The Epic Story of Fortnite

In 2011, Epic Games teased a new video game called Fortnite. Six years later, the game finally emerged from development and took the world by storm. What's the story behind Fortnite?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works and I love
all things tech. And you know what, many video games

(00:24):
never really rise to a level of notoriety that gets
them attention outside of gaming circles, you know, into the
main stream. But once in a while, a video game
does do that. It manages to burst free of its
confines and then next thing, you know, everyone knows about it,
or at least recognizes little elements that are common to

(00:46):
that video game. So games like Pac Man or Donkey Kong,
lots of people know about those. Well. Recently, the video
game Fortnite has managed to do this and burst out
of those small niche adiences of video gamers. Millions of
people play Fortnite. Millions of people will watch other people

(01:08):
play Fortnite, either in tournaments or in live stream sessions
that sort of thing. There are hundreds of videos of
people talking about the game or doing some of the
notable dances that are featured in the game. Epic Games,
which developed and published Fortnite, made three billion dollars in

(01:28):
revenue in eighteen, largely because of that game. There are
a lot of stories about Fortnite, some of which criticize
how the game seemingly lifts elements from other games and
pop culture memes without compensation or credit. But where did
this game come from and how did it become so

(01:49):
popular so quickly? Well, I'm going to do my best
not to turn this into an episode that's secretly about
Epic Games, the company that aches and publishes Fortnite, but
it would be a good idea to get a quick
rundown of that studio and what was going on when
the company first announced development on Fortnite. So here's the

(02:12):
super quick version of Epic games history. Maybe in the
future I'll do a full episode about Epic Games and
will really dive into the details. But back in a
college student named Tim Sweeney launched a computing consulting business
called Potomac Computer Systems. It became clear that the business

(02:33):
was going to require more work and time than Sweeney
could dedicate to it while also doing his college studies,
So around that same time he also got interested in
developing games, and he created a somewhat primitive computer game
called z z T. It was a simple top down
computer RPG style game with as key art, and he

(02:57):
released this game under that Potomac computer or system's company name.
But Sweeney also released some code that made it possible
for gamers to take this game and modify it themselves.
And word quickly spread throughout the old computer bulletin board
system communities, and the game was a modest hit. It

(03:17):
actually did fairly well. The success inspired Sweeney to pursue
game development on a larger scale within the shareware community.
Shareware is a method of distribution in which a developer
allows some portion of their work to be distributed freely
as much as people like. So you can make copies,
you can give them to your friends, and there's no penalty.

(03:40):
There's nothing wrong about that. Typically this software has some
sort of limit built into it, so, for example, a
shareware game might allow you to play the first level
of that game for free, but then to get beyond
this limitation, you would actually have to buy the full game. Well,
Sweeney set out to create his own shareware company. He

(04:02):
also decided they needed a better name, and so he
chose Epic Mega Games, and he later admitted that he
chose that name, in part because it made people think
his company was a lot larger than just a single
person working out of his parents house. Sweeney began to
form relationships and work with other developers as well, like

(04:24):
Cliff Blazinski sometimes known as Cliffy B. He was another
young video game enthusiast who was eager to get into
that industry. Um he was in high school when he
first started to right to Sweeney and work with him.
The company would release several games over the next couple
of years, including a video pinball game and a game
called jazz Jack Rabbit that ended up being very popular.

(04:48):
But things really picked up in Now This was Right
at the Dawn, a video game graphics cards, three D
game design, and first person shooters like Castle, Wolfin's Line
and Doom, both of which were from ID Software. Sweeney
and his team decided to develop their own game engine
and three D first person shooter, a game they called

(05:10):
it Unreal. It was an incredibly ambitious project, and they
released the game and the game engine in after several
years of development. The Unreal engine was an industry triumph,
easily matching up against the more seasoned id's Quake two
engine and the Unreal Engine would become one of the

(05:32):
standard game engines used throughout the industry. It's cemented Epic
Games as a quote unquote real video game company. Epic
would go on to release games like the Gears of
War franchise, which was incredibly successful and the company did
well in the two thousand's. Now this brings us up
rapidly as we skip over a lot of details to

