It was the sight of Venom rocking out on the saxophone that ultimately won me over. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
It’s not like I didn’t know what Fortnite was prior to that fateful run-in with Venom in October 2021. Even if my job didn’t keep my attention locked every day on the ebbs and flows of the video game industry, Epic Games’ juggernaut has been impossible to overlook in the four years since its 2017 launch.
Few video games in history have managed to achieve a level of mainstream success and attention that rivals Fortnite. The battle royale mode, which sees 100 players fighting with found weapons to survive in an always shrinking warzone — and which is chiefly responsible for Fortnite‘s wild success — isn’t even Epic’s original creation. It was a late addition to what was originally pitched as a cooperative survival game. Epic almost certainly delivered the mode to Fortnite in 2017 because of another battle royale’s unexpected success at the time: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, aka PUBG.
I never had an issue with the choice to add a popular thing to Fortnite. I’d spent some time with PUBG and it wasn’t really my thing. In general, I’m picky with competitive PVP games. I did spend some time with Fortnite‘s “Save the World” cooperative mode — which is like cartoon Minecraft with zombies — but it didn’t really stick. I was glad for Epic’s success, but I was equally happy to admire this creation from a distance.
Over time, however, Fortnite became increasingly difficult to ignore. The battle royale evolved rapidly in its first year, introducing in-game events that, early on, delivered a season-ending spectacle for players to simply absorb as a setup for changed play dynamics in the next season. By the end of 2018, Epic introduced Creative Mode, which transplants the basic rules and building mechanics of the Fortnite world into a no-holds-barred space that gives players the freedom to explore their imaginations.
It was the sight of Venom rocking out on the saxophone that won me over.
Just a few months later, “live” concerts arrived for the first time when the EDM producer and DJ Marshmello staged a 10-minute concert, the first such gathering in Fortnite. Since then, other well-known performers — a lineup that most recently featured Ariana Grande — have brought even more complex experiences to the mix. Brands got involved too, but in ways that are more cool than cringe — like the time JJ Abrams flew in aboard the Millennium Falcon to debut a clip from the much-hyped Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker while crowds of avatars gathered in-game to watch.
I’m giving you all this history to make a point: I was aware of these things as they happened, and I even wrote about them sometimes. But I was never invested in Fortnite. I have a deep respect for anyone who creates video games. But that’s a very different thing from committing to one game or another as a hobby. I respected Fortnite, I thought it did some really cool stuff. But meh, battle royale. Not really my thing.
Then Venom happened. I tend to play online games with a group of friends connected to the sprawling Minecraft server that’s been an unexpected source of community for me during the pandemic. None of us are working streamers, but it’s not uncommon in our Discord for someone to broadcast whatever they’re playing while we hang out in a voice channel.
So it was on that fateful October night when I hopped into voice and fired up one friend’s stream, only to find the group queueing up for a Fortnite match. For anyone who’s not familiar: The lobby screen in Fortnite is a simple affair, with a set of menu options at the top of the screen and most of the rest occupied by the one, two, three, or four members of the squad as they wait for matchmaking to play out. You can see what everyone’s wearing — their “skin,” in the parlance of these games — and you can also see and hear when they trigger an emote.
I had known for some time that brands existed within the Fortnite experience, but I never realized just how big a piece of the game they are. Every day, the Fortnite Item Shop updates with new cosmetic customization options like skins. And at this point in 2021, Fortnite‘s skin drops have covered a variety of different and wildly popular IP: Marvel and DC Comics, Star Wars, Dune, Naruto, even video games like Halo and God of War. You don’t enjoy any gameplay advantage when you slap on a Superman skin or a Thanos skin, but you still look like a cartoonish take on whatever popular character.
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The going gets even weirder when you add in the emotes. A lot of emotes make your avatar start dancing; the best of them are often set to snippets of pop music. It’s one thing to watch BTS doing their thing in the “Dynamite” video. But it’s a whole other thing to load up Fortnite and all of a sudden you’re standing next to God of War’s Kratos in a virtual world as he dances along to the BTS hit.
I was only vaguely aware of all this when I popped into Discord voice back in October. And then, all of a sudden, there were these two Venoms staring back at me from the Fortnite lobby screen. One of them was wearing a black Superman cape from the Snyder Cut and the other kept transforming back and forth between the goopy, Spider-Man-esque Venom outfit and an uncannily accurate virtual recreation of Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock.
“Wow,” I remember thinking. “You can just be [INSERT POPULAR CHARACTER HERE] in Fortnite? That’s pretty cool!” But oh reader, how innocent I was. Because all of a sudden, the cape-less Venom whipped out an entire saxophone and started doing this.
It took me a minute to process what I was seeing. The Venom hype was already running high across the internet with the imminent release of Let There Be Carnage bearing down on us all. But it wasn’t just the presence of the Marvel anti-hero that got me. He was wailing away on this sax and dancing the whole time, too.
