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Fortnite/YouTube

Fortnite’s black hole launches conspiracy theories and memes

Players have some time on their hands.

 

Alex Puente

Internet Culture

Posted on Oct 14, 2019   Updated on May 20, 2021, 1:30 am CDT

On Sunday, Fortnite erupted in a black hole.

In the finale of the wildly popular game’s 10th season, the entire Battle Royale Island was sucked into space, wiping out the entire map and rendering the game unplayable. The live event, titled “The End,” left many players in confusion, especially because they had anticipated a trailer for the next season. All of Fortnite’s official social media channels were also wiped of content—save for a stream of the black hole.

But since millions of people play Fortnite, and it’s earned billions of dollars in sales, fans figure even a cosmic explosion won’t mean the end. For now, though, players plenty of time to speculate over what will happen next. Some people have gone quite in-depth, even using data mining to find clues for the game’s future.

One data miner, known as @Lucas7yoshi on Twitter, predicted when the game will be back based on an analysis of the Fortnite code.

“The the-end thing has its end_time as Thursday at 4am EST,” @Lucas7yoshi tweeted Sunday. “I really doubt they really going to make people not play for 4 days or whatever straight but its epic lmao. Take it as you will.”

Other users found hidden messages in the game’s code.

“This is the complete text the numbers mean: ‘I was not alone. Others were outside the Loop. This was not calculated. The moment is now inevitable,'” Twitter user @ShiinaBR wrote.

Predictably, many people are making memes out of the speculation. One user plugged in digits from the game’s code into Google Maps and discovered the coordinates lead to an image of a crab-filled lot.

https://twitter.com/MrDalekJD/status/1183470600418926592?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1183470600418926592&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnet.com%2Fnews%2Ffortnite-season-11-event-ended-with-a-cosmic-explosion-and-now-the-game-is-gone%2F

And the memes just keep coming.

https://twitter.com/PapaElChapo/status/1183779435981561856

While no one knows for sure what’s coming next, players seem confident that something epic is on the horizon.

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*First Published: Oct 14, 2019, 3:19 pm CDT