Fortnite: Video game is a phenomenon, and a teenage obsession

It was a beautiful evening for a shootout.

Every time Christian Nole climbed to the roof of the burned-out hamburger restaurant, he could glimpse the clouds, which burned pink in the sunset, and the sniper, who stood atop an abandoned gas station two blocks away and fired an automatic rifle at Nole’s head.

Nole ducked. He raised his rocket-propelled grenade launcher to his shoulder, popped up, and fired.

The effect was devastating. The sniper’s rooftop fort collapsed. His body flew into the air, landed on the pavement, and disappeared in a cone of sparkly blue light.

Welcome to Fortnite, an online game that combines kill-em-all thrill with the whimsy of a cartoon dreamland.

Six months ago, it didn’t exist.

Today, it is the most popular video game of its kind in the world.

“I like it because it’s exciting, and there’s a lot of strategy,” said Nole, 17, a Rochelle Park resident and a senior at Hackensack High School. “Plus it’s really colorful. It’s actually really pretty.”

The Epic Games company of Cary, North Carolina, introduced the latest version of Fortnite on Sept. 26. By late March it was the top-selling iPhone app in the United States, the United Kingdom and 11 other countries, according to PC Games News.

On March 25, more than 3.4 million people around the globe played the game simultaneously.

Fortnite even attracts spectators. A recent match pitted the rappers Drake and Travis Scott against JuJu Smith-Schuster, a wide receiver with the Pittsburgh Steelers, and Tyler Blevins, a professional gamer who goes by the username “Ninja.”

The event attracted more than 600,000 viewers to the live-streaming website Twitch.com, a record.

“This is better than scoring a touchdown,” Smith-Schuster tweeted during the game.

Crossing every boundary but one

If you’ve never heard of Fortnite it means you are older than 25, don’t have school-aged children, or both. Even if you have kids, it may be difficult to grasp just how popular Fortnite is, or why.

The game’s only boundary is age — it is played by young people, almost exclusively.

Outside of that, the popularity of Fortnite transcends race, class and geography. Nole was one of 15 people who gathered at the Gamers Paradise video arcade in River Vale on Friday afternoon for a Fortnite tournament. The top prize: $100 cash for the player with the most kills.

“Fortnite has gone crazy. It’s everywhere, at every school,” said Guy Calabro, 37, who founded Gamers Paradise in 2010. “I really haven’t seen a game as popular as Fortnite.”

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Contestants included Evan Vomero, 18, a senior at Hackensack High School who plays video games competitively for prize money.

“I stand behind him as he plays. I serve as his eyes and ears, looking for people so he can go and kill them,” said Lauren Kreutzer, 18, Vomero’s girlfriend and a freshman at William Paterson University. “We play Fortnite at least two hours every day. I love it.”

Another contestant was Roman Parrotta, 11, a sixth-grader from Tappan, New York.

“He plays a lot with one kid in Sweden and another kid in the U.K.,” said Joy Parrotta, 45, Roman’s mom. “He’s never met either of them in real life. They met through playing the game.”

From the Edgemont Montessori School in Montclair to Northern Valley Regional High School at Demarest, Fortnite isn’t simply the most popular video game, students and parents said. It is the dominant topic of conversation.  

“It’s kind of hard to explain how popular it is,” said Ulysses Minaya, 13, a seventh-grader at George G. White Middle School in Hillsdale. “Everyone in my school is playing it. Everyone is talking about it.”

Because I am old, the first person to tell me about Fortnite was Josh Mercado, 23. I met Mercado last month in downtown Paterson as I reported a story about a lull in lethal shootings in the city. I asked Mercado why he thought the killers had taken a break.

“Everybody’s inside playing Fortnite!” Mercado said.

OK, what is it?

Watching a Fortnite game for the first time is a disorienting experience. Shootouts come in quick bursts and end in seconds. The entire world spins, jerks and zooms with the slightest twitch of the player’s thumb on the controller.

After an hour, the game comes into focus. Yes, Fortnite occupies a post-apocalyptic world in which a storm has killed 98 percent of the earth's population, leaving those who remain to kill zombies or one another other, depending on which mode one chooses to play. Yes, it is a violent free-for-all in which 100 players board a flying blue school bus suspended from a hot air balloon (not important, don’t ask), skydive onto an island, scavenge for weapons, build forts for protection, and kill anyone they encounter.

The last one standing wins.

It all sounds pretty grim.

After one’s eyes acclimate, however, Fortnite reveals itself to be playful, even lovely. Avatars resemble cartoon characters. Cars are rendered in exaggerated form, like a Hot Wheels set. Players can dress up in pink bunny suits, ride rockets, and bash buildings to bits swinging a rainbow-colored battle ax shaped like a unicorn’s head.

“It’s very funny,” said Bryan Mulvaney, 22, an employee at Gamers Paradise. “It’s like, ‘Oh great, I just got shot by a pink panda bear.'”

In the countryside, players splash through steel-blue streams. They hunt each other through tall grass that curls in the wind.

“Compared to other games the graphics are obviously better, which I like,” said Minaya, who scored 11 kills in Friday’s competition, winning second place and $26. “When someone’s shooting at you, you can see the bullets whiz by. Other games don’t do that.”

The result is addictive — and, for educators, an enormous distraction. In Missouri, a science teacher and coach has started confiscating smartphones from students caught playing Fortnite in class. Administrators at St. Bernadette's Catholic Nursery and Primary School in London sent a text urging parents to banish the game, saying it is "unsuitable for Primary pupils and needs to be banned at home," according to The Sun newspaper.

It appears Epic Games is aware of the problems. Last week the company added a warning to the game's loading screen asking students not to play during class. 

For Mulvaney, Fortnite became a compulsion. In March, he said, he played it every moment he could. Now he’s pacing himself.

“I don’t play too much anymore,” Mulvaney said. “These days I only play Fortnite about two hours a day.”

Ready, Player One

After the tournament, Alicia Poleshuk walked into Gamers Paradise with her son Logan and two of his friends. They sat in lounge chairs and stared up at three flat-screen televisions, each ablaze with a bright day in the Fortnite universe.

“We didn’t come here specifically for Fortnite. But this is the craze, so this is the game they picked,” said Poleshuk, a child psychologist from Harrington Park who learned about Fortnite from her clients. “It’s like this instantaneous phenomenon.”

For safety, Logan and his friends tried to stick together.

“OK! Jump when I say!” Logan, 7, a second-grader at Harrington Park Elementary School, yelled to his friends. “3! 2! 1! Go!”

Logan’s avatar parachuted into the middle of a gunfight between two more experienced players. The instant his shoes hit the ground, he was killed.

Logan didn’t make a sound. He simply hit the “B” button, boarded the flying blue bus, and prepared to play again.

Email: maag@northjersey.com