(05:53):
two thousand eleven and the start of the story around
Fortnite itself. In two thousand eleven, Epic is wrapping up
on its own Epic trilogy, which has since grown beyond
three games, and the company was really celebrating they had
just finished Gears of War three. The first Gears of
War game was for the Xbox three sixty back in

(06:15):
two thousand six. Gears of War two followed in two
thousand eight, and Gears of War three finally came out
in two thousand eleven. The trilogy follows a human military
force fighting off an alien invasion and centers around a
protagonist named Marcus Phoenix, and Part three wrapped up Phoenix's storyline,
and so in order to create a sense of closure
and transition, the company held a game jam now, a

(06:38):
game jam is like a hackathon. Developers team up with
each other. Sometimes they work with people that they've never
worked with directly before. Sometimes they'll take on new roles
on the team that they normally wouldn't on a project,
So a programmer might become the art director for a
game jam. Their goal is just to create a fun
game within a certain amount of time, such as forty

(06:59):
eight or seventy two hours. They have to come up
with a concept developed the gameplay, the mechanics, the art,
the music, everything else, and then they show it off
to each other and it helps inspire creativity and outside
the box thinking and gives developers a chance to experiment.
Sometimes it can create the earliest version of a future game.

(07:19):
A short time after this game jam, some of the
Epic team began talking about a possible future game that
would become Fortnite. The Fortnite itself wasn't actually spawned directly
from the game jam. It wasn't one of the games
developed during that uh that that project, but the experience
of the game jam lad the team to talk about

(07:41):
possibilities now. The team imagined a game in which players
would control a human survivor of a zombie apocalypse, and
this would be a multiplayer game, so they could team
up with other players and increase their odds of survival.
They would traverse a world ruined by this apocalypse, and
they would other resources, scavenging and harvesting them from stuff

(08:03):
like trees or rocks or houses or whatever. Then they
could use that material to construct bases to protect themselves
from zombie hordes which would spawn at night. It was
sort of combining elements of several other games that already existed,
stuff like Minecraft and Left for Dead. Producers have also
cited the game Terraria as one of the big influences

(08:24):
in their early development. The goal was to create a
survival building game and marry it to a third person
or a first person shooter game, and make sure that
both of those elements were designed well and fun to play.
The view of the team was that most games, generally
in that space, we're good at one thing but not
the other thing. So building games were really good at building,

(08:47):
but weren't so great at combat. Combat games were great
at combat but not so good at building. They wanted
the best of both. Now, there's no definitive source that
I could find about when Fortnite became an ef shoal project,
but it sounds like there were serious discussions around this
idea starting sometime in August two eleven. Initially, the thought

(09:10):
was to create a game with a dark, gritty tone,
really you know, kind of of of foreboding art style,
But the team decided that they wanted something that would
come across more timeless, not to mention, a style that
wouldn't put as heavy a strain on computer processing power
or development time. If you make it more realistic, you've
got to figure all that stuff out, so they opted

(09:31):
for a brighter, more cartoonish approach. The name Fortnite came
out of an email thread where they were just debating
on what they should name this game. Since the goal
was to survive a zombie attack each night by building
a protective base. Someone suggested Fortnight as a possibility, and
it clicked, and they decided to announce the game just

(09:54):
a few months later after they had decided to actually
make it. This would be in December two thou eleven,
at the Video Game Awards show on on Spike TV.
Well at that point, the team had only been actively
working on the game development for three weeks. There was
no game yet. Cliff Blazynski, now the design director at Epic,

(10:15):
took the stage for the reveal. The announcement included a
video showing off the idea for this game, with characters
rushing into a town to scavenge, then heading back to
build a tower base just before a group of zombies
would attack. The whole thing was a cinematic It was
not gameplay. There was no game to show off at
that point. It was just the idea for a game.

