Epic Games’ Fortnite has been a dominating force on the landscape of video games for over two years now. Its compelling gameplay certainly helps it to retain its player base, but Epic’s attention to in-game events have helped it really distinguish Fortnite as a cutting-edge title. To celebrate everything that’s come so far, we’re taking a look at the most memorable Fortnite events, ranked.
9. Ice Storm (S7)
The Ice Storm event was cool in concept, but ultimately it just didn’t really wow us quite as much as the other events that came before and after it. Rounding out Season 7, the Ice Storm initially saw the Ice King cast a spell and conceal himself in a ball above Polar Peak.
A few days later, when the event took place, the Ice King burst out of the icy sphere and cast a giant projection of himself in the southwest area of the map. With a wave of his hands, he brought in a giant blizzard that covered the map in snow.
Having a snowy-themed map was cool and all, but it wasn’t anything we hadn’t already seen with the southwest corner of the map. By no means a bad event, but it just can’t compete with the rest of ’em.
8. Rocket Launch (S4)
After the meteor crashed into the map in Season 3, players soon discovered that a mysterious being had been inside and had escaped over the course of Season 4.
A superhero house was built on the east side of the map, while a villain’s lair could be found on a mountain near Snobby Shores with a rocket silo inside, ready to launch.
When the event actually started, the rocket launched into the sky, before The Visitor showed up and managed to push it through various cracks in time and space, which we’d eventually learn to call Rifts.
Just as the rocket began careering towards everyone’s beloved Tilted Towers, The Visitor managed to force it through another Rift, reappearing by Loot Lake and blasting into the sky.
This whole thing introduced Rifts to the gameplay, and the event as a whole had the community come together to try and figure out exactly what was going to happen. Would superheroes appear out of nowhere to save the day from the villain’s rocket? Nobody knew!
Still, while Rifts were a pretty huge game-changer when it came to traversal in Fortnite, it’s by no means the most exciting addition to the game.
7. Butterfly Event (S6)
The Butterfly event was almost a follow-up to the Cube event that took place in the season before it. After good ol’ Kevin (the Cube, of course) had made its way to Loot Lake following his visiting of the various Corrupted Areas on the map, the floating island appeared above it and a beam of light shot into the sky.
The Cube leaked and dripped into the whirlpool beneath the floating island, and once empty, began spinning and let off a blinding white light.
All players were transported to the ‘In-between,’ an incredibly white and ‘clean’-looking area in which they could float around. After spending a bit of time here, a rift in the shape of a butterfly flapped its way over to each individual player.
Upon touching the butterfly with their finger, players were transported back to the island, with Loot Lake now sporting a new look (and plenty more chests).
The Butterfly event was impressive for a number of reasons. Not only was it the first time that Epic Games had managed to pull players in thousands of games at the same time, into the ‘In-Between,’ implement a change to the map as substantial as Loot Lake’s fresh new look, and then throw everyone back into the world, it was also quite visually pleasing to experience first-hand.
6. Unvaulting (S8)
Over the course of Fortnite Season 8, there’d been a lot of unrest in the community about certain weapons being ‘Vaulted.’ For those not familiar with the term, that means Epic Games removed them from the ‘core’ game modes and we were told they may never return.
The Unvaulting event, as you can imagine, primarily focused on bringing back a previously ‘Vaulted’ weapon. This all happened by the vault that had been found at the center of Loot Lake opening up.
Players could jump into the vault and explore the In-Between world once more, but this time there were huge pillars in the way.
Each one represented a different weapon or item that could return to the Battle Royale experience. Out of the likes of the Grappler, Bouncers, Tactical SMG, and the Drum Gun, players opted to bring back the latter.
It didn’t just stop there, though. The volcano in the northeast quadrant of the island exploded upon players leaving the ‘In-Between,’ wiping out almost the entirety of Tilted Towers, half of Retail Row, and putting a huge crack in Polar Peak.
The Unvaulting not only was a cool way to give the players a chance to bring back one of the weapons they’d felt had so wrongly been removed (albeit with a few tweaks) but the volcano eruption that immediately followed essentially destroyed Tilted Towers as we knew it.
5. Cube (S5)
The Fortnite event that brought us Kevin deserves to be this high up on the list for that reason alone, even if the end result wasn’t quite as exciting as what we’d seen elsewhere.
Kevin became a bit of an icon in the Fortnite community. I mean, why else would you call a randomly rolling, enormous purple cube, Kevin? Anyway, we digress. We just really like Kevin.
The Cube event actually lasted for a good few weeks, with a bolt of lightning from the Rift causing a giant purple cube to form on the top of a hill in the desert biome.
Over the following weeks, Kevin rolled around the map, and as players went to investigate, discovered he was an incredibly bouncy boi. Just walking into it would propel players flying in the opposite direction. It was great fun.
After weeks of shuffling its way around the map, Kevin finally rolled into Loot Lake, dissolving and transforming the body of water into a giant bouncy surface.
