Fortnite is unplayable as map is replaced by black hole and mysterious numbers
By Rich Leigh on Monday, October 14, 2019
More than quarter of a billion people still play Fortnite. That would make the Fortnite community the fifth largest country by population, you know (you come here to learn, no?).
In PR speak, that’s one hell of an engaged audience, especially on account of the fact the game is 2 and a half years and ten ‘seasons’ old. A season is an in-game update that brings with it map, character, weapon and other playable changes.
Well, to mark the end of season 10 and in an event publicly flagged in the buildup to Sunday 13th October and dubbed ‘The End’, Fortnite’s entire playable map has been swallowed by a black hole. All of the 12,000+ tweets on the Fortnite Twitter account were deleted.
Players gaming at the time of ‘The End’ saw an in-game metor shower, before getting pulled out of the game:
Fortnite's season X event, The End, just wiped out the whole island #Theend #Fortnite #PS4share pic.twitter.com/UbDe9wMuRw
— James Jarvis (@James_Jarvis) October 13, 2019
As of right now, the game is unplayable, and Fortnite’s creator, Epic Games, is live-streaming the black hole across multiple channels.
17,000 people are watching the below stream on Twitter as I type. A further 20k are watching on the official YouTube channel’s live-stream, 44k are watching on the game’s Twitch channel and, on that note, according to CNET, more than 1 million people tuned in to watch the event unfold on Twitch.
— Fortnite (@FortniteGame) October 13, 2019
A series of numbers have appeared near the black hole and sent hundreds of thousands of people off theorising.
The numbers that have been spotted so far, at the time of writing (10.30am UK time) are: 11, 146, 15, 62, 87, 14, 106, 2 and 150.
The End has definitely got people talking and excited about what comes next in season 11. It’s PR in the truest sense, appealing to its target audience and keeping something we’ve heard so much about in the news over the last couple of years fresh, as Epic Games readies itself to release the new update.
Bonus:
Brilliantly, if you enter the famous Konami code on screen, you can also play a Space Invaders-esque minigame:
If you do the Konami code, you can play a minigame while you wait.
UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, B/O, A/X, START/ENTER pic.twitter.com/nJy7ILHBnv
— Fortnite News (@FortniteBR) October 13, 2019
