Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…The metaverse is an idea who stock price goes up and down depending on who says what on what day, and some have an ability to drive it way down by opening their mouths, but ultimately this is about multiplayer social gaming experiences, you and your friends getting together in a 3D world and having fun together in any way you want. If you’re playing Fortnite Battle Royale, in my view, that is capturing the essence of the metaverse, and it’s especially in Fortnite when we got Sony on board so that all players on all platforms in Fortnite could play together, could voice chat together, and could be part of a single game experience, it really took on a new nature, which was not just like a multiplayer game with Heritage from Doom, but also a true social experience between you and your friends. And Fortnite Battle Royale is just one manifestation of that. Another one is Rec Room: VR, where you’re standing around in VR with friends playing billiards and or shooting hoops or doing other light entertainment things. I think every game that has a huge number of players who play together socially as part of their entertainment lives, yeah, I think is really getting at the core essence of the aspiration for the metaverse. And we’re still in the very early days of it. I was on the internet in like 1992 or so, and it was a pretty bare bones thing. And I think when we look back at the state of gaming today, we’ll realize that there’s a lot further to go to get to the ultimate version of it, but I think it’s all on track. And I think it was the time we released Fortnite Battle Royale and started playing together. All of the people at Epic and squads and experiencing that world that we realized that this trend was afoot and that we needed to do everything we could to bring in other creators so that anybody could pile on to the work we were doing by creating their own worlds through Fortnite, Creative and UEFN, and creating more games and more genres that people could play and ever expanding the repertoire of fun. Yeah, I would love to sort of talk about different aspects of that a little bit more because Epic has created a lot of amazing games, Unreal Tournament, Gears of War, but the game that I think is fair to say that transformed the gaming industry was Fortnite, Fortnite Battle Royale especially. Can you explain the origin story of Fortnite? Well, Fortnite has humble beginnings. In 2011, we just been in the final days of finishing one of the Gears of War games, and we wanted to explore ideas for new games, and we’d had a general idea that we would like to build some smaller games, online games and or to learn more about yeah, that space and not just have one single massive game in production at all times and only one. And so everybody in the company was given a week to form a team and work with whichever co-workers they wanted and build a game using Unreal Engine so you can actually build something pretty interesting in a week. And one of the teams built the very first version of what became Fortnite. The very first version of it had a different art style, but it had the idea at the core that you’re going to build forts by day using this building system. Then night would come and you’d defend the forts against zombies, and the longer you could go, the more elaborate forts you could build and the more survival waves you could withstand, and it would get cooler and cooler with time.…

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