Abstract
On Sunday the 13th of October, 2019, millions of people gathered on online channels to witness the end of the world.
Thankfully, this wasn’t nuclear war, rather, this was the end of the world for the Fortnite game world, which was sucked into a black hole, taking the whole game and all player characters with it. And with that, Fortnite went offline, leaving players around the world stunned. But what is Fortnite? Fortnite is an online video game developed by Epic Games, initially released in 2017. It’s a sandbox-survival-battle-royale video game, with three game modes that share the same gameplay style and engine. Fortnite started life at Epic Games as a game jam concept, following the publishing of Gears of War 3. Development was slow due to several issues, including switching from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine 4, developing a deeper role-playing game approach to extend the life of the game, and a switch of art style to a more cartoonish design. Ultimately, Epic was able to release Fortnite in July 2017. The initial game mode was a roaring success, gaining over one million players by August 2017. But this was just the beginning. By mid-2018, it had over 125 million players – a number which continues to climb. Fortnite is a significant financial and critical success for Epic games and has become an online cultural phenomenon. All of which brings us back to the end of the world. Fortnite will be back, with freshly designed gameplay, aptly titled “Chapter 2”. With its apocalyptic ending, Fortnite has done something remarkable, pulling in a vast live audience to witness the conclusion to a unique video game narrative. Epic was had done the spade work in building towards the finale. Throughout the last few months players have been able to find audiotapes hidden around the map in which a key character has made recordings about his attempts to fix a loop in time and prevent a singularity. This narrative structure was spectacularly realised in the climactic events of the game, which even extended to sucking in the game interface and registering anomalies on the server status reports outside of the game engine. This has become a game changer. Fortnite is playing with storytelling concepts in the gaming medium, while also providing an industry-leading piece of blockbuster entertainment for their millions of players. When the next chapter of Fortnite begins, it will have some big shoes to fill. Epic Games has gone into new territory… and we’re all waiting to see what will come next.
