EVO 2013 Sees Record Number Of Attendees From All Over The World As Day One Begins

If you had any doubts about whether or not EVO 2013 would see even more players than last year, you can put those doubts to rest. As reported by GameSpot, EVO has once again broken its attendance record with exactly 3,538 unique competitors flying in from across the world.

In case you didn’t know, EVO 2013 is a pretty big deal to fighting game fans.

The actual number of tournament entries for EVO 2013, however, is almost double that; in an image provided to the site by EVO founder Tom Cannon, it was revealed that there are a total of 6,097 tournament entries across nine games amongst those in attendance.

“I think the numbers just go to show that fighting game fans love to compete,” Cannon told the site. “Most of our players know they have almost no shot at winning the tournament. They use the experience to see how they measure up against the best in the world. The open bracket is incredibly important for us. It comes from our arcade roots, where anyone with a quarter could step up and try to knock of [sic] the guy on that cabinet.”

One of the games that will be run at the tournament this year, and streamed, almost didn’t make it: Super Smash Bros. Melee. Nintendo not only tried to shut down the stream of the game’s tournament, it also reportedly attempted to shut the tournament itself down.

Shortly afterwards, however, Nintendo had a change of heart, allowing Super Smash Bros. Melee to make an appearance as originally intended – stream and all.

EVO 2013 kicks off this morning in Las Vegas, with Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, Mortal Kombat 9, and Super Smash Bros. Melee coming up first. To check out the full stream schedule, you can head over to this link, where you can also find the URLs you’ll need to go to in order to see each individual game.