There’s this high-minded concept in video games of “emergent gameplay,” which mostly refers to the unpredictability of what can happen when you play a game that’s built around interconnected systems. The common touchstone for this idea is the post-3D era of Grand Theft Auto games (starting with GTA III), and other open world games that followed.
In your typical GTA, the missions and the story are part of the experience for sure. But the real allure for most people is the potential for chaos. The unexpected stuff that happens just in the natural course of you, a player-controlled avatar, existing in an AI-driven world that’s built to respond to stimulus, as opposed to sticking to some script.
Fortnite is dripping with a similarly chaotic kind of energy. It’s not quite the same as a GTA — the people you encounter in-game are largely other player-controlled avatars. But the amount of stuff that’s been loaded into this thing over time, and which continues to cycle through at a regular clip, means you never know what you’re going to see when you step into a Fortnite match.
“Wow,” I remember thinking. “You can just *be* [INSERT POPULAR CHARACTER HERE] in ‘Fortnite’?”
Battle royale games are inherently emergent experiences because of the shrinking map’s randomness. You never know where the next safe zone will be, and that unpredictability means players have to think on their feet about the best tactical approach in any given moment. The character and feel of every match changes because the battlefield is never the same.
Fortnite further ratchets up those thrills with its unique and frequently shifting rules. The crafting features from “Save the World” are always active in battle royale, meaning players can throw up walls, stairs, and floors in an instant to reach inaccessible locations or shield themselves from incoming fire. Seasonal events like 2018’s “Infinity Gauntlet” (which let players find the eponymous golden glove and become a fully powered Thanos) or the current season’s B.R.U.T.E. mechs inject even more unpredictability into the proceedings.
For me, though, Fortnite‘s most powerful chaos agent isn’t something that would traditionally fuel emergent elements in other games. I’m talking about its reverence for non-Fortnite brands. Over the years, players have unlocked and purchased entire stockpiles of cosmetic items tied to basically all of our pop culture faves in movies, TV, streaming, music, and even other video games. Without those cosmetics, dropping into any given match means you’d be facing off against other teams of generically Fortnite characters.
Epic has made cool skins of its own, like the current season’s cartoon Toona Fish. But it’s so much more personally meaningful and weird to suddenly find yourself going head-to-head against a team that includes Harley Quinn, Lara Croft, a Stranger Things Demogorgon, and Rick Sanchez. Fortnite is the kind of chaos space where you might suddenly see LeBron James carrying a downed Thanos to safety during a firefight.
This is marketing-as-a-gameplay system. Epic sells most of the branded cosmetics in the Item Shop, after all. Fortnite would still be an original spin on the battle royale genre without all the tie-ins, but it would lack the particular flavor of unhinged chaos that can only come from seeing Kratos and Master Chief, the prized sons of video game industry competitors Sony and Microsoft, fighting on the same squad. It’s a possibility space that is utterly unique to Fortnite, and it’s downright intoxicating when the chaos hits.
Credit: Epic Games
The same week I saw Venom playing his saxophone, I re-installed Fortnite and hopped in for a night of battle royale with the boys. That night led to a next night. And then a next one. It’s now a regular staple of my weekly gaming diet.
I fell hard for Fortnite very quickly and now unabashedly love its weird, forever-transforming world and the unexpected gameplay scenarios that unfold there. It doesn’t feel like I’m coming to any of this “late.” A great game is simply great, regardless of when you find it. It helps that Fortnite is still very much a vital, living experience that likely won’t disappear anytime soon. But it’s distinctly different from what I’ve encountered with other so-called “live” games.
Destiny, to cite a game I’ve loved enough to spend more than 2,000 hours playing, bases much of its ongoing appeal on FOMO. The loot you pick up has actual gameplay value, with guns and armor offering tangible benefits that are locked to some piece of kit or another. Often, that loot is tied to a season or limited-time event or even an especially challenging activity where, if you don’t play for those weeks or months when those things are offered, you lose the chance to get the stuff.
That kind of approach isn’t inherently bad or wrong, but it’s fueled what I’ve come to realize is an unhealthy relationship with the game (for me, at least). I don’t play Destiny nearly as much as I used to, and it’s because I got tired of feeling resentful about missed opportunities, or even just the potential for missed opportunities. I still love Destiny very much and will play it when a group of friends gathers, but I drifted away because of how investing in it made me feel.
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That hasn’t been an issue in Fortnite because none of the stuff you get really matters in terms of winning and losing. It’s all cosmetic. And because of the way the in-game store works, many of the coolest cosmetics are only ever a daily store refresh away from coming up again.
In the past week since I started writing all of this down, I had opportunities to buy a Xenomorph skin and a BTS emote pack. Obviously, I got them both and made magic out of that combination.
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So I’m in. Completely in. I’m fully a Fortnite guy now. I love the chaos. I also love not having to care about missing one cool thing or another. It’ll be documented on social media for me to watch at some point, and missing out won’t make me any less capable when I’m playing the game. But mostly I love Venom, dancing and wailing away on the sax, and everything that utterly weird visual represents.