(10:37):
A year later, Epic would be a very different company.
A three thirty million dollar investment would hand over a
significant but technically minority stake of ownership of the company
to a Chinese conglomerate. Game designer and self promoter. Cliff
Blazynski would leave the company, and the Fortnite game would
undergo some changes early in its development. I'll explain more

(10:59):
into the second, but first, let's take a quick break
to thank our sponsor. Okay, time for a quick check
in with Epic Games. Circa mid two thousand and twelve,
Fortnite was now well and truly in development, and the

(11:22):
company projected a release date sometime in two thousand thirteen.
The public knew about the game thanks to those two
thousand eleven Video Game Awards announcements, and Cliff Lazynski was frustrated.
He was finding it difficult to convince people that his
ideas for new games were viable. And then you have

(11:42):
a Chinese company called Tencent Holdings Limited make a huge
deal that Epic just couldn't refuse. Ten Cent, and a
press release on Epic Games as website was described as
quote a leading provider of Internet and mobile and telecom
munications value added services in China end quote. Today it's

(12:05):
the world's largest gaming company, as well as a contender
for one of the top social media companies in the world.
Since its founding in it has had a long history
of investing in other companies. It's much better known in
China that is in the United States. But trust me,
this company is a huge deal. It was during this

(12:27):
time that several important people left Epic Games, among them
producer Rod Ferguson. He left Epic to go work on
a game called BioShock Infinite with Irrational Games, and Cliff Blazynski,
who felt he had hit this creative roadblock at Epic
and he wanted to try his hand at creating his

(12:47):
own studio. That story is a pretty fascinating one in
its own right, and someday I'm going to have to
talk about his experiences and what happened, because it was
one of those tragic stories of failure in tech that
I think still sting a lot of people to this day. Anyway,

(13:09):
their departures gave the gaming community concern about the future
of Fortnite. Everyone identified these guys as being leaders. This
was in a time when some game developers were very
public figures like Cliffy B, and they were sometimes known
for living like rock stars. Cliffy B certainly embrace that

(13:30):
lifestyle and that portrayal, so a lot of people thought, well,
without them there, what's going to happen to this game?
Who is still at Epic Games that can help this
project stay on track? Now, I think this is one
of the big problems with the cult of personality mentality
in general, not just for video games but for everything,

(13:51):
because it tends to put all the focus on one
or two rock stars, and it ignores the hard work
and contributions of countless people who makes stuff possible. And
so typically this means we have a unrealistic view of
what's happening the people who are rock stars are in
fact remarkable. For the most part, they are talented people

(14:14):
who do a lot of work. But it still does
the rest of the team a disservice to assume that
if someone person leaves, the whole project's going to fall apart. Still,
the departures were definitely an issue that the game development
team had to take into account. Meanwhile, the three thirty
million dollars that ten Cent provided to Epic gave them

(14:36):
plenty of safety net for what the company planned to
do next. While still developing games, Epic prepared to make
a big shift in how it generated revenue. One of
the most lucrative assets the company had was its Unreal
Games Engine, which many other developers would rely upon when
they were building out their own games. Traditionally, a company

(14:58):
would have to pay a subscribe shin fee for the
use of the Unreal Engine. Epic released Unreal Engine four
in March two thousand fourteen, and a year later, Epic
made it free to download. The plan was to step
away from focusing only on triple A titles from big
publishers and to leverage the growing community of smaller developers.

(15:20):
The new revenue generating strategy was a royalties agreement, so
instead of a set monthly subscription fee, companies would pay
out five percent of royalties for any commercial application of
the Unreal game engine that earned more than three thousand
dollars per quarter. So if your project didn't earn at
least three thousand dollars per quarter, you weren't charging anything.

(15:43):
This was part of a major shift in the video
game industry as a whole. Back to Fortnite, it didn't
take long into the development process for the designers to
realize that they needed more elements to make the game
they wanted to create. Originally, they thought about making a
building game and releasing it super fast, But while testing

(16:03):
and building the game, they realized that they needed some
more components to make the game fun. To play an
important element in any video game, As it turns out,
some people tend to forget that. During the development process,
they decided they needed some stuff like progression, in which
players are rewarded for doing well in the game, maybe
a skill tree, or being able to improve items and equipment.

