The largest video game fighting tournament in the world isn’t pulling any punches this year. As the annual Evolution Championship Series (EVO) descends on Las Vegas for the 18th time, fans from around the globe will witness history.
“I don’t think there’s been an open bracket competition larger than what EVO 2024 is going to be in the history of competitive gaming,” says Rick Thiher, general manager of EVO. “This is tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of people descending on Las Vegas … for the love of fighting games.”
More than 10,000 competitors will attend EVO at the Las Vegas Convention Center’s West Hall on July 19-21, crushing records as the largest esports tournament to date. That alone should be enough to prove EVO’s on track to be the best it’s ever been, but there’s more: Thiher says this year’s tournament will be the first three-day convention at EVO in over a decade, and after years of bouncing from casinos to convention spaces across the Strip, it’ll return to the Convention Center for the first time since 2016.
“It’s going to be a very new, very different EVO experience,” Thiher says. “But there’s lots here that hearkens back to some of the earliest EVOs pre-Mandalay Bay, where it’s one giant show floor, it’s one ticket, it’s one choose-your-own-adventure experience.”
In recent years, Michelob Ultra Arena at Mandalay Bay housed EVO’s Grand Finals, but the Convention Center’s new West Hall will see a mega transformation for the competition, with stadium-seating and a main stage being installed to replicate a true finale experience.
“The [Convention Center]’s state-of-the-art West Hall is the ultimate backdrop for EVO with its contemporary design and innovative technology,” Lisa Phelps, director of trade shows and convention sales at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA), said in a statement. “The 1.4 million-square-foot space has created opportunities for EVO to enhance the attendee experience, including an expanded show floor and other upgrades to fan-favorite experiences.”
The LVCVA Research Center projects that roughly 20,000 people will gather for this year’s EVO, accounting for a total economic impact of more than $40 million.
A Las Vegas staple since 2005, EVO has managed to stitch itself into the fabric of the video gaming community here, similarly to how the city embraces mainstream events like National Finals Rodeo. Last year, EVO’s founders were awarded the key to the city, and August 6 officially became EVO Day.
“It’s ridiculously big, but it’s big for a good reason,” says Hieu Van Le, founder of the Nevada Esports Education League. “It’s video gamers coming together to love what they do and play against each other. Not just for fun, but to see who’s the best of the best.”
Van Le worked with EVO on Nevada’s first fighting game circuit, giving 14 local finalists free tickets to compete in this year’s tournament. Growing up, Van Le never went to EVO because it was too expensive and his parents didn’t understand the appeal. “I used to be the boy from Chinatown. My parents told me never to play video games again. And I would hide under the sheets playing with my Game Boy SP. I loved video games,” he says.
Today, people from around the world attend EVO and millions more watch online, eager to see their favorite players face off in tense, white-knuckled games of Street Fighter 6, Mortal Kombat 1, Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive and more.
“Two cool things happen when you learn a fighting game. You learn a discipline, you learn everything that comes with putting into that discipline and improving upon yourself and being able to test yourself with other people. But you learn a language at the same time,” Thiher says. “Having that language so exclusively to this genre of gaming means that anytime you meet someone else that knows how to speak that language, you have an excuse to speak it. That’s that camaraderie component. And the competition component is right there next to it too, so you get the rivalry side of it.”
Shantell Labajo and Erwin Nicolas, two Las Vegans who previously served as EVO referees and will now compete in its Tekken 8 bracket (thanks to Van Le’s circuit), started attending EVO in 2012 as teens and have been going ever since.
“Back then, it was in the ballrooms of Caesars [Palace],” says Labajo, who will again referee at EVO this year. “It wasn’t taking up a whole Mandalay Bay Convention Center, and not with the 10,000-plus people that we’re getting nowadays. It was very grassroots.”
The growth has been steady. Thiher calls the current state “a renaissance period,” as new installments from beloved fighting game franchises come out. Tekken 8, with its realistic character models, over-the-top combos and stylish brawlers, remains a stalwart of the genre. Nicolas jumped into the series shortly after his uncle recommended checking out Hwoarang, a Tekken fighter with a similar Taekwondo journey to his own. That’s what Labajo says she loves most about fighting games: the ability to see yourself in your badass character.
“The spectacle of it, the special moves, the way that you fight—I can’t do that in real life, obviously. One, I probably don’t have the physical capabilities. And two, it’s probably illegal. But it’s just being able to put myself in there,” Labajo says.
In preparation for EVO, Nicolas says he’s competing in local tourneys at Velocity Esports, the Peoples’ Card and traveling out of state to compete at events like DreamHack Dallas. “You want to get as many games as you can without getting burned out,” he says.
Labajo echoes that advice, adding that she’s hitting the gym, meditating and learning how to steel her nerves under competitive pressure. It’s easy to lose your composure at EVO’s Grand Finals with aisles upon aisles of fans watching. “That whole room is vibrating,” Nicolas says.
“You’ve got a crowd behind you possibly cheering against you. The monitor setup might not be as ideal, maybe it might have a little bit more of a latency to it. Then there’s the stakes at hand,” Labajo says. “Your ego wants to prove that you’re good at the game, that you’re better than this other person and you feel that there’s something at stake there. That’s where people get nervous.”
EVO being significantly larger this year also means competitors and spectators can take a break from the fight, too.
Thiher says the community will have even more to do than ever before, from exploring EVO’s art museum, featuring more than 100 works from all of the game’s franchises, to learning about the last 30 years of fighting game history at the Arcade Stick Museum and sparring in games on the show floor. With EVO approaching almost 20 years in Vegas, Thiher has had the privilege of watching the fandom have fun and grow up doing it.
“There’s a reason why when you go to EVO, and you sit down to compete and you’ve got a 50-year-old man, and a lot of times now he’s brought his 12-year-old kid. And she’s also sitting down to compete right next to him,” Thiher says. “It’s still generations of testing themselves against the world. That’s what makes fighting games special to me.
“That’s part of what has made EVO special in the ecosystem, and as long as we can continue to really have a place to celebrate that, I think there will always be a good cause for EVO to be here.”
EVO July 19-21, $75 - $225, Las Vegas Convention Center, evo.gg.
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