Evo Awards $20K Scholarship for NYU Game Design Degree

The Evolution Championship Series and NYU's Game Center have decided to give back to the fighting game community in a tremendous way.

Polygon reports that the New York University Game Center has teamed up with the Evolution Championship Series to award its third annual Evo Scholarship, granting a whopping $20,000 to recipient Tony Kao. Kao is a graphics designer and illustrator from Chicago who is entering NYU Game Center's Master of Fine Arts program for competitive game design. Evo used all of its proceeds from the ticket purchases of last year's Evo livestream in order to fund Kao's scholarship. This year, Evo and the Game Center are hoping to raise double that amount for the Evo 2015 scholarship.

"Tony embodies exactly the candidate we were hoping to attract with this scholarship — a committed gamer and a talented designer who jumped at the opportunity to pursue game design at a deeper level," said Frank Lantz, chair of the NYU Game Center.

Kao was chosen to win the scholarship based upon his noteworthy participation in the fighting game community, financial need and his keen interest in game design for competitive games.

"At Evo we feel a sense of duty to support fighting game players not only in their competitive lives, but in their personal and professional growth as people," said Tom Cannon, the founder of Evo.

We applaud the folks at both Evo and NYU's Game Center for giving back to the fighting game community.