Fortnite painfully late to the trend with Impostors

Fortnite is one of those juggernaut franchises so big it pulls other franchises into its orbit. Anything that becomes popular is likely to be blessed (or doomed, depending how you see it) to be incorporated into Fortnite in some way, usually as a skin. The new Fortnite Impostors mode isn’t like that at all.

Among Us, released in 2018, is a game that slept in obscurity for a couple of years before having a meteoric rise in popularity last year. Once again, anything that’s popular needs to be in Fortnite. Players have wanted an Among Us crossover in Fortnite since, but maybe it’s a little too late for it now.

Fortnite painfully late to the trend with Impostors

To me, it does seem that anyone has a particular attachment to what little lore is in Among Us, but this demand seemed to have sprouted because both games are just extremely popular.

Among Us’s popularity may have waned slightly in recent times, but it’s still enormously popular and widely enjoyed, especially among schoolchildren. It’s entered the gaming and internet sphere’s collective unconscious for better or for worse.

Epic Games doesn’t just make an Among Us clone for the sake of it. The player base for this kind of game is enormous, and there’s been tons of clones of Among Us already.

At its core, Among Us is a video game take on the classic party games Werewolf and Mafia, with a healthy dose of the film The Thing. The issue comes with the terminology and mechanics being painfully close to Inner Sloth’s game. It’s even more painful knowing that Inner Sloth is a much smaller team than you’d think.

It’s almost like the development team lost the memo that Among Us was the new hotness. I would have expected this mode to have come out last year. It just seems like Epic is picking up the scraps of Among Us. There’s nothing new here, as solid as the game is. In a strange twist, it would have been better for Fortnite to have done a collaboration.

And that’s entirely because Among Us is a great game. Impostors is just Among Us with a Fortnite skin, down to the terminology and mechanic names.

The Impostors debacle reminds me of a dark time in the early days of Fortnite. In those days Fortnite would often make their own similar-but-legally distinct riffs on popular memes, dances and characters, often walking the fine line of copyright infringement. Epic Games was sued a few times, most notably by The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star Alfonso Ribeiro over use of his famous “Carlton Dance” but those often didn’t go anywhere.

It’s why Epic Games goes out of their way to secure the licenses and the omnipresence of crossover and Icon series materials these days. This Among Us clone is baffling, because it could have easily been the crossover of a generation.

Impostors is a great gameplay experience, don’t get me wrong. It has a few differences between Among Us that changes the mood of the game. It’s just slightly different, and unnecessary.