Fortnite's appearance in Avengers: Endgame makes no damn sense!

Not seen Avengers: Endgame yet? By necessity, I'll be talking about parts of the plot, so spoilers follow. 

Avengers: Endgame is the number one movie in the world right now, a kind of series finale to 21 other movies about Marvel superheroes. Actually, why am I explaining it? You know what it is, and you already know if you're the type of person who loves this comic book shit, hates it, or sits somewhere in the middle. 

Fortnite makes a pretty damn blatant appearance in the film, in a sequence set five years after the Thanos finger snap that wiped out half of all life in the universe. Presumably, then, all of this is happening in 2023, since Infinity War came out in 2018. 

Fortnite pops up as a podgy, drunk Thor (such a mood, by the way) yells down his headset at another player (called Noobmaster69) during a game, after that same player called his rocky pal Korg a "dickhead". And that's basically it: a solid gag about negative voice chat, only this time it's a Norse god losing his temper at what's likely a teenager while playing a popular computer game. Given the recent addition of more Marvel content to Fortnite following the arrival of Thanos last year, it suggests Epic and Marvel have been working closely on making this happen. 

But reader! There are some possible logic problems with all of this. In five years, how can we be certain Fortnite will still be the go-to game for the likes of Thor and Korg? Wouldn't today's fickle youth have moved on to something else, and wouldn't the god of thunder follow suit? What device were they even playing it on? And what happened to the developers at Epic Games during the Thanos finger snap? Wouldn't losing around half of its team have a serious effect on the game's long-term prospects? With half the world's population gone, how likely is it people would be maintaining a live game like Fortnite anyway, given that the film had multiple bleak sequences of entirely abandoned streets and extremely sad looking people? Did Thanos appear in this universe's version of Fortnite, as a macabre reminder of what came before? That would seemingly be in poor taste, but hey, it'd get a lot of attention. 

Or, could it be that continuing to play Fortnite our way of telling Thanos that he doesn't get to win? All of these frivolous questions cycled through my brain as I enjoyed this very long, noisy and enjoyable film. 

What next? Apex Legends in Jurassic World 3? 

Samuel Roberts
Former PC Gamer EIC Samuel has been writing about games since he was 18. He's a generalist, because life is surely about playing as many games as possible before you're put in the cold ground.