The Evolution Championship Series or EVO for short, is the biggest fighting game event and it's live starting today! Of the many fighting games present at this year's EVO the most popular is, of course, Street Fighter 5 with over 2,600 registered competitors, 6 of which are our very own Method FGC team members! The action has already started and in a couple of hours, at 4pm PDT/1am CEST, Method's Packz will be up, playing SFV. Luffy will be joining in the fun during the day, as well as Mikeand1ke and Coblecog who are up at 8p PDT/5am CEST. SylverRye and REO are there playing Injustice 2, with Sylver playing at 6pm PDT / 3am CEST and REO playing tomorrow at 10am PDT / 7pm CEST!
The Street Fighter 5 competitors: Cobelcog, Luffy, Mikeand1ke, Packz
The Injustice 2 competitors: SylverRye, REO
This year's EVO features Street Fighter 5, Tekken 7, Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2, Injustice 2, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, BlazBlue: Central Fiction, The King of Fighters 14 and Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. The prize pool is determined by the number of entrants, and it's going to be pretty big this year! The SFV finals on Sunday will also be broadcast live on ESPN2, and it's the only game to air on the US sports cable network. This year, the event is being held in Las Vegas, at the Mandalay Bay Resort.
Now let's take a look at the event itself and its history. Founded in 1996, then known as the Battle by the Bay, it changed it's title to EVO in 2002.
Since its inception it's been an open tournament, where anyone can sign up and try to get to the grand finals, with the prize money depending on the number of participants and with the games' developers usually kicking in additional funds. For 2016 the total number of entrants for all games was almost 15,000, while the total twitch viewer numbers for SFV alone were over 200,000 and the developers kicked in another $50,000 to the prize pools of SFV and Mortal Kombat XL. The event has grown each year and now it's become more than just a collection of different game tournaments under one roof, as fighting game developers use the opportunity to show off their latest games and we get to see the latest peripherals exhibited as well.
All in all EVO is the central event of the fighting game community's year, both in terms of esports and in general, showcasing the best of the best in one huge and luxurious event and over many tournaments. So let's get ready for a weekend full of action and knockouts, and see how far the Method crew can get in the SFV portion of the event!
The action has already started and is live the next two days from 10am PDT/ 7pm CEST, and the finals start even earlier on Sunday, at 7:45 PDT / 4:45pm CEST. You can check out one of two streams for the action, with EVO's own coverage of all the games and Capcom's Street Fighter 5 stream.
