Still others claim that hockey evolved in Northern Europe. At any rate, it is quite likely that ice hockey came into being from different early games played with a stick and a ball. A more definitive history of hockey can start from the mid 1800's.Ice hockey, as we know it today, is definitely the product of Canada. In the 1850's, the first logged games of ice hockey were played, and in the 1870's, the first set of ice hockey rules were written by a group of students at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. These rules set up the use of a puck replacing a ball and decided the number of players to be nine per team.