Epic Games, the company that owns and publishes online money printer Fortnite, has long harbored some interesting ambitions for its massively popular internet shooter. (Ambitions beyond “Have all the money,” which it’s pretty much handily done.) With regular seasonal events tying in to popular movies, musical acts, and also Weezer, Fortnite has done its best to carve a space for itself out, not just as a video game, but as a sort of digital event space—an idea that sounded a lot less necessary just a few short months ago.
That being said, past Fortnite events have all come in somewhere in the vicinity of neat-bordering-on-infuriating—we still haven’t forgiven anyone involved for placing a key bit of Rise Of Skywalker’s backstory in an in-game promotional event. But they’ve also been a little…restrained. Sure, it was kind of neat to watch Marshmello DJ a set, or to wander through the vast, uncharted wilderness of Weezer Island. But this is still a video game, right? Can’t it go a little bit nuts?
As it turns out: Fuck, absolutely, yes. Apparently the missing ingredient was rapper Travis Scott, who dropped by Pleasant Park this week to spread a little extravagant, gorgeous crazy around. And look: We know “Travis Scott performs in Fortnite” is kind of a hard sell. But it really is a legitimately nifty thing they’ve put together, featuring a giant Scott looming over players, teleporting around, and occasionally blasting them off into space. At 10 minutes, it’s not like this is a full concert or anything, but as a way to feature music in an inventive new way—it’s essentially a massively multiplayer music video—it’s one of the coolest things we’ve seen since a super-creaky digital Bono rocked the online world in Second Life.
You don’t have to take our word for it, either; Fortnite is running repeats of the event (the Travis Scott thing, not digi-Edge) throughout the upcoming weekend.
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Why not have major plot points for your movie appear in an entirely unrelated video game? It’s a bold new direction in storytelling. Someday soon there’ll be movies where whole character arcs are absent from the theatrical cut, but can easily be found by clicking a link embedded in a Wikipedia article on turnip cultivation in icy climates.
by clicking a link embedded in a Wikipedia article on turnip cultivation in icy climates.
Ok, that’s too specific for it not to have happened.
I was trying to figure out who Travis Scott is, and then I remembered that he’s really Jacques Berman Webster II.
Help me! I’m old!
As Grampa Simpson would say… “Think of me when you’re having the best sex of your life!”
Hip hop 1990: “Fight the power!”
Hip hop 2020: “Fight the nine year olds!”
Thanks to the embedded tweet, today I learned that people are apparently still putting “Xxx_xxX” in their username, like an AIM handle from 2003. So angsty!
My 12 year old thought it was cool, so that is A “mission accomplished” for Epic.
If you look closely, you can tell he was lip-syncing.
What percentage of Travis Scott’s lyrics are “shawty”?