The first RoboCup
In Nagoya 39 teams (10 in the real-robot league, 29 in simulation) played robot and simulated football for the first time, and the organisers named a goal decades away.
Why it matters
Instead of a single task the field acquired a long-running competition where winning is immediately visible and progress is measured annually.
The organisers named a long-term goal: a robot team beating the world champions. The 1997 article names the Brazil national team and "decades of effort, if not centuries"; the 1998 report says until a robot team beats the human World Cup champion team. The year 2050 does not occur in these two AI Magazine articles: it probably comes from later RoboCup statements, and this record does not confirm it. The task was chosen deliberately: it demands perception, coordination, teamwork and real-time operation at once. Chess demanded none of that, because there the environment is fully observable and one player moves at a time; the 1997 article gives a table comparing chess and RoboCup.