On September 26, 2022, it would have been five years since Fortnite appeared in the video game world and changed it forever. Well, actually that’s not technically true. Fortnite’s original Save The World mode launched earlier that same year. With PlayerUnknown: Battlegrounds shifting millions of copies, Epic clearly saw that there might be something to the whole battle royale thing and offered a game of its own. A free version of Fortnite labeled Early Access. Suffice it to say that Fortnite BR early access has now ended.
It’s remarkable to look back on the last half-decade and see how far Fortnite has come. A mode that was basically a trial version of Epic has not only grown so big that most of its millions of players probably don’t even know Save The World exists, but an argument has to be made that Fortnite is the biggest and most popular video game. all time. I actually owe it a lot more than most. Not just because I’ve been playing it consistently for at least four of those five years, but because it pulled me back into a world that I quickly left behind.
Although games played a big role in the first two decades of my life, I had slowly left them behind. The annual installments of FIFA and WWE 2K were the only titles on my calendar that I absolutely had to have, and I had reached a point where my PS4 was being used more for movies than games. Despite my aloofness from the video game world, like most, I couldn’t have avoided the Fortnite buzz. When I discovered it was free to play, I decided to give it a try. Why not, right?
After getting the hang of the concept, as I had never experienced before, of course, I quickly decided I was all-in. I wasn’t the only one either. My partner, curious that I was playing something that wasn’t about kicking a ball or hitting big sweaty men, saw me play a few games and decided she wanted to join in too. That started weeks of our use of every free evening and weekend we took turns playing Fortnite. What I didn’t realize then was that my dormant love for gaming as a whole had been awakened by my BR discovery.
Someone claiming a game like Fortnite, arguably the antithesis of traditional gaming, pulled them back into the pastime as a whole may sound a bit odd to some. However, it really did. A return to video games as the medium I use most to tell great stories, have fun, and sometimes just pass the time can be traced back to the day I decided to give Fortnite a try. From there, I picked up Marvel’s Spider-Man shortly after launch, a title that now ranks among my all-time favorite games.
Five years later, I’m still spending a lot of time catching up on the great games I missed while trying to become the world’s most mediocre FIFA player. As I write this, I’m still recovering from my first playthrough of Mass Effect, 2 years after all the others. However, I have not forgotten Fortnite. Nothing from the past five years, nor anything I’ve caught up to in that time, has been able to displace it. That and its continued popularity worldwide speaks to how impressive the Fortnite formula is.
Formula might be the wrong word to use here. Formula means Epic does the same thing over and over and people still love it. While the core remains the same – players dropping onto the island and fighting each other until one remains – everything else about Fortnite is very different, and that’s key. There are new modes, the island is an ever-changing landscape and just about everyone and everything of interest has crossed over with the game. Therein lies the key to its continued longevity. Show someone who hasn’t played Fortnite in three, four, even five years, it might blow them away. Give them a controller, though, and if they’ve played it before, they’ll be just as adept at playing it again. Once they have their heads around the various weapons, vans reboot and Darth Vader is now canon.
The BR vibe has become saturated with studios trying to replicate or maybe even replace Fortnite’s success, but it may now have reached a point where it’s almost unbeatable. It’s a cultural phenomenon. Your mom knows what it is, your mate who thinks games are something to grow out of, knows what it is, the queen probably even knows what it is. Sorry, knew what it is. Not only were the crossovers featuring some of the biggest people, series and franchises in the world, but they were curated to appeal to as many people as possible. Ariana Grande has performed in-game, people can take on the role of Neymar as they rack up eliminations, and there was an entire season devoted to Marvel.
Epic has already accomplished so much through Fortnite, it’s hard to imagine and predict where it will go from here. What will Fortnite be in five years when it turns ten? A game that remains as relevant as Fortnite has done for five years to maintain that momentum for an entire decade is unprecedented, but what exactly is stopping it from achieving that? There will be more crossovers, there will be more changes and most of all I will still play it even if I keep quitting furiously after about every third game and promise never to play again.
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