X Games

ESPN announced the Extreme Games at a Planet Hollywood press conference in New York on April 12, 1994, and held the first one from June 24 to July 1, 1995, across Newport, Providence, and Middletown, Rhode Island, and Mount Snow, Vermont. Nine sport categories ran, including windsurfing, bungee jumping, and mountain biking, in front of 198,000 spectators and sponsors like Mountain Dew, Taco Bell, and Nike. In January 1996 the name was shortened to X Games, officially to allow "easier translation to international televisers" and better branding, and Newport drew roughly 200,000 again that summer.

Then it grew every year: 221,000 in San Diego in 1997, 233,000 there in 1998, and nearly 275,000 in San Francisco in 1999. The Winter X Games debuted at Snow Summit in Big Bear Lake, California, in January 1997, broadcast to 198 countries, and settled at Aspen's Buttermilk Mountain from 2002, the first X Games televised live. The 1999 San Francisco event is the one everyone remembers. On June 27, Tony Hawk landed the first 900 in skateboarding history after regulation time had expired, with other skaters protesting and the announcer admitting, "We make up the rules as we go along." That same year MotoX made its debut and the event became the first professional sporting event broadcast live on the Internet.

The 2000s were the Los Angeles years, 2003 through 2013, after two summers on San Francisco's Piers 30 and 32 and two in Philadelphia. Travis Pastrana, who had broken his foot bailing on a backflip in 2000, landed the world's first double backflip on a dirt bike in the 2006 Moto X Best Trick for a 98.60. Shaun White won Skateboard Vert gold in 2007, the first back-to-back Snowboard Superpipe golds in 2009, a perfect 100 in 2012 (the first perfect score in any X Games), and six straight Superpipe titles through 2013. ESPN has since sold a majority stake in the X Games to MSP Sports Capital, but the Aspen winter event has been held every year since 2002.