While Fortnite, a game played by many, many kids, has done loads of collaborations with R or MA-rated properties, it has escalated things this Halloween during its “Fortnitemares” event.
We’ve seen horror movie villains added before, and more on those later, but now Fortnite has added an Art the Clown skin, the villain of the infamous Terrifier series, which is legitimately one of the most violent movies in recent history, with modern-day special effects producing all-time nasty kills. Great series! Great to feature in Fortnite? This is getting a little weird.
I’m not being puritanical here; I personally don’t care if Fortnite does any of these, but I do wonder if the game has any sort of line when it comes to IP collabs, and Art the Clown feels like it indicates that it doesn’t.
I think this would only apply to real-life figures. Fortnite is not going to do a collab with someone universally controversial. That can include any number of creators (I won’t name them, but you know more than a few). Actors or musicians embroiled in scandal (Fortnite should probably circle back to its accused murderer d4vd content). I cannot imagine the game would get political with say, Obama or Donald Trump skins (why do I think Trump would actually love that?).
But actual movie, TV and game IPs? I don’t think there’s a limit. Fortnite is okay with collabs if they are not literally violent when they appear in the game, a-la-Art the Clown with a blood-covered alt skin or a Deadpool skin with a severed head as back bling. Fortnite also (generally) shies away from overly sexual content (with a Chun-Li exception or two). They recently put bike shorts on Mortal Kombat characters, for instance, to cover more revealing, game-accurate outfits. So as long as some sort of middleground censorship can be reached there, the source material doesn’t matter.
These collabs do a few things for Fortnite. 1) Establish relationships with all entertainment brands and show a willingness to promote any IP, even child-murdering horror movies. 2) Let its younger audience “participate” in content that’s too old for them (there is no age restriction to buy these skins) without showing them anything technically bad in the game. 3) The goal of Fortnite continuing to build out its Metaverse that it wants to be full of more or less every fictional character it can find, as real people will be harder to come by.
Any movie, show or game is on the table, that much is clear. The worst thing you’ll see is bike shorts on women, I guess, as a mediating factor. If you were curious about the full list of R or MA-rated Fortnite collabs over the years, I assembled one below just for fun:
- Alien
- Terminator
- Predator
- Bad Boys
- John Wick
- The Walking Dead
- Deadpool and Wolverine
- Scream
- Friday the 13th
- The Black Phone
- Evil Dead
- Dead Space
- Invincible
- Squid Game
- Peacemaker
- Attack on Titan
- Demon Slayer
- Alan Wake
- Borderlands
- Unreal Tournament
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Mortal Kombat
- Saw
- Metal Gear
- Fallout
- Halo
- God of War
- The Witcher
- Doom
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