Tuesday, April 1 Initially proposed for 2025, the timeline has changed. The competition is now slated to take place in Riyadh in 2027, with the first qualifying events later this year. "When we started the preparations, we came to the conclusion that it would be better not to take any risks regarding this 'wow effect' and to organize some preliminary events,” IOC President Thomas Bach explained to Xinhua News Agency. The IOC’s agreement with Saudi organizers gives the kingdom the right to host the Olympic Esports Games not just in 2027 but through 2037. Exactly how a gamer Olympics will unfold is still in the works. Exactly how many events there will be, how many Esports athletes will take part, and whether it will have the trappings of a traditional Olympics with Opening and Closing Ceremonies, podiums, medals, and anthems, are details still being ironed out. (At the 2023 Olympic Virtual Sports Festival in Singapore, which was underwritten by the IOC, winners received trophies.) The IOC beta tested the event with a World Cup in Riyadh in 2024 and is enthusiastic about its place in Esports history. Still, concerns about agreements with gaming companies that are still being forged have pushed the start date back. It hasn’t dampened enthusiasm: in a recent interview, Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Al Faisal, President of the Saudi Olympic and Paralympic Committee, cast Saudi Arabia as “a global hub for esports” and said 23 million Saudis — 67 percent of the country’s population — identifies as gamers. A visit to the kingdom to see the Saudi National Games, a mix of traditional Olympic sports and Esports, is said to have helped convince Bach that Saudi Arabia is up to the challenge. “I have rarely seen such a positive development of sport in such a short time,” Bach remarked at the time. He also nodded to “a rise in the level of female participation,” noting that “goals of the sports strategy in many ways mirror the aims of our Olympic Agenda reform programme.” The kingdom has been roundly criticized for its repressive treatment of women, who only gained the right to drive in 2018. An Olympic discipline in its development era Esports has plenty of fans among other key players in the Olympics movement and from the Middle East. Prince Omar bin Feisal of Jordan, son of IOC member HRH Prince Feisal Al-Hussein, has sat on the board of the International Esports Federation. “It is clear we must collude and not collide with this genre of sport,” Prince Feisal said while campaigning for the IOC Presidency earlier this year. The initial Games announcement came after the Singapore event and an Olympic Virtual Series in 2021. The Olympic Rings were prominently displayed at Olympic Esports Week in Singapore, where winners ... More were awarded trophies, not medals. (Photo by Yong Teck Lim/Getty Images) Getty Images During the Virtual Series, competitors sat on a stage kitted out with gaming consoles, controllers, and chairs, with games projected onto a big screen behind them as they competed in virtual baseball, cycling, sailing, rowing, and motor sports events. Sitting and watching expert gamers do their thing, a step up from watching popular play-throughs on YouTube, has proven exceedingly popular among teen and young adult aficionados. Games like Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country helped define a generation in the 1980s and 1990s, but Esports did not really gain a foothold until 2007, when they were included as part of the Asian Indoor Games in Macau, along with other non-traditional sports like chess. Chicago’s Robert Morris University became the first in the nation to offer competitive e-gamers scholarships in 2015, and when the pandemic made social distancing the order of the day, their popularity exploded. The debate about whether Esports constitute a sport rather than a game or competition continues to smolder in some corners of the internet, but the IOC weighing in in its favor — and organizing a Games around it — lends weight to the argument. The official IOC line as of 2017 is that "Competitive 'Esports' could be considered as a sporting activity, and the players involved prepare and train with an intensity which may be comparable to athletes in traditional sports,” but would require any games used for the Olympics fitting “with the rules and regulations of the Olympic movement.” While Olympic inclusion in any form goes a long way toward legitimizing gaming as a sport, some gaming purists have fretted that the games played at the Olympic Esports Games will be too tame for enthusiasts because they will be devoid of the violence of more popular, cutting-edge games. Whatever these Olympic games turn out to be, eliminating people Grand Theft Auto style is almost certainly not on the cards. It also remains an event apart. At this point the IOC is clearly not willing to entertain including Esports at the Olympics, where the focus is on seasonal events — skiing and skating at the Winter Games, swimming and track and field in the summer. And the dates of the event and how exactly the road to Riyadh will unfold is still to be defined. Which is understandable — like the best video games, the somewhat mysterious path ahead leaves plenty of room for all players to be intrigued and surprised. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Editorial StandardsForbes Accolades