HALL OF FAME

FORTNITE

RELEASED July 25, 2017 | DEVELOPER Epic | PUBLISHER In-house

James: Who said it? Who at Epic Games—during whatever meeting about the questionable outlook of its cooperative base building game finally entering early access after nearly seven years in development, announced in 2011 and delayed multiple times since—who said, “Maybe we could turn it into PUBG?”. There’s never been such a rapid, derivative, and successful pivot: Fortnite’s barebones battle royale mode was made in two months. And it wasn’t even good.

But, unlike the then-phenom PUBG, Fortnite: Battle Royale was, and still is, free-to-play. It didn’t matter that the building system wasn’t made for twitch shooting in a 100-person free-for-all, or that the map began as a featureless wasteland. What mattered is that when kids with no money logged into PSN, Xbox Live, or Googled ‘free PC games’, Fortnite was there.

UNLIKE PUBG, FORTNITE: BATTLE ROYALE WAS AND STILL IS FREETO-PLAY

Fortnite was poised to be a temporary craze, but Epic kept it growing with an unprecedented update schedule, introducing new weapons, items, vehicles, and major balance changes on a near-weekly basis. In-game events like the meteor impact or epic mecha vs kaiju battle took Team Fortress 2’s narrative and update integration to a new damn dimension.

Fortnite was already massive, but then Ninja streamed with Drake. Suddenly, Fortnite wasn’t just how you became a successful Twitch streamer, it was how you