(16:29):
The game had a sort of RPG component to it,
and so the company began to seek out developers who
had worked in that space because they didn't have expertise
in RPGs and they wanted to find people who could
contribute to the game's development. With that in mind, and
the release of Unreal Engine four changed things for the
development team as well. Initially they had been using Unreal

(16:51):
Engine three. They chose to abandon that and go with
the latest version of the game engine, which meant some
of that early work needed to go as well. They
had borrowed a lot of assets from a lot of
their earlier games games like the Gears of War franchise,
while all of that needed to be tossed aside, they
had to redevelop things. All of this meant the game

(17:13):
was taking longer to finish than the team had initially planned.
One of the big game elements that emerged during this
turmoil was the actual building mechanic in the game. Initially,
the idea was that building structures in the game should
include some sort of mini game or extended activity, such
as maybe just standing in place and holding down a

(17:34):
button as the structure goes up. So imagine that you're
trying to build a wall, and you start, you pick
the wall from your list of options, and you see
an outline on your screen, you place the outline where
you want to go, and then you hold down a
button while this wall starts to assemble. The team figured
out this wasn't very much fun and it was antithetical

(17:57):
to the fast pace of a shooter. If you have
a fast action game, you can't have your back turned
to all the action and try to build a wall.
So the decision was made that game characters would have
schematics that would allow them to build certain structures, and
all they would have to do is select the appropriate
schematic and the location for the build, and then hit

(18:18):
a button and that was it. It would just build itself.
The game would construct the structure for you, assuming that
you had the raw materials necessary to build whatever it
was you wanted to build. You meanwhile, could run along
and you could build the next section, or shoot enemy
players or actually, at that time, it wasn't even enemy players.
It was uh enemy AI because it was a p

(18:41):
v or player versus environment game, so players could spend
less time building individual components like a section of a
floor or a wall, and they could build entire bases
very quickly, like within a minute or so. Those environments
were also destructible. The pre existing and vironments were destructible.
The stuff that players built were destructible, So anything that

(19:05):
you saw in the game, you could, in theory breakdown
or it could be destroyed by the enemy forces attacking you.
Players would harvest resources from structures, so you could run
up to a house and just start whacking at it
with like a pick axe and start taking materials. That way,
enemies can knock structures down, and that Bick needed a
lot of talent to work on the game to create

(19:27):
all the structures and elements in those destructible environments. So
if you thought, well, we're gonna have a house here,
what sort of stuff goes in the house? Bookshelves, couches, television's, radios, microwaves, refrigerators, stoves,
all these sort of things were assets that had to
be built in the game, so they started hiring people

(19:47):
to build those assets. As this was happening, the designers
began to shape the game to make it more cartoonish
and the Fortnite aesthetic began to emerge. Designers began to
create progression strategies for tools in the game game and
incorporated more science fiction elements into the design, and the
general philosophy was that no idea would be outright denied,

(20:08):
but the team would deliberate on which elements should receive
attention first, and the plan was to continue this process
once the game hit release, it would get updates for
as long as people were playing the game. The developers
would listen to the community of players, and the community
would tell the developers which elements they should focus on next,

(20:29):
and they would provide more content. That was the plan
well from the earlier stages of development. The plan was
to make the game an ongoing projects, so this was
not something new. This was something they had thought about
for a while. In fact, there were announcements that Cliffy
b had made before he left the company about how
the company was going to act as kind of like

(20:49):
a dungeon master or game master for role playing game.
They would create new scenarios, tools, monsters, challenges, that kind
of stuff for the community. All that was decided on
while the game was still being made. The Epic team
in North Carolina was in charge of the project, but
they also worked with satellite offices in Seattle and Poland

(21:10):
to bring it all together. I watched a great video
from Game Informer that published in April two thousand fourteen,
it's available on YouTube, so if you go and search
for Fortnite and Game Informer, you should be able to
pull that video up. And they mentioned that the game
development team around that time was around hundred ten people.
The video of gameplay in that interview literally polished. This

(21:32):
was two thousand fourteen. Interestingly, the game wouldn't actually launch
for three more years. Epic held a closed alpha test
of the game on December one, two thousand fourteen. Only
a few thousand people could participate, and it was meant
to give Epic feedback on how gamers played the game
that they had designed and what they might have to

(21:53):
fix or tweak based upon actual people playing the game.
A second closed alpha test followed in March two thousand fifteen,
and the plan then was to open up a beta
test in the fall, but instead Epic chose to go
with a closed beta, meaning it was invitation only. They
limited the participation to around fifty thousand players. It wasn't
until July two thousand seventeen that gamers at large finally

