Fortnite
| Fortnite | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Epic Games |
| Engine | Unreal Engine |
| Platform(s) | Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and later others |
| Release | July 25, 2017 (Save the World, paid early access); September 26, 2017 (Battle Royale) |
| Genre(s) | Survival, battle royale |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, multiplayer |
Fortnite is an online video game made by Epic Games. It was first sold in paid early access on July 25, 2017, as Save the World, a cooperative game in which players gather materials, build forts and defend them against waves of monsters. Its best known form is Fortnite Battle Royale, a free mode released on September 26, 2017, in which up to 100 players parachute onto an island and fight until one player or one squad is left.[1] More than 350 million accounts had been registered by May 2020.
In 2022 Molecular Reality Corporation proposed a "battle-royale mode a la Fortnite" for its game Maxine's Quest.
Battle Royale
The studio built the mode in about two months, beginning in July 2017, with help from the team behind its Unreal Tournament games. Its developers said they "loved Battle Royale games like" PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, which had entered early access in March 2017. It first meant to include the mode in the paid game and released it as a separate free game about two weeks before launch.[1]
Each player lands with a pickaxe and nothing else. Nearly every object on the island can be broken down into wood, stone or metal, and those materials become walls, ramps, floors and roofs, which a player can put up in the middle of a gunfight. A storm closes in over the course of a match, shrinking the safe area to the "eye of a storm", and players caught outside it lose health until they die or get back in. Players can enter alone or in squads of two, three or four. During development the designers aimed for matches lasting no longer than 25 minutes.[1]
The genre takes its name from Battle Royale, a 1999 Japanese novel by Koushun Takami, and the 2000 film made from it by Kinji Fukasaku, in which a class of schoolchildren is left on an island and made to fight until one survives.
Players
Battle Royale had more than 10 million players within two weeks of its release, more than 45 million by March 2018 and more than 125 million by June 2018, when about 40 million played each month.[1] The island also became a venue. A concert by the DJ Marshmello in February 2019 was attended by more than 10 million players, and later concerts, by Travis Scott among others, drew audiences of millions.
Molecular Reality Corporation
The December 2022 overview of Molecular Reality Corporation describes Maxine's Quest as a set of games run on the company's nanopore console, in which "the number of 'spikes' (brief changes in current caused by analytes transiting a pore) determine how many enemies appear". It continues: "Games will be solo player, player vs. player, and battle-royale mode a la Fortnite."[2] In Fortnite all 100 players share one island. In Maxine's Quest the enemies on each player's screen are generated by the molecules passing through that player's own pore.
Fortnite and FarmVille are the only video games released after 1985 that the company's documents of that year name as influences; the rest come from the years of the Atari 2600 and the arcade.[3] The battle-royale mode was not built. The version of Maxine's Quest playable in 2026 is for one player, whose monsters are drawn from recorded nanopore signals.[4]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d "Fortnite Battle Royale". Wikipedia. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ "Scientific and technical overview". Molecular Reality Corporation. December 2022.
- ^ "Early Releases on Maxine's Quest". Molecular Reality Corporation. 2022.
- ^ Pixel Marchetti (June 2, 2026). "Maxine's Quest Review: The Monsters Are Real Current Spikes". Ludicious.