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Evo

Evolution Championship Series, from Battle by the Bay to Las Vegas

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The fighting-game tournament that began as Battle by the Bay, a Street Fighter contest at an arcade in Sunnyvale, California, in 1996. Renamed Evolution in 2002, it produced 'Evo Moment 37' in 2004, moved to Las Vegas in 2005 and drew 9,182 entrants in 2023. It has changed hands three times since 2021: Sony and RTS bought it, Sony sold its stake in 2025, and RTS, by then owned by Saudi Arabia's Qiddiya, took full control in 2026.

Evo is an open fighting-game tournament, which means anyone who registers can enter, and by 2021 Wireframe was calling it “the largest fighting game tournament in the world”. It started in 1996 as Battle by the Bay, a Street Fighter contest at an arcade in Sunnyvale, California, held to settle arguments that had started on internet message boards. In 2023 it had 9,182 entrants. Its best-known match, in 2004, took 57 seconds and is remembered as Evo Moment 37.

Fast facts

  • First held: 1996, as Battle by the Bay (B3), at Golfland in Sunnyvale, California.
  • Founders: Tom and Tony Cannon, Joey Cuellar and Seth Killian.
  • Renamed: Evolution Championship Series, known as Evo, in 2002.
  • Where: California until 2004; Las Vegas since 2005.
  • Format: open entry, double elimination (a player is out after losing twice).
  • Largest: 9,182 entrants in 2023.
  • Owners: the founders’ company, Triple Perfect, until 2021; then Sony Interactive Entertainment with RTS; RTS alone since February 2026.

Battle by the Bay

In the mid-1990s American Street Fighter competition was local. Players met at arcades, and a handful had reputations for the strongest players: Chinatown Fair in New York, Super Just Games near Chicago, and two branches of Golfland in California, at Sunnyvale in the north and Southern Hills in the south. Tom Cannon, then a computer science student, took the bus to Sunnyvale twice a week, “usually one day to practice and another day to compete in the local tournament there.”

The internet added a new kind of rivalry. On text-only message boards players wrote long strategy threads that, Cannon recalled, “usually devolved” into arguments about how bad the other person was. That was how he met Seth Killian. Battle by the Bay, in 1996, was “basically a ‘put up or shut up’ moment for all these internet folks who all thought they were the best”. Holding it at Sunnyvale Golfland brought in the best players in California, and even the first event had entrants from Canada and Kuwait. Its games were Super Street Fighter II Turbo and Street Fighter Alpha 2. Later editions, B4 and B5, were held in Folsom, California, in 2000 and 2001, and in 2002 it was renamed the Evolution Championship Series.

Japanese players began to come. Daigo Umehara, the best-known of them, later said that the prize money was what drew them first, because “we could not and still can’t get any monetary prize in Japan (due to a law)”. At his first Evo, he said, he won two of the four games he entered and came second in the other two.

Moment 37

Evo 2004 was held at Cal Poly Pomona in Southern California. About 700 players came to compete in nine games. On 1 August, the last day, Justin Wong, an 18-year-old from New York, met the 23-year-old Umehara in the losers’ final of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. The two had never played each other.

3rd Strike gave players the parry: push the joystick towards the opponent at the moment an attack lands and you take no damage and lose no time, where blocking still costs a little health. With a sliver of health left, Umehara could not afford to block anything. Wong, playing Chun-Li, launched her 15-hit Super Art. Umehara, as Ken, parried every hit, “seven hits with the left leg… seven hits with the right leg, every one parried perfectly,” as Edge described it in 2007, “and the crowd is on its feet”. He then finished Chun-Li off with a combo of his own.

The video spread. By 2007 it had been watched more than a million times on YouTube. When Capcom released Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition in 2011, one of its trials asked players to repeat the parry themselves. Retro Gamer, in 2012, placed the match at Evo 2003, but it was at Evo 2004.

Las Vegas

In 2005 Evo moved to the Green Valley Ranch hotel and casino in Las Vegas. That year Shoryuken.com, the fighting-game website that ran it, partnered with Major League Gaming, which helped secure the venue, and more than 1,500 players came, Hardcore Gamer reported, from England, Japan, Korea, Canada and elsewhere. The Tekken 5 title went to Christopher “Crow” Villareal of Houston, who beat Korean and Japanese players to win it. By 2007 Edge could call Evo “the US’s largest and most prestigious fighting game tournament”, sponsored by Toyota and Capcom and paying out more than $90,000 in prizes.

Street Fighter IV, in 2009, brought a new wave of players, with more than 1,000 entering its tournament that year. Other games brought their own crowds. Super Smash Bros. Melee was added to Evo 2013 after a charity vote, and more than 100,000 people watched its stream. By 2017, USgamer counted more than 2,600 players entered for Street Fighter V alone and around 1,500 each for two Smash Bros. games.

2020 and new owners

Evo 2020 was due to be held at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas that summer. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the in-person event to be cancelled, and an online event was planned instead. In early July a Twitter user accused Joey Cuellar, Evo’s president and one of its founders, of inappropriate behaviour towards him and other boys in the 1990s and 2000s. ESPN reported that Evo placed Cuellar on administrative leave pending an investigation. Capcom, NetherRealm Studios and Bandai Namco withdrew their games. Cuellar posted on Twitter: “I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt anyone. I was young and reckless and did things I’m not proud of.” Evo then announced that Cuellar would no longer be involved, that Tony Cannon would take over as chief executive, and that Evo Online was cancelled and entry fees refunded.

In March 2021 Sony Interactive Entertainment and RTS, a talent management and brand consultancy, bought Evo jointly. The first in-person Evo under the new owners was held in Las Vegas from 5 to 7 August 2022; Sony said the tournament would stay open to games on every platform. Nintendo, however, removed Smash Bros. from Evo 2022. The 2023 event broke the entry record, with 9,182 players, and Las Vegas gave the Cannon brothers the key to the city.

In August 2025 Sony sold its stake to the Indian events company Nodwin Gaming, staying on as a sponsor. At the same time Qiddiya, a company owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund that is building an entertainment and sports city, invested in RTS; a month later it bought RTS outright. In February 2026 RTS bought out Nodwin and took sole ownership of Evo. IGN reported that many fans reacted badly to the change, citing Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

Evo 2026 was held in Las Vegas from 26 to 28 June. Evo also runs events in Tokyo (Evo Japan), Nice (Evo France) and, from January 2027, Singapore.

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