(22:17):
got their hands on Fortnite. Even then, the game was
released in early access, and it wasn't the version of
Fortnite that everyone tends to talk about today. I'll explain
more in just a moment, but first let's take another
quick break to thank our sponsor. So why did it

(22:41):
take so long for Fortnite to launch? If that documentary
back in two thousand fourteen showed gameplay that looks almost
identical to what the game is today, what was taking
so long? Well, part of it was that Epic was
developing the game as a service. The original plan was
to release Fortnite as a free to play game and
then include content that players could only access if they

(23:05):
paid for it, so you would have in game purchases.
You would be able to play the game for free,
but if you want some of the bells and whistles,
you would have to cough up dough in order to
get it. Also, Epic began work on another title around
that same time called Paragon, and the two games were
competing for in company talent and time and resources, so

(23:27):
when the game did release in early access, it required
would be gamers to pay for that privilege. By the way,
Paragon would end up being released first, and then Epic
would focus on Fortnite, and then eventually Epic would shut
down Paragon. It was a project that did not did

(23:47):
not meet the success that the company had hoped for,
so the early access version of Fortnite was called Save
the World. This was pretty much what the original concept
had been years earlier. Players would gather resources and use
those resources to build forts and then defend those forts
against zombies. The company said it intended to offer Save

(24:09):
the World up as a free to play game sometime
in two thousand eighteen. This was in two thousand seventeen.
Skip ahead now it's early two thousand nineteen as I
record this, and it still has not happened. The basic
version of Fortnite that player versus environment, Save the World
version is thirty nine dollars cents for the standard version.

(24:33):
The Deluxe edition, which contains more character models and weapons
plus some other stuff, is fifty nine dollars and ninety
nine cents. So one of the things Epic Games has
done has create a lot of different character models, a
lot of different weapons, a lot of different emotes. U uh,
these various elements that allow you to customize your character

(24:53):
to some extent, to a great extent, but it's almost
like baseball cards. You have to collect them in order
to be able to use them. But a different version
of Fortnite did launch as free to play, and it's
this version that really captured the attention of a lot
of gamers. This is the famous Battle Royal mode, which

(25:14):
Epic released in September two thousand seventeen, just a few
months after Save the World entered early access. Now, if
you're not familiar with Battle Royal or Battle Royal, if
you prefer style games, i'll summarize. The name comes from
a Japanese film called Battle Royal, in which a class

(25:35):
of students is transported to an island and then they
are forced to fight to a last man standing competition.
The administrator for the competition designates certain areas on that
island as being safe zones save zones, just meaning that
you wouldn't automatically be killed if you were there, and
other areas on the island go to becoming off limits,

(25:58):
and if you are there when it goes off limits,
they're automatically killed off. Now, if this sounds a lot
like another story called Hunger Games, well it's no big
surprise Hunger Games that that those books came out after
Battle Royal had had come out, and they both cover
very similar territory. One Brendan Green, a video game player

(26:22):
and mod maker who uses the handle player Unknown, oversaw
a new game called Player Unknowns Battlegrounds, sometimes known as
pub G. This game was based off of some mods
that Green had created for other games, and these mods
all made a battle Royal started game mode for for

(26:42):
these various games it created it, the games didn't natively
support it, so Brendan Green built mods that allowed it
to happen. And typically the way it works is that
you have a map, and you have group of players
who are all competing against each other. I they're solo
or in teams, and they're all in different parts of

(27:04):
the map, and a section of that map, typically designated
by a circle, is the safe zone. Being outside the
safe zone means you start taking damage a certain amount
of damage per unit of time, and the goal is
to be the last player alive at the end of
the match. The game became enormously popular very quickly, despite

(27:25):
the performance issues and bugs. People famously talked about how
they would have the most incredible beast of a video
game rig and still struggled to run pub G at
at its highest settings. Now Epic must have been paying
really close attention to how popular pub G was becoming

(27:47):
because this was right around the same time that they
were releasing the Save the World version of Fortnite, and
so they launched their own Battle Royal mode in September
two seventeen, and it closely resembled pub G's approach. It's
incredibly similar. In fact, it was similar enough that it
prompted Cheong Han Kim, who was a games developer and

(28:09):
a businessman who had become the CEO of the pub
G corporation, to criticize Epic Games and to threaten legal action,
and in January two eighteen, pub G filed a lawsuit
against Epic Games and then dropped it six months later,
and they didn't really comment on why they dropped the case. Now.

