Fortnite

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2017 · Epic Games, an American games company, on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One · Also known as Fortnite Battle Royale; Fortnite: Save the World; Fortnite Creative

What it is

Fortnite is a video game made by Epic Games and released in 2017. It's free to play on computers, games consoles and phones. In its best-known mode, Battle Royale, 100 players jump out of a flying bus onto an island, pick up weapons and fight until one person or team is left, while a storm shrinks the safe area. Players can also build walls and ramps in seconds. Epic made its money selling outfits and dances for players' characters.

Where it came from

Epic first sold a slower co-operative zombie game called Save the World in July 2017. Earlier that year PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds had made the 100-player, last-person-standing format a hit, so Epic added a free Battle Royale mode in September 2017. It spread through schools and through live streams, where people watch someone else play in real time. In March 2018 the streamer Ninja (Tyler Blevins) played it with the rapper Drake on Twitch, a streaming site, and over 600,000 people watched at once, a record then. Epic said it had 125 million players within a year.

How people used it

Friends met in squads after school and chatted over headsets while they played. Players spent V-Bucks, the game's own money bought with real money, on skins (character outfits) and emotes (short dances). Anyone in the free starting outfit got called a "default", meaning new or skint. Children copied emotes such as the Floss in playgrounds and footballers did them after scoring. Players danced the "Take the L" emote over people they'd just beaten. Millions logged in at once for live events, including a Marshmello concert in 2019, the black hole that ended the game's first map in 2019, and Travis Scott's concert in 2020.

Why it mattered

For a lot of children around 2018 it was where their social life happened, which is why parents and schools worried about it so much. It made watching strangers play games a normal pastime and turned streamers into celebrities. It showed the games industry that people would pay for looks alone, and many games copied its battle pass, a paid list of rewards unlocked by playing. It also caused fights. The actor Alfonso Ribeiro and several rappers sued over dances used as emotes, Epic got Fortnite thrown off Apple's App Store in 2020 to start a legal fight over Apple's fees, and in 2022 Epic agreed to pay $520 million to settle US Federal Trade Commission complaints about children's privacy and misleading payment buttons.

The jokes around it

• "Where we dropping?": the question that started every match, usually answered with "Tilted Towers", the busiest town on the map.
• "Default": an insult for anyone still wearing the free starting outfit.
• "Victory Royale": the win screen's words, quoted whenever anyone won anything at all.
• "Chug Jug With You": a parody of the song "American Boy" about the game's items, made by a young fan and later revived on TikTok.
• "Fortnite bad": the standard sneer from older gamers who saw it as a game for children.

What noah thinks it shows about us

A lot of the time the game was an excuse. Children who couldn't meet their friends in person met them inside a shooting game, and they paid real money for dances and outfits whose only use was being seen by those friends.

What noah is not sure of

The Ninja and Drake viewer peak is usually given as about 628,000. Attendance figures for the Marshmello (about 10.7 million) and Travis Scott (about 12.3 million) events came from Epic itself. The exact year of the "Chug Jug With You" song (believed 2018) and its TikTok revival (believed 2021) aren't certain. The specimen's season and chapter counts as of 2026 weren't checked.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.