Evo 2019


The 2019 Evolution Championship Series was a fighting game event held in Las Vegas from August 2 to 4, 2019 as part of the long-running Evolution Championship Series. The event offered tournaments for various video games, including Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, and Dragon Ball FighterZ, as well as the newly-released Soulcalibur VI, Mortal Kombat 11, Samurai Shodown, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate; the latter received the most entrants with over 3,500 players participating, making it the largest in person Super Smash Bros. tournament of all time.

Venue

EVO 2019 was, once again, hosted at the Mandalay Bay resort. The Mandalay Bay Convention Center hosted the first two days of the event, while the Mandalay Bay Events Center hosted the final day for the fourth consecutive year.

Games

The lineup was announced in February 2019 to have 9 games. Returning from last year are ', Tekken 7, Dragon Ball FighterZ, and '. New additions are Soulcalibur VI, ], Samurai Shodown, Mortal Kombat 11, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which effectively replaced Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. Notably, this is the first year since EVO 2013 where Super Smash Bros. Melee was not included in the lineup, and was relegated to a side-event.

Participants

Over 9,000 participants were at Evo 2019.

Broadcast

As usual, the tournament was streamed on the streaming site Twitch, broadcast across multiple different streams.

Reveals

A few days before the tournament, a trailer for ' revealing three upcoming characters, E. Honda, Poison, and Lucia from Final Fight was accidentally uploaded to Steam a few days ahead of its reveal at EVO by Valve, who apologized for the upload, stating that it was a "Regrettable and unintentional situation".
After the finals for ] concluded on Saturday, the game director of French Bread, Kamone Serizawa took to the stage to announce the newest version of the game, titled Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late alongside new character, Londrekia Light, with the game slated for an early 2020 release.
After the ' finals ended, Arc System Works revealed a major update to the game and revealed four out of nine new characters including Yumi from the Senran Kagura series, Akatsuki and Blitztank from Akatsuki Blitzkampf, and Neopolitan from RWBY, with a release date of November 21.

Controversy

During the Tekken 7 Grand Finals, a Metal Gear Solid-like codec call video featuring Solid Snake talking to Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada was shown to the audience at the event in the big screen that have fans thinking that the character will be the next DLC character. However, EVO confirmed that it was not an official tease, but more of a little joke. Harada was surprised by the video and fans expressed dismay that it was not a real announcement. More than 12 hours since EVO made the statement, David Hayter, the voice of the character that was used in the video said in a tweet that they have "failed to consult me, or Konami", reiterating to not use his voice to promote other games ever.

Results