(28:29):
One reason Kim might have been worried about Fortnite is
that pub G relies upon the Unreal Engine for its
games engine, so pub G developers sometimes have to work
with Epic support to implement new features for the pub
G game. So the worry was that Epic might find
out about pub G's plans for upcoming features, and then

(28:50):
Epic could rush to implement similar features into Fortnite and
released them before pub G could do it. Undercutting the competition.
It didn't take very long for Fortnite to catch up
to pub G and then to pass it in popularity.
The fact that it was a free to play game
gave it a big boost. Because pub G is not

(29:12):
free to play. If you want to play pub G,
you have to go and purchase the game, just like
you would for a normal video game or any other
most other video games. Fortnite, however, is different. You can
download the Fortnite Battle Royal game for free and start
playing right away, but if you want certain in game items,

(29:32):
certain weapons, skins, characters, emotes, if you want to get
a very specific dance, then you have to pay extra.
You have to do that those in game purchases, and
lots of people were doing that. Not only that, but
Fortnite became one of the most popular games to watch
someone else play, primarily through these streaming service Twitch players

(29:54):
with handles like Tofu t f U E and Ninja
rack up mill millions of viewer hours on the streaming
service as they play games, and that elevated Fortnite's profile further.
It also helped that Epic would open up Fortnite so
that would play on other platforms Originally it was to
be PC only, but then it went Mac and PC

(30:17):
and now it's also available for consoles and mobile devices.
And to be clear, pub G didn't invent Battle Royal.
I don't want to make the claim that pub G
created this game mode and Fortnite stole it, and the
Battle Royal version and pub G and the Battle Royal
version in Fortnite don't exactly play the same way, not

(30:41):
not entirely. Fortnite is cartoonish, the physics are not nearly
as realistic. It's a faster paced gameplay, this little swimmier
than pub G is. And the fact that you can
build stuff in Fortnite, you can construct barriers and ramps,
and you can get over mountains this way. You can't

(31:01):
do that in pub G. It creates a totally different
gameplay experience than you would find in pub G or
other Battle Royal games. So there are elements to Fortnite
that really said it of heart. So lots of other
games have also got similar Battle Royal modes, including the
most recent Call of duty game Black Ops four with Blackout.

(31:21):
So I don't want to suggest that you know pub
G has a an exclusive right to the Battle Royal
game Mode, but that people were criticizing Epic Games, saying,
it looks to me like the game that you had
promised for years and years and years wasn't doing as
well as you wanted, so then you copied a game

(31:42):
that was doing really well, and that's how you were
able to turn it into a success. Whether that's true
or not, you do have to admit that Fortnite is
an enormous success. Also, the lawsuit between pub G and
Epic Games, that's not the only legal headache that Epic
has had to endure thanks to this runaway success of Fortnite.

(32:03):
One of those things that you can purchase in the
game would be an emote or an action that you
can choose your character to make based upon a keystroke.
So you might have emotes that are like a particular pose.
But in Fortnite, the emotes that are really famous are
the various dances. Epic has created animations of numerous dances,

(32:26):
some of which were already famous memes, and therein lies
the problem, well, one of the problems. The other problem
is that there's some really litigious folks out there who
are hoping for a meal ticket, I think, but there's
fault on all sides, I would argue. So one of
the dances you can purchase, at least at one time,
was called Fresh, which was a nod to the source

(32:49):
of this dance, the television show Fresh Prince of bel Air.
In that show, Alfonso Ribero, who played the character at Carlton,
did an iconic dance to Tom Jones's song It's not Unusual.
Fortnite didn't lift the song, but it did lift the dance,
and Alfonso has filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming
they're capitalizing on his celebrity and didn't give him any

