EVO blunder angers many members of the gaming industry

Posted on August 6, 2019

Evo 2019 has come and gone, breaking new records when it comes to fighting game tournaments. The event was almost a complete success with hundreds of thousands tuning in to watch the best of the best within the fighting game community duke it out to win big in the most popular fighting games around.

Unfortunately Evo was tarnished by a rather unfortunate blunder. A blunder that was intended as a simple joke but has managed to anger multiple members of the gaming community including gamers themselves, publishers, and even a voice actor.

During the Tekken grand finals a short video was played featuring Solid Snake. The video lead viewers to believe that Snake would be heading to the Tekken series and naturally the live audience, made up of primarily hardcore fighting game fans, was incredibly excited.

As it turns out Snake isn’t heading to the Tekken series and the video was a mere joke conducted by the Evo event runners. Unfortunately it wasn’t just fans who were dissapointed by the joke.

“Just to clear things up, the Snake cameo video that we showed during Tekken finals was our idea of a little joke. It was not intended to imply a character reveal, and was done on our own, without consulting Bandai Namco. Sorry for any confusion!”

David Hayter, voice actor for Solid Snake, took to Twitter to vent his grievances about the joke. Likewise, Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada took to Twitter to clear up the dilemma for Japanese fans. Whilst his Tweets are written in Japanese, many sources suggests that he states he wasn’t in on the joke and feels sorry for the other parties involved and fans who were also not informed of the video.

The result is clearly not what the Evo event coordinators were looking to achieve.