The 2018 Evo Scholar is Brian Chung

The Evo Scholarship is a partnership between the NYU Game Center and the Evo tournament to create a scholarship to study game design at New York University. The scholarship is funded by subscriptions to the Evo tournament live stream and by a generous gift from world-famous fighting game champion Daigo Umehara.  The Evo Scholarship is open to anyone who is passionate about fighting games and eSports.

Previous Evo Scholars include Tony Kao of Chicago and Christian Sutton of Baltimore. This year Brian Chung joins their ranks, receiving the 2017 “All In” Evo scholarship. Brian is a game developer as well as a longtime tournament and community organizer- including several years of running the Game Center’s Super Smash Bros. tournament Fall Brawl and the Game Devs of Color Conference. 

“I’m incredibly thankful for this opportunity. As a former player, teammate, and tournament organizer, I’ve seen first-hand the way that fighting games can create a grassroots community that builds, sustains, and grows itself far beyond what the developers could have hoped to achieve through their designs alone. That power of emergent community has permanently informed my sensibilities as a designer and responsibilities as a leader, and is something that I want to cultivate & share with others, as I myself grow.”

In addition to his to work as a tournament and community organizer, Brian is also a prolific game developer, having worked on community-oriented MMO titles like EverQuest and Fantage, where he was the lead game designer. Along with GJ Lee, he is a co-founder of the game development studio The Sheep’s Meow. From their website, “As game developers, their mission is to create games that make you see differently. Their artgames have exhibited at institutions like Stedelijk Museum‘s-Hertogenbosch, New Museum, and The Museum of the Moving Image. They also develop cross-platform HTML5 web games with a focus on quick & quirky fun.”

The Sheep’s Meow is currently developing EXPOSURE, a game of camouflage. EXPOSURE was a Finalist at IndieCade 2018, and won the award for Best Experimental Game Design at the 2018 Boston Festival of Indie Games. It was also was one of the games listed by the New York Times in their article about the NY game development scene, “12 Games Made in New York.”

We’re very excited to welcome Brian to the NYU Game Center MFA program! You can follow his work twitter here and if you’re around NYC we encourage you to visit us during Spring Fighter or stop by for Playtest Thursday to see what Brian and the entire Game Center community is building!