So, let’s deal with the elephant in the room straight away shall we? As I write this particular piece I am currently an Epic employee. But more importantly, I’m currently undergoing consultation and am very likely to be made redundant in a couple of weeks. So I wanted to write about Fortnite before I became too jaded and grumpy about it all, because frankly it is a fantastic game.

To go back to the beginning we need to start with the Covid-19 pandemic and a pile of issues that came up with being in lockdown for months. At the time we were homeschooling and trying to find ways for our kids to still have fun together when one of my son’s school friends invited him to play Fortnite (via a parent's Whatsapp group, obviously!). We talked about it for a little while and  I did some investigation into it as I was only really vaguely aware of Fortnite and what it was. At the time I hadn’t yet started working at Epic. Eventually I decided that it would probably be OK and we put it on his Android tablet and set him up with an account, arranged some times for his group to meet online and play and that was that. They played for a few weeks and eventually the pandemic calmed down and everyone went back to ‘normal’.

Fast forward about 18 months and I’d started working at MediaTonic (part of Epic) and the subject of Fortnite came up again. I had been at MT about a month and had been seeing all the internal emails flying around about new features coming into Fortnite and decided that I should probably, actually take a look at it. So I installed it on my PC and tentatively took my first steps into the world of the snapshots. I won my first game. Yes, I realise that the very first game you’re matched into probably involves a few bots and other first-timers in an effort to try and get you hooked in quicker, but I still feel like it was a big success. Afterall, not everyone could possibly win their first ever game or we’d all be talking about it like some massive open secret. I came second in my second game and ironically, third in my third game. At that point I probably should have seen a pattern and quit, but I persevered and actually won my fourth game! This was getting to be quite good fun, I thought. The next few games brought me crashing back to reality as I dodged around in the mediocre levels of placing in the 70s or 80s, but by then I’d started to see the fun of it all. And also, my son had realised I was now playing Fortnite.

We decided to try and play together, but when we got the game all up to date on his tablet again it very quickly became apparent that the game had outpaced his tablet and that it’s performance was now well below expectation and definitely well below what was required for Fortnite. He was pretty disappointed to see that I was now playing a game he wanted to play with me only to not be able to join in. So I did a quick Google and discovered it was available on Nintendo Switch. Luckily, we’d bought him a Switch for Christmas the year before so we got to work downloading and setting him up there instead.

We teamed up together for the first time ever in an online competitive game and had an amazing amount of fun. As someone who has always played online games, both co-op and competitive, the ability to go somewhere with him and partner up was a new experience. I was already a seasoned FPS player and I knew how online players operated. He had a brief amount of experience with his friends from before but was generally pretty green. You could say he was the very definition of being a noob.

I spent a lot of the first few weeks of us playing together, being a massive bullet sponge and shielding him from attacks, whilst shouting at him from across the room for his lone wolf style of play that left us both massively vulnerable to a well practised team attack. I spent many games trudging across the map as he’d dropped a mile away from me to go and pick him up, revive him or take his respawn card after he was downed by another team. But slowly and very perceptibly his gaming changed. He got better and started to see the benefits of dropping close to your team mate. He was to be fair, also getting used to playing a fast paced shooter on his Switch which was also a new experience for him. But he was very clearly improving before my eyes. Proud gamer Dad moment. He has continued to improve and over the last six months there have been very clear moments, where we’re down to the last 4 players, in combat and I’ve been downed by a particularly good sniper shot from an opponent and I’ve thought “Well, that’s that. Second place again!”, when my now quite excellent team mate pulls out an amazing (if somewhat panicky) run across the battlefield using cover and switching out weapons appropriately to either come and get me - or more importantly now, take out the remainders and win the game for us. If I go and look at his stats now, I can see that season over season his KD score has improved.

When the end of Chapter event last year (2022) happened, he was too young to stay up and play in it. So I played and live-recorded it for him to watch the following morning. Only for my game to crash halfway through and not be able to get back in to record the rest of it. But I also waited on the day the servers were back up until the afternoon, for our first opportunity to drop onto the new island as a team so we could experience the whole new Chapter together for the first time. It was fantastic fun discovering new tools, weapons and points of interest together.

My time in Fortnite ended abruptly, nearly 4 weeks ago when I was given notice that I was at risk of redundancy. Emotionally, as far as Epic is concerned, I’m in a pretty ambivalent place towards it. I can’t yet bring myself back to Fortnite and a part of me wants to resist the end of year event and the new Chapter that’s coming too. I don’t want to add to the stats that tell them every time a new Chapter is released, they get an influx of players who had given up on the game coming back to see what’s new. But at the same time I know my son would love nothing more than for me to come back to the game, experience the new Chapter together and have that discovery of cool shit as a team again. Because believe me - there is cool shit coming. I’ve seen it and my team’s worked on it.

But the “Games That Made Me” is all about the moments and memories that games have given me. Those moments that have indelibly etched memories into my long term storage for later retrieval and smiles, or sometimes tears. And let’s be really clear here; Fortnite is a fantastic game. I’m hoping that at some point I can bring myself back to the island without feeling hostility towards the frankly amazing teams of people who made it, simply because they managed to survive the accountant's scalpel and I didn’t. I’m still a work in progress there, I guess.