Yesterday’s article and follow up work was the most satisfying work that I’ve done with regards to an esports event in recent memory. Today’s posts made me feel like I was helping to document EVO 2015 even before I heard someone else say it.
I’ve been all over the show floor and the tournament hall just looking for things to take pictures of. If I was in an advantageous position to capture some video and post it, I did so.
Did you know that the iPhone can take panoramic photos? Did you know that it’s actually insanely easy to pull off?
As long as you keep the turning rate under control when you’re capturing the panorama, you can capture some pretty epic vistas.
At this point of EVO, the Smash Bros. for Wii U (or Smash 4) tournament had just reached its final phase. The Top 8 playoff pits the final four remaining in the winners bracket against the final four who have lost a match up in the tournament. It as the first finale of the second day of EVO, so everyone had just started to trickle into the main room.
I snapped this photo to show off how large the turnout was for Smash 4 and how it was filling the room, which a lot of Smash players weren’t sure would happen or not.
EVO has always drawn some of the best international players to its tournaments and the audience at the event can easily find a sole foreigner making Top 8 to be a people’s hero, in a manner of speaking. Nairo’s run in the Smash 4 event was something special, considering he came from Japan to Las Vegas to play EVO’s first Smash 4 tournament.
Tekken is the current outlier in the fighting game community’s current top titles. Many games featured at EVO are considered 2D or 2.5D fighters due to their 3D rendering style married to a set of 2D fighting mechanics. Movement only takes place in two dimensions, even though the game is generating three dimensional character models and stages.
Tekken could more accurately be described as a fantasy fighting simulator insofar that movement takes place in three dimensions. It’s not enough for a player to consider their distance to their target, typically called spacing, but also how that player’s character can 3D-dodge their next attack. The variety of possibilities combined with the games’ lower threshold for character health allows for faster-paced matches.
The game isn’t the most popular title out there, so seeing the EVO community in attendance stick around to watch the Tekken 7’s Top 8 playoff is a testament to either the value of saving your seat (if you had one) or the respect the community has towards any fighting game.
It was after this photo that I informally asked to met up with the folks in charge of running social media for @evo2k. I went over to the Command Center — the codename for the station for EVO operations at the center of the main hall — and ended up talking to the one man who was running the account at the time. I thanked him for promoting my tweets and asked him what his thinking was for sourcing content for the account. He explained how he was picking posts out of social media and why mine were what he was looking for: “I’m just looking for tweets that help tell the story. That’s all I’m trying to do — tell the story of EVO.”
So that’s what I’m going to do for the remainder of the tournament — help tell the story of EVO. And then start planning which event I’ll show up to next.
As how I’m keeping up with EVO while taking the time to write up this post —
Might as well multitask while I wait for my phone to charge up!
