Fortnite’s massive OG weekend shows that gaming nostalgia isn’t just about retro remakes

Fortnite just had the biggest single day in its history, with a staggering 44.7 million players logging in to play at some point throughout Saturday 4 November, all prompted by the revival of parts of its first ever battle royale map.

That’s brought players screeching back to the good old days of 2018, when Epic Games’ kooky survival game first launched its battle royale mode out of early access and absolutely dazzled players.

Fast forward more than five years and Fortnite has become a cultural juggernaut, completely dominating the gaming landscape in many categories and crossing over into the mainstream.

It’s also been a lodestar for other live service games to follow, demonstrating how huge, well-coordinated teams can produce regular content updates and reactive changes to ensure that players never get bored.

So many imitators have failed to follow its success, and even where other games have survived, from Apex Legends to Call of Duty: Warzone, their fanbases are generally a bit more starved and a bit less happy than Fortnite’s.

Hit rewind

Gaming is in a bit of a retro purple patch right now, with remakes and reboots as popular as they’ve ever been, but the time between something releasing and being considered vintage is shrinking.

The superb Dead Space remake from earlier this year (nominated for our Game of the Year award) is a faithful, harrowing update of a game from 2008, but when it was announced even that 15-year span seemed a little short to some observers.

Square Enix has also cottoned on to the demand for updates to much older classics in a big way, with its 2.5D updates of the likes of Live A Live and, most recently, Star Ocean: The Second Story R, proving critical darlings.

Fortnite going back to 2018 isn’t the biggest shock, then, but the ravenous demand that it’s been met with is still a bit of a surprise, for a game that had sort of settled into having a massive playerbase but limited capacity to actually make major innovations.

It demonstrates just how seriously players hanker after a return to the glorious early days of the battle royale craze, even if Fortnite OG is actually more of an amalgamation of current features with old bits of the map.

You only have to look at COD: Warzone to see how much players can yearn for maps to reappear – we’re about to get the third full-sized new map for Warzone since its first map, Verdansk was retired after two years.

Caldera and Al Mazrah followed, and Modern Warfare 3 is set to bring Urzikstan to the stage, but speculation is still absolutely rife that Verdansk will get a comeback at some point.

No wonder, when Fortnite’s able to generate this level of interest just by hitting rewind. Activision surely must be observing and planning Verdansk’s reappearance at some point.

Even without this weekend’s news, the Modern Warfare 3 campaign noticeably reuses locations like Stadium and Dam from Verdansk during its missions (which is in early access now), pouring more fuel on the fire.

These locations have been prettied up considerably, with new detail added throughout, but they’re fundamentally the same geography and have left players itching to explore the full map once more.

With Urzikstan already on the way, there’s little prospect of this in the next seven or eight months, but the smart money is on Verdansk returning at the tail-end of 2024.

The cycle continues

For every person who desperately wants an old map back (and there are a lot of them) there’s someone else who wants nothing more than to finally explore a new location.

Gaming’s relationship with nostalgia boils down to that tension, after all – being able to play something again in a new time might let you recapture some of that original joy, but it will feel less new for it.

Epic Games

Whether this relationship with the past stifles creativity is another question that can’t be answered too easily, but I lean towards suspecting that it’s just about finding the right balance.

Warzone has been right to steer clear of Verdansk for a few years, because that map is still drastically familiar for most players, just as Fortnite has found the right moment to rewind things to its very beginning.

It leaves dedicated players in a funny position, admittedly, where they’re constantly searching for hints that their favourite period in a game’s life cycle isn’t dead and buried forever.

The comforting thought, then is this: don’t cry because a battle royale map’s gone – smile because it’s probably coming back.