Fortnite has made a sudden return to its long-lost original map for a month-long mini-season fuelled by nostalgia, and its sudden spike in popularity has blown past everyone’s expectations. It’s a stunning moment for Epic Games’ ever-changing battle royale – even by Fortnite’s own stratospheric standards – and yet I can’t help but feel a tinge of sadness that this is the version of Fortnite all 44 million players picked up on Saturday.
The game’s first map is a special place, home to countless player memories and a string of wild and memorable live events, the likes of which haven’t really been topped since. But it was also the game at its most basic and rough – a nimble but work-in-progress creation labelled as “Early Access” and built on-the-hoof as Epic Games quickly pivoted from Fortnite’s initial PVE zombie shooter origins.
To see this version of Fortnite blow up now is surely brilliant for the future of a game I play pretty much every day – which Epic itself has said is only now starting to grow in popularity again after previous lockdown-era peaks (and since it became a lot more difficult to play on mobile). But the fact remains this is a version of the game that, nostalgia aside, lacks so many of the features and functionality Epic had built on top of these foundations. And it also presents something of a dilemma for Epic, as it must now navigate how it will cater to the tens of millions who turned up to play Fortnite OG after this month concludes.
