During an in-game event today, Fortnite’s cube (known to fans as Kevin) exploded—and then things got weird.
At about 1pm EST today, Fortnite’s cube began to pulse, then glow and spin. When the spinning reached a fever pitch, a burst of white light shot from the cube, transporting players to a white, Matrix-meets-The Good Place-esque world. I floated, suspended in space, until being unceremoniously dumped back to a Loot Lake with a new island featuring a sort of Stonehenge and a rainbow in the middle. (I was then killed.)
I have no idea what this portends (my game then crashed, as did some other players’), but I’m sure players are already piecing together the mystery of what happened.
Epic teased something big in a tweet last week advising players to be in-game for the end of the Fortnitemares Halloween event. Many players suspected this event would signal the end of Kevin, and Fortnite dataminers found references to the cube cracking and the codename “butterfly,” suggesting something would emerge from the cube once it destructed.
Kevin was born in August 2018, when a lightning strike created him near Paradise Palms. Not content with his humble beginnings, he left home the next day to follow his passion of rolling across the game’s map, leaving glowing purple runes in his wake. In mid-September he destroyed part of Tilted Towers before eventually reinventing himself in Loot Lake, turning the surface purple and bouncy.
At the beginning of Season 6, Kevin emerged from the lake, carrying the area’s island into the sky with him. The island then drifted across the map, activating the runes, which became corrupted areas full of Shadow Stones, before returning to the lake. At the start of the Fortnitemares event, the island fractured and Kevin released a fissure of purple light (and also monsters). Since then, Kevin has been cracking, leading up to today’s events.
RIP, Kevin. Hello, new cyber-butterfly overlords.