Though this wasn’t the most exciting end result of an event in Fortnite, Kevin captured the hearts of many fans, and lives on as the Lil Kev back bling. Plus, all that anticipation of what the cube was going to do and where it would end up fueled conversation in the community for weeks.
4. Marshmello Concert (S8)
While a lot of Fortnite’s events tend to focus on some big, dramatic change in the story, Marshmello’s concert was anything but that. It wasn’t a ‘true’ event, as it came midway through Season 8, but that didn’t stop it from being an incredibly impressive and enjoyable way to enjoy some time on the Battle Royale island.
Lasting about 10 minutes long, the electronic artist played a few of his most popular songs, all the while huge holograms of skins danced away on podiums in front of him, and the stadium cycled through zero gravity, skydiving, and other effects.
The fact that Epic Games managed to essentially host an entirely digital concert, live, for millions of players at once, is an impressive feat on its own.
Even if Marshmello’s music isn’t your jam, you can’t deny how much of a feel-good event this was for Fortnite and its community, and one that we’d love to see repeated with another artist in Chapter 2.
3. Meteor (S3)
The Meteor event probably seems incredibly high up on our list at surface value, but let’s just remind ourselves of how insane the idea of a live in-game event across all matches seemed at the time.
Epic Games started things off by having a meteor/ comet/ whatever you want to call it visible in the sky. With each day that passed, the closer it got. Then, there were rumblings in the controller. Some players put it down to a glitch, others tried to even figure out what it was trying to tell us in Morse code.
Just about everyone thought the iconic Tilted Towers was going to be destroyed by the comet, but that turned out not to be the case.
Eventually, the meteor came crashing down into the map — following a number of smaller ones leaving scorch marks and mini craters across the island — and obliterated Dusty Depot, transforming it into Dusty Divot.
The ‘event’ itself might not have had the same spectacle value as those that followed, but Fortnite’s Meteor event was the one to really kick things off. It brought the community together in a way we hadn’t previously seen, and essentially kickstarted the storyline for every other event that followed.
2. Final Showdown (S9)
The Final Showdown makes it to number two on our list of Fortnite’s best in-game events. No, no, not just because it involved a giant mech with a Cuddle Team leader head, but for the sheer spectacle of watching two titans duke it out across pretty much half of the Battle Royale map.
Things looked promising for the mech, and then the monster launched itself back out of the sea while the mech’s back was turned, tearing its arm off in the process.
All that was left to do was for the mech to pull the sword out from the vault at Loot Lake and plow it right into the face of the aforementioned monster.
Its skeleton remained on the map for the rest of Fortnite Chapter 1, only disappearing when the map was sucked into the black hole, never to be seen again.
1. The End (S10)
The End was a special Fortnite event for a lot of reasons. It rounded out the end of Fortnite as we knew it; it led to one of the most popular games in the world to turn its servers off for a few days while its world was sucked into a black hole; and it was pretty badass to just sit back and watch.
The End started off with the launching of another rocket, this time from Dusty Depot, which had been restored thanks to some time manipulation courtesy of everyone’s favorite mystery man, The Visitor.
After launching, the rocket created a rift in the sky, which caused the Rift Zone rifts to crack further before the rocket proceeded to speed its way through them.
Soon after, we see more rockets falling from the rifts high up in the sky, weaving their way around the map into other rifts and so on. Eventually, they all quickly follow one another into a rift by the meteor hovering over Dusty Depot, before coming down one by one and diving into a rift that formed right at the center of this named location.
The rockets repeatedly dive into the rift here, looping back out of one just above the meteor. This causes the meteor to get sucked into the rift at Dusty Depot, seemingly freeing the island from its inevitable doom.
However, just when things looked okay, a red beam shone down on Loot Lake and a rocket crashed into the vault, creating a pulse that pushes players out into space, allowing them to float and get a better view of what’s to come.
The meteor then reappears from a rift high up in the sky, surrounded by the six rockets of the other Visitors. It plummets towards the sphere over Loot Lake, crushing through its shield and crashing into the vault.
This causes a huge reaction and a black hole is formed at Loot Lake, sucking the entire island, all players, and even the Battle Bus into it.
It was a sight you really had to experience for yourself, and while there are plenty of replays of it on YouTube, it’s not quite the same. Being left with nothingness afterward but the faint glow of the black hole led to the community trying to figure out what was next, and some even questioned whether it was the end of Fortnite entirely (of course, it wouldn’t be).
Fortnite’s The End event was the ultimate spectacle. Its build-up was hyped, there were challenges that not only rewarded players with new cosmetics, but also gave lore tidbits of what to come, and the event itself was a true spectacle.
PLUS, you then got that day or two of downtime where everyone had their own thoughts and opinions on how Fortnite would return. The end result, Chapter 2, and players seem very, very happy with the changes thus far.
How would you rank Fortnite’s in-game events yourself? Let us know down in the comments below.
