You jest, Slacks, but it's crucial to understand that the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis actually played a crucial role in the founding of esports in Korea. Though the causes of the crisis are beyond the scope of this shit-and/or-effortpost, one of the compensatory effects was a major governmental investment into an already-strong national broadband network, coupled with increased regulation that led to the elimination of a wide number of upper-middle class, white collar management jobs. These two effects meant that fast, reliable internet had become extremely cheap, while there was a large number of entrepreneurial workers looking for new work.
As a result, many of these laid-off workers started founding PC Bangs. It's hard to overstate the speed of growth of the PC Bang in these years; I don't have exact numbers handy, but it grew from something like 500 in 1997 to 25,000 in 2003. Thanks to demographic shifts in Korea (a long term result of the rapid westernization and industrialization during the Han River Miracle following the Korean War), there was a huge number of young people in search of entertainment in a highly urbanized environment. PC Bangs, for reasons of both supply and low overhead, were an extremely cheap source of entertainment. For a personal account, I recommend BoXeR's autobiography, Crazy as Me, which can be found in (bad) translation on archive.org.
(The prominence of the PC in South Korean entertainment culture is a separate, though interesting topic, but it's best explained, I think, by the relative lack of consoles and arcade games in South Korea during the 1980s and 1990s, largely as a result of the ban on Japanese goods that persisted from the end of the Japanese occupation in Korea in 1945 until 1999 – another effect of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Even after the entry of Japanese products to the South Korean market, however, cultural tensions between Korea and Japan meant that Japanese products were not widely available anyway. The PS2, for example, was not available in South Korea until 2002/3.)
Anyway, it goes without saying that the PC Bang culture fostered the nascent competitive StarCraft: Brood War scene in Korea, which, paired with KeSPA and major investment from South Korean corporations (many of which were already hoping to expand into game publishing in anticipation of mobile technologies later in the decade), created the modern esports model.
Anyway, I wanted to take this moment out to reflect on the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, because its effects are far more wide-ranging than Indonesia's state owned petroleum monopoly, and, in fact, have a lot to do with the very thing that has brought us together today. In short, the unique cultural, economic, social, and technological conditions in Korea that were magnified and transformed by the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis instigated a major change in competitive gaming culture that made South Korea the early leader in esports.
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