Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: I’ve been thinking about Fortnite a lot lately.
I’ve managed to go through the previous seven years without dedicating really any space in my sacred mind-palace to the game. However, with my son being 10, in the last six months since we allowed him to download the free-to-play Battle Royale sensation (admittedly, after a fair bit of resistance, hoping he’d instead take my advice to try something like Tears of the Kingdom or Stardew Valley), our home has been increasingly inflicted with talk of V-Bucks and Battle Passes.
Before I go too far down the derogatory train, I’ve got to admit, I’ve probably been a little too “dad-ish” or “boomer-y” (despite being a solid millenial in actuality) in my assumptions on the topic. Last weekend my cousin’s son was visiting (a little older than my boy at 15) and spent some time playing Fortnite with my son and his friend. I sat down and actually watched the game for the first time. Up to this point, I had Fortnite painted mentally as somewhat of a meme-centric joke, primarily visualizing characters that seem like they’d fit naturally in Viva Pinata doing stupid dances for cheap entertainment. I was surprised to find out a few things: firstly, gameplay in Fortnite is undeniably polished. It was immediately apparent that not only has more thoughtful effort gone into ongoing development than I assumed over the past seven years (in retrospect this should have been obvious, given the cash cow this has been for Epic), but there’s also some real depth here. And these kids, including my son, clearly had wrapped their heads around it. They pulled out back-to-back wins in the game of 100 contestants with all three of them surviving both, and with the third game them only losing to one other team of three. And as they did it, they were speaking in a language that, despite feeling fairly well versed in most video game jargon, I only superficially understood. There was about a five minute conversation as to the nuances of how a recent update had buffed the ability to run on a lake of (poison? sludge? I don’t know - it was green) and only allowing “sliding” across” it instead. Something that would have seemed was more or less insignificant from the outside looking in made a fairly substantial impact to these players, two of them being only ten years old. All of this goes to say, there’s something of real substance here - and it’s obviously resonating with these kids. I still have some critical thoughts as to how well designed Fortnite’s monetization is structured to result in kids periodically but reliably asking parents for funds for premium items in the current season (though I wouldn’t go as far as to classify this scheme as predatory), and the game is still something I personally have no interest in playing, but I did leave this experience with a moderately higher degree of respect for the game.
Allow me to change gears here for a second while still looking at things from my “dad perspective”. My son loves music. He’s especially proficient at both guitar and drums, and he loves to listen, too. His dear ol’ dad’s tastes have also rubbed off on him - like myself, he primarily listens to metal. While he’ll dip his toes into some of the heavier and more progressive stuff I show him, Metallica was really his first love in this space, and easily has maintained status as his favourite band - to a borderline obsessive degree. I think this is great - I fucking love Metallica too. Just yesterday we were in the basement playing Guitar Hero Metallica as we often do, and I went to make a comment about a Death Magnetic b-side I assumed he wouldn’t have known about. Before I could even name the song he finished my sentence, stating “I know - Hate Train. It was off the EP Beyond Magnetic. It came out in 2011”. Damn, buddy. For 10, you know your shit.
To date, his friends haven’t shown much shared interest in music to this degree, specifically not metal. I’ve heard him months ago passionately telling them about topics such as his favourite tracks on Ride the Lightning, and their response has been respectful but less than enthusiastic. However lately, there’s been a change in the winds - I’ve overheard Metallica being actively discussed amongst him and multiple friends during their noisy voice chat sessions while plugging away at Fortnite. It wasn’t any surprise why - as soon as it was announced, my son couldn’t wait to enthusiastically let me know about the Fortnite “Metallica Takeover”. I can’t necessarily recall the finer points, but I’ve heard all about skins of band members, guitar models as weapons or items, in-game songs, and a special event - a live in-game Metallica concert. “Takeover” encapsulates it quite accurately.
With some further reflection on the topic, I’ve noticed some other related trends. A few months ago, my son started showing somewhat of an interest in Eminem. He’s really never responded much to rap music, despite it being a somewhat regular genre on family drives or general listening around the house. That’s fine, I’ve been happy to help nurture his interest in more instrument driven genres, but really I’m glad to see him take an interest in any kind of music, whether it’s something I personally share an interest in or not. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and he also didn’t elaborate too far on the topic, I believe because he’s obviously aware of the often offensive nature of Eminem’s music. We’ll listen to Lose Yourself or The Real Slim Shady around the kids, but I obviously am not going to incentivise him to dig into the back catalogue and learn the lyrics to Drips at this age.
However, thinking back, I realized I recalled hearing about an in-game Eminem concert in Fortnite too. I can only assume this was another “Takeover” style event with various similar facets and related DLC. Come to think of it, I’ve been hearing periodic talk of Imagine Dragons between him and his friends too, a band I’m not really sure where my son would have really learned of - a quick Google search shows yet another relation to Fortnite.
The more I consider this, I believe this implementation is genius. Obviously this provides an avenue to monetize pop culture related purchases in-game, but what really interests me is the benefit to the artists themselves. I’m sure there has to be some sort of immediate financial payout to them (I’m now specifically interested to see if I can find out more about how these artist contracts work for the “Takeover” system), but more importantly, I think the long term benefit to these artists is nearly invaluable. This buys relevance to an entire new generation that I think would be hard to come by otherwise, and a relevance that genuinely resonates with these kids. I can almost guarantee my son’s friends never would have gained an appreciation for Metallica just via his discussion of his interests, but now they are all actively participating in discussing the topic themselves. It begs the question, how many of them will maintain this interest by the time Metallica releases another album? As a matter of fact, I write this only two days after the release of Eminem’s new The Death of Slim Shady album, having released to significant success - far more success than any of his previous few albums to be sure. I certainly wouldn’t attribute this relevance primarily to Fortnite (the reasons for this could be an entire writeup of their own), but surely it had to help.
As a thirty something, I don’t think I would have ever had a line of sight on the relevance of this without having kids, but thinking further on it, this music has really been introduced into the lives of an entire generation through a conduit they truly care about, and that means something. I really believe that is making a much larger impact than most of us are going to realize for quite some time. But I’m going to make a prediction - I don’t think this blog post will be the last you are going to hear of Fortnite’s impact on the music industry. I think that five, ten years down the road, this will be a topic you might read an article about in Rolling Stone.
Thanks for reading, and please feel free to check out the podcast my friends and I do, Fine Time!
