‘Fortnite: Party Royale’ celebrity tournament planned for June

Image: Epic Games via AFP Relaxnews

After Canadian hip-hop star Drake hopped into a game of “Fortnite: Battle Royale” with Twitch TV’s biggest streamer Ninja, developer Epic Games announces a celebrity pro-am special set for mid-June’s 2018 Electronic Entertainment Expo.

Drake, fellow rapper Travis Scott, and NFL player JuJu Smith-Schuster all featured on Wednesday night’s “Fortnite” stream hosted by Tyler Blevins, a.k.a. Ninja.

The event was so popular that, with an audience of over 635,000, it set a new record as Twitch’s most-viewed live broadcast.

It also got fans chatting about their own fantasy celebrity “Fortnite” match-ups and, by June, some of those wishes may come true.

Blevins has nearly ten years of experience as a competitive eSports player, more recently transitioning from the “Halo” franchise to “H1Z1”, “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” and then “Fortnite: Battle Royale” and developer Epic Games is planning to continue pairing physical and eSports athletes at its Fortnite Party Royale event.

Some of the world’s greatest athletes and entertainers will be paired with top “Fortnite: Battle Royale” players from around the world, Epic said in its announcement.

The idea appears to be in its early stages, indicating that the Drake and Ninja match-up caught Epic’s imagination as well as that of the game’s playing and stream-watching community.

“Fortnite: Battle Royale” began as an offshoot from a long-in-development team game about building fortresses to fend off waves of zombies.

As battle royale genre kingpin “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds” utterly dominated PC gaming network Steam following its March 2017 release, Epic developers realized they could create a similar experience within their own game.

A cartoon caricature aesthetic, a fast-action building mechanic, cross-platform multiplayer between console and PC, and the low low price of free all helped differentiate “Fortnite: Battle Royale” from “PUBG”, as did the fact that it launched on console several months before “PUBG” set foot on Xbox One at the end of the year.

Both games are now moving into mobile, with two official “PUBG” adaptations launched in China in February and, this week, as an English-language soft launch for Android on the Canadian Google Play store; “Fortnite” on mobile, in which players can team up with friends on computer and console, began its public test phase this week. JB

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