On August 8, EVO 2k8 celebrated 10 years of fighting game competition with an action-packed weekend at the Tropicana Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, NV. We caught up with Seth Killian, the director of the tournament and a producer at Capcom to talk about the different aspects of the tournament, where a group of 64 trash-talking gamers grew into a 3-day event that sees thousands of fighting game fans attend each year.


TL: Tim Livingston - Sports Joystick

SK: Seth Killian - EVO/Capcom

TL: So why don't you tell us a little bit about EVO.

SK: Well, it's EVO 2k8. Basically, it started on the Internet. We had a bunch of people that were griping and we all grew up in arcades, and the Internet was a little bit young and we decided "We better figure out who's really the best." There was a lot of trash talking.

TL: I bet.

SK: So, we got together and had a little tournament, up in the Bay Area called Battle By the Bay, and we got players from all over the place. They came in from Canada and Mexico, Kuwait, and that was just our very first event and everyone had such a good time that we were like, "We have to do this again." So, it's been a struggle, but it's really come a long way, and now we've grown a lot and it's an exciting place to be.

TL: I live in the Bay Area, actually. In Sonoma, up in the North Bay.

SK: Yeah, Southern Hills Golfland was the first one.



No GolfLand = No EVO.

TL: Yeah, there you go! Cool! So, you have it at six games this year and the newest addition is (Super) Smash Bros. Brawl. Tell me what you guys were thinking about with that, because compared to the other five games, it's definitely a less-conventional type of fighting game.

SK: It is, it is. We've started a sort of Street Fighter event, and it slowly grew to include other fighters, and really, that's just based on community feedback. So if we feel like that's what the players are calling for, and that's where people are playing games…there was a lot of resistance at the beginning for Smash Bros. because a lot of people thought it was a little cartoony, that it was a kid's game, but we watched the scene for a couple of years, and we were like, "These guys are legit." There are a lot of serious tactics to this game. It definitely looks goofy and it's a cartoony game, but the players are dead serious, and we wanted to try and bring them in to be part of the fighting tradition.

TL: I'm guessing you're a little partial to the Super (Street Fighter II) Turbo portion of the tournament considering that was the game that got this all started.

SK: Yeah, that's where we began, and we're definitely loving Super Turbo. It's amazing to see people from all over the world come and show you things that you've never seen on a game that old, but watching people playing it, hearing the cheers, it's doesn't get old. It's like baseball in that sense. It's not aging.

TL: Did you help out at all on the HD Remix version that will be coming out for XBOX Live and the PlayStation Network?

SK: The guy who is the producer on that project is someone I work with at Capcom and the designer is a guy who I have been playing with for that same decade, David Sirlin, and so we talk about all the time, and we're in there testing, bouncing ideas off each other. "This doesn't work. This is too powerful." So it's been a lot of fun to crack open the hood on one of our favorite cars and kind of retune it a bit. It's sort of a childhood dream.

TL: Talk about the new games. Clearly, you have Smash Bros. in the tournament, but you have two games set up. Both of them have gotten amazing responses in only the first day. It's Street Fighter IV, which has been out in the arcades for a couple of months now, and Capcom vs. Tatsunoko, which is a game that not too many people know about, but upon first glance, it looks like it might be right there with Marvel vs. Capcom.

SK: That's right. It's definitely built more on inspirations and a similar type of fighting system with chain combos and super jumps and high flying and zany Supers and it's a lot of fun. The reaction so far has been really great and I'm really happy that Capcom Japan let a very exclusive board out of their R&D department to come here and let the players dig their teeth into it early, and the response has just been great so I think they're going to be really happy.

TL: That's a test right now, right? It doesn't look like it's close to the final product.

SK: Definitely far from the final product. Also, the game has some licensing issues because it was originally planned as a Japan-only release, where Tatsunoko owns all their own rights, but outside of Japan, the rights are owned by different parties so it's a matter of getting them all on the same page and supporting the game, and showing them how they can benefit as well from the release of something like this, and giving more exposure to their characters.



That's Seth Killian in the middle, sans gun. Seth's job might be a bit better than yours.

TL: Talk about the competition about EVO. We're looking at a huge scope of games and you talk about people coming from all around the world just to come and play in this tournament. How have you seen the competition change from year-to-year?

SK: Well, it's gotten…I won't say it's gotten more bloodthirsty, exactly, but rivalries come and spring up every year. The level of play is really incredible. Pound for pound, these guys are like nothing else, and the competition is unbelievable. For some of the more complex games, it's difficult to even talk about all the amazing things that are happening. I mean, you could write a book on every match about the mind games involved, but really, that's what is so much fun about fighting games, especially for all of us, is that there's great elements of execution, of course, just like in any other competitive endeavor, but a lot of mind games, and lot of bloodthirstiness. If someone gets hungry, you get scared, you can see that somebody is playing scared, and the other guy is going for the throat. There's a lot of different styles, especially when seeing regional players from around the world, what kind of styles they bring versus other regions. It's been really illuminating for a lot of people.


Seth's baby has become the biggest fighting game tournament in the world.

TL: Let's take a look at the future a little bit. This has been ten years that you have been doing this. You talked about this being kind of an underground thing. Do you see this thing growing into something even bigger over the next 10 years? Is it something that you can't stop from becoming bigger?

SK: It has grown a lot, even to this point. Obviously, we started with a small collection of 64 players, but if it grows, it grows. It's based on the player community. So I'd like to see it grow, I'd like to see more people catch the fighting game fever because I think they're really brilliant games, but at the same time, the people who need to know about it already know about it. We're not out necessarily beating the bushes for this because this event is what we want it to be now. It's awesome. The more, the merrier. Everyone is welcome. We have completely open registration. Anybody can sign up and take a shot at the world champ. If you got the chops, you take home first no questions asked . There's no question about it. There's not a really complicated series of qualifiers, there's no hoops you have to jump through. It's a pretty low barrier for entry and that's the way we like it.

TL: Any thoughts on Street Fighter IV being a part of the line-up for next year?

SK: Oh, we're definitely going to add Street Fighter IV. It's gotten a really great response so far and it's really excited a lot of old fans of the series, people that haven't played a Street Fighter game in 10 years. I've seen them in places like ComicCon, we had the machines out there and the reaction from fans has just been incredible. I felt bad because we were kicking people off. They had waited in line for up to an hour and we kicked them off after one match, win or lose. I thought there would be a riot, but everyone was happy. They were like, "It was amazing! I'm really excited to play! I can't wait until it comes out!" So that is really gratifying as a long-time Street Fighter fan to see people remembering and reconnecting with the passion that made Street Fighter II such a smash hit.

TL: Well, Seth, thanks for taking the time to sit down with me, and the readers of Sports Joystick are really going to enjoy taking a look at how gaming competitions have come to be, especially the biggest fighting game competition in the world. Thanks a lot.

SK: Thank you.