Fortnite is a free-to-play battle royale game that took the success from PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and made it their own. Everyone from children to celebrities (such as Drake) plays Fortnite in their free time and the game has spurred eSports to start to become mainstream.
In April of last year, Fortnite made (an estimated) $300 million in just one month and individual gamers like “Ninja” and “Tfue” are personally making a lot of money by streaming the game on Twitch and Mixer. Other studios have tried to capitalize on the boom of the battle-royale genre from Call of Duty (Activision) and Battlefield (EA) to smaller studios trying to make their first big hit.
Fortnite has allowed the spotlight to be shown on the eSports stage and even allowed college students to get scholarships for playing on their teams (but only for League of Legends and other games) and Ninja was the first ever eSports player to be on the cover of ESPN’s The Magazine. Fortnite has had collaborations with Borderlands, Stranger Things, and even Marvel (it made a cameo in Endgame).
The date was October 13th, 2019 and Fortnite was having its usual season-ending live event, but this time it would be different. Clues had been spread throughout the entirety of the current season, and the final one had dropped the day before: a transcript of certain recordings by the ‘Visitor’ (a person from an alternate dimension/time traveler) that was posted by Donald Mustard, the Creative Director at Epic Games (the company that created Fortnite).
At the start of the live event, a rocket took off and eventually went into a rift. Soon, the rocket reappeared and went through more rifts, and eventually, the rocket multiplied itself and was ‘rifting’ right underneath a meteor that was frozen mid-air. And, after a minute or two, the rockets rifted the meteor and the three factories underneath out of existence. Right after, a rocket appeared above the ‘zero point’ (a ball of energy that was surrounded by a zero-gravity bubble) and went full speed into the Zero Point which caused the entire world of Fortnite to go zero-g. All the rockets and the meteor appeared above the aggravated zero point bubble and slowly crashed into it and eventually created a black hole.
That black hole took over Fortnite’s social accounts with their Twitter being completely wiped, their Twitch stream showing just a black hole, and their Twitch game profile to be deleted. The game would be down for 48 hours with the black hole revealing numbers at 3-minute intervals , and eventually leakers were able to decode those numbers, which correlated to words in the transcription mentioned earlier. The stream of the black hole was on Youtube and Twitch and broke records on both platforms for concurrent viewers.
Fortnite is now known as Fortnite Chapter 2 with a bunch of changes to the game. One of the changes was the map: The new map is filled with more water, and the whole island is closer to sea level, allowing boats to be driven around and through the map easily. Fortnite used to have a ton of weapons that weren’t consistent throughout the rarity system and were unbalanced at times. So, Epic Games decided to simplify the game and bring it down to 8 weapons all of which ranging from 5 different rarities: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. This change came with a update to the game’s UI with the map, health bar, weapon icons/styles, and many more items getting a new fresh design. Recently, for Halloween, Fortnite had its annual update to make the game Halloween-themed. This year it was called Fortnitemares and included an island in the middle of one of the more prominent lakes in the Fortnite map. This island had zombie spawning cubes as well as the Zombie King spawning in a special gamemode. These zombies (once killed) would give the player ‘shields’ as well as some loot.
Fortnite has broken multiple records throughout its time and has helped a multitude of streamers to break records, make money, and create a successful career in the eSports industry. Will Fortnite ever truly ‘die’? That’s up to the community and the players of the game. It’s been more than 10 years since Minecraft was released and it’s still one of the most played video games of this era. So, it’s very possible for Fortnite to last at least another 8 years and even when it dies, it would have affected the gaming industry a great amount by then.
Article by Eli Umar of Cabin John Middle School
Photo courtesy of Creative Commons