(33:13):
credit or compensation. Actor Donald Fazan pointed to another instance
in which Epic Games had included animation that copied a
dance he did in the television series Scrubs Terrence to Millie.
Ferguson filed a lawsuit against Epic Games for using his
Millie Rock dance. Anita Red, acting on behalf of Russell
Backpack Kid Horning, filed a lawsuit because of the game

(33:37):
using the floss dancing move, which Horning had made famous.
In an airing of Saturday Night Live, Katy Perry was
playing a song and she threw a whole lot of
focus towards Horning, who then did the Flaws dance. It
went totally viral and became a huge meme of itself.
But here's the thing, he didn't invent that dance. You

(33:59):
can just do a quick search on YouTube and you
will find there are lots of videos that well pre
date that Saturday Night Live performance, one going all the
way back to two thousand ten of people doing that dance.
So my guess is that particular lawsuit won't go very
far ultimately once they're able to show that this kid

(34:19):
didn't create that dance, and that while that that particular
Saturday Night Live episode might have elevated everyone's awareness of
the philosophy, it's not like that kid has any claim
to ownership of the dance. The cases, however, bring up
a question can a dance be copyrighted? Can you copyright

(34:41):
dance moves? As of the recording of this podcast, that
remains a pretty unanswered question. And also there are a
lot of people point out that there's a long history
of of various artists doing dances and making them famous
and and profiting from them without having a actually invented them.

(35:01):
Beyonce has lifted lots of dances from from films. Michael
Jackson did not invent the moonwalk, but he sure did
make it famous, So I'm not sure that this particular
argument will go much further. However, it has led to
a lot of people criticizing Epic Games in Fortnite for

(35:23):
taking content or taking performances and not crediting the people
who originally made those performances famous. So let's sum up Fortnite.
It's a video game that was conceived in and shown
off way too early. Epic Games has admitted they talked
about this game far too early in the in the process,

(35:46):
it didn't go into a closed alpha until two thousand
and fourteen, transition to a closed beta in and stayed
that way until going into early access as a player
versus environment survival game in they you'd have to actually purchase.
Later that year, a new variant that was free to
play and one that closely resembled another game came out,

(36:08):
propelled the entire title into the spotlight, and now it
is a true phenomenon. The Fortnite Tracker network currently tracks
more than fifty seven million, five hundred thousand players of
the game. Some estimates for the total number of players
across all platforms runs as high as eighty million. Now,

(36:29):
Epic uses its own game launcher on the PC rather
than going through valves Steam Service, which does allow for tracking.
That means Epic doesn't have to share revenue with Valve
because they're not selling their game or using valves Steam
Service for that purpose. And the popularity of Fortnite has
allowed Epic to launch its own video game store to

(36:51):
rival Steam, and Epic is offering up incentives like a
lower revenue cut than what Valve demands for featuring games
in its store, and it's also offering up other incentives,
so if a developer uses epics Unreal Engine, they get
more bonuses for listing their game in Epics game Store. Now,

(37:11):
some gamers might complain that Fortnite isn't a quote unquote
serious game, or maybe that it lifts too many features
from other sources without credit, or that they aren't playing
in Steam, and because Steam is the established video game
store that irritates people personally. I think that competition is
always a good thing, but there's no denying that the

(37:32):
game has become an enormously powerful force in pop culture
in general and gaming in particular. As the company's name attests,
it is truly Epic. At some point in twenty nineteen,
the save the World mode is supposed to go into
free to play mode. At that point, Epic will rely
entirely on in game purchases to generate revenue from Fortnite,

(37:56):
But the game has already paid off in large amounts,
and if Epic Game Store is successful, it will likely
go down as one of the biggest wins in video
game history. That's something worth dancing about. Well. That wraps
up this look at Epic Games is Fortnite and the
phenomenon it has created. If you guys are Fortnite players,

(38:18):
or you have any specific thoughts on the subject, or
maybe you have a suggestion for a future episode of
tech Stuff, get in touch with me. Send me an
email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or go to tech Stuff podcast dot com. You can
find the archive of our older shows there and other
ways to get in touch with me on social media.

(38:38):
Don't forget to pop on over to our merchandise store
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(38:58):
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