Image via Epic Games
On Sunday, October 13, 2019, at 2 p.m. EST, you may have felt a great disturbance online, as if millions of voices (around 250 million, actually) cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Fortnite, the world's most popular battle royale multiplayer, concluded its tenth season with a game-changing event: the apparent deletion and destruction of everything. Epic Games has created in-game events before, but never on this scale. The map, the menus, the characters: it's all gone, obliterated in a cataclysmic in-game disaster.
What's left in its place is a black screen with a black hole. As of this afternoon, Monday, October 14, if you try logging in to Fortnite, you'll just see the black hole. The Twitter account has a live stream of the black hole. The Instagram account uploaded a 5-minute video of the black hole. And ironically, the lack of anything means that everyone is talking about it. Never has not playing a game been so exciting.
Here is everything you need to know about the Fortnite black hole, especially if you've got friends who have been currently staring at a black screen for the past several hours.
What is Fortnite?
Fortnite is the name of a video game franchise featuring third-person shooting and online multiplayer. Development company Epic Games, also famous for its Unreal Tournament and Gears of War franchises, devised three different game modes: one is Fortnite: Save The World, the most traditional game with a zombie apocalypse narrative, and another is Fortnite: Creator, which allows players to design their own maps.
But the Fortnite: Battle Royale mode has turned this game into a global phenomenon. One hundred players skydive onto the map, where they fortify themselves, arm themselves, and fight to the death until only one of them is left. This is available as a free-to-play experience, with microtransactions for cosmetic customization.
The battle takes place on a massive island, which is further divided into different zones. There's an area covered with ice, an area that's a desert, and another area that's a jungle. Think Disney's Zootopia, but with more guns and less bunnies.
That sounds fun.
It is fun. Approximately 250 million people play the game worldwide. And it's reached such a cultural saturation point that people are filing complaints and lawsuits over the game's addictive qualities. In fact, a Montreal law firm is currently preparing a class-action suit on behalf of two parents against the company, claiming that it knowingly made the game as addictive as possible to children by hiring psychologists to aid in its development.
Regardless, it sounds like those parents need to do a better job of establishing boundaries.
I agree.
What did players know about this "black hole" event?
Epic Games announced that Fortnite's Season 10 would end on Sunday, October 13, 2019, at 2 p.m. EST. For most games, that would usually mean mundane server downtime; the game would go offline with little fanfare, while the developers worked on launching the new content.
But Fortnite has established a precedent for special in-game events at announced times. These run the gamut from game-changing — a meteor shower reshaped the island in Season 4 — to silly — a giant disco ball descended from the sky to celebrate the new year in 2019.
What did players speculate the new event would be?
Most players knew this was going to be big. Season 10's central mystery circled around The Visitor, a time-traveler responsible for multiple time "rift zones" throughout the map. They would trigger different stipulations to the gameplay or even revert some locations back to their appearance from prior seasons. In hindsight, this was a nice way to 'say goodbye' to the old map.
Throughout Season 10, the Visitor had been constructing a massive rocket at Dusty Depot. So most players figured it would launch at some point. The bigger mystery was what would come afterwards.
What happened at October 13, 2019, 2 p.m. EST?
As predicted, the rocket launched. When it exploded, multiple rifts formed across the sky, and multiple missiles came out of them. They all converged onto a point, which then became a black hole. Players were launched into the air and were forced to watch as everything got sucked in, before they too were sucked in as well. Everything went black. And then, we were left with a tiny black hole in the middle of it.
What if you were trying to log into the game to watch this, but couldn't?
Because so many people were logging on at the same time to watch the event, there were many players who did not get to see the rocket launch firsthand. If you were a player queuing in the lobby, you were treated to your own version of "The End" which saw the menu interface getting sucked into the black hole.
How many people witnessed the event, or were a part of it?
The early estimates are that in addition to the players who were actually logged into the game, 5.5 million people watched The End on YouTube and Twitch, which is approximately the population of Minnesota.
Did Epic Games respond afterwards?
Epic Games' social media accounts posted solid black images in the aftermath; the Twitter account currently links to a livestream of the black hole. They also tweeted out, "this is the end," although this has since been deleted. There's been nothing since then.
To be fair, a non-response is its own form of response.
Can you do anything with the black hole, aside from staring at it?
If you enter in the Konami code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start), you can play a mini-game while you wait for whatever happens next. It's a Space Invaders-esque shooter, where you play as a slice of pizza against a fleet of Durr Burger heads.
What have I been hearing about secret numbers?
People who have been watching the black hole non-stop have noticed numbers that materialize and then disappear. In order, the numbers so far have been:
11 146 15 62
87 14 106 2 150
69 146 15 36
2 176 8 160 65
When players tried entering the first set of numbers as coordinates into Google Maps, they were directed to an image that referenced the crab rave meme. Clearly, Epic Games figured that players might try this first.
Do we have a possible solution to this puzzle?
As of Monday morning, players have likely solved the puzzle. By matching up the numbers with the words on the Visitor's audio cassette tapes, we get the following message:
I was not alone.
Others were outside the loop.
This was not calculated.
The nothing is now inevitable.
That's too perfect to be a coincidence. It's cool, to be sure. But it still doesn't tell us much about what's to come.
Are the V-Bucks safe?
Both Nintendo and Sony have confirmed that in-game purchases and in-game money are safe. Even black holes have their limits.
When can we expect the game to go back online?
It varies, depending on who you ask. Gamers are searching through the official website's source code, trying to find accurate times. Players searching through China's Fortnite website believe that something will happen at 4:05 pm EST. Data miners searching through fortnite.com also found a later time of Thursday, October 17 at 4 am EST, which was originally Tuesday, October 15, at 6 am EST.
Ultimately, when the game goes online again will depend on two things: whether Epic still needs to work out bugs with the new content, and whether Epic has the intestinal fortitude to troll its audience for this long (and lose money in the process). It's gotten people talking for sure. How much money is that ultimately worth to them? We're about to find out.