May the Fortnite Be With You
My childhood dream awakens…
When I was a kid, I dreamed about an ultimate “meta” videogame which would incorporate things from all of my favorite videogames, as well as the real world. Think: Street Fighter where Super Mario could fight Shaquille O’Neal.¹ Or a version of Rampage with Link from Zelda and Vanilla Ice.² It’s weird how kids’ minds work. And mine was no exception.
Except, it’s also not that weird.
As I grew up, my naïveté gave way to the cold harsh reality of capitalism. While the technology to pull off the above was coming into its own, the IP rights would undoubtedly be insurmountable. It all comes down to money. And so the dream faded from my memory — at least until 2011, when Ready Player One, the book, was released with some similar cross-culture gaming ideas mixed with a bit of Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse. Aha! I wasn’t alone!
Still, as fun as this was to see in film form in 2018, it was basically only because Steven Spielberg was Steven Spielberg that many of the cross-IP rights were obtained — and many others weren’t! — in a movie, a two-hour piece of content. No way a game, let alone an actual Metaverse was possible.
And yet, somehow, that’s seemingly exactly what Fortnite has built.
I’m realizing this with the news last week that Disney made a huge splash in the Fortnite world by releasing not only a new, exclusive Star Wars trailer in the game, but also by launching several coordinated events to lead up to the launch of the new movie. J.J. Abrams entered the game for an interview. Lightsabers were deployed to players. Just follow this tweet thread by Jack Appleby for a succinct recap. It’s amazing.
And amazingly smart. While Fortnite may not have set out to build my childhood dreamscape, they created a world malleable enough to back into it. And it is creating a cultural phenomenon consistently soaring to new heights, far eclipsing gaming itself. The Avengers! EDM! John Wick!
Case in point: I actually have never even played Fortnite. Which is mildly embarrassing to admit, but it’s certainly not for lack of interest, just lack of time. And yet here I am, constantly thinking about, and even now writing about a game which I’ve never played. Because I think it’s just one of the most interesting and potentially important channels of culture going forward.
Here was Epic’s worldwide creative director Donald Mustard while accepting an award for Fortnite last week:
Mustard also flicked at the idea of Fortnite as the first steps toward a proper metaverse, the term from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash that refers to a persistent virtual world that acts much like a VR- and AR-infused evolution of the internet. In his speech, Mustard specifically says that Epic’s vision for Fortnite is a world where “all [intellectual property] can live together,” which is certainly true given the company’s spate of recent crossover marketing events for things like Batman and Borderlands 3.
I’m sure to some, this all sounds more than a bit sad. Perhaps even dystopian. It’s corporate America taking over the safe spaces of our youth for the purposes of promotion. And here’s where I’ll mention that I also used to dream of a version of SimCity where I could place McDonald’s alongside my Arcologies. Silly me, I didn’t even consider a Death Star…
¹ Honestly, what I was thinking about was more along the lines of ClayFighter.
² This all pre-dates Super Smash Brothers, of course. Let alone Apple’s new weird hockey crossover game.
