What is Fortnite Festival?

If you haven’t been paying attention Fortnite is now much more than building towers and blasting humanoid bananas. Epic Games is doing what Meta wishes it could and is busy building a bona fide metaverse, with Fortnite rapidly becoming a platform for varied interactive experiences with the Battle Royale mode at its core. Over the last few months, we’ve seen ‘Rocket Racing’, the Minecraft-like ‘LEGO Fortnite’, and expansions of the Creative Modes in which players can make pretty much whatever they want.

Of all these, perhaps the most eye-catching new mode is Fortnite Festival. This mode will very soon receive a shot in the arm with the addition of Lady Gaga to the game, so, what is it and how do you play it?

The basics

Fortnite Festival is a rhythm action game in which you join a four-person band and play along to either licensed songs or Fortnite‘s in-house tracks. In single-player you can play with bots on other instruments or go online and have other players join the band. Each track has guitar, bass, vocals, and drum parts, though band members can double up if each wants to do the same instrument. There are four difficulty levels for each track, each rising in complexity.

Every day the selection of songs up for grabs is updated, though at the moment if you miss a favorite song you can assume it’ll roll around again sometime over the next few weeks or so. No matter your age or tastes you should find something to love, with classics like the Cranberries’ ‘Zombie’ rubbing shoulders with recent hits like Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Vampire’. The upcoming Lady Gaga collab likely means we’ll be getting a lot of her hits landing soon, but if you really can’t wait ‘Bad Romance’ is usually in the weekly rotation.

As with the rest of Fortnite the game is free-to-play, though there’s a Fortnite Festival premium battle pass that lets you unlock special skins, wallpapers and emotes that can be used elsewhere in the game. Adjacent to Fortnite Festival is the Jam Stage, a chillout area where you can remix in-game songs with other players as you see fit.

The gameplay will be familiar to anyone who’s ever picked up a rhythm action title. Notes travel toward you down a ‘highway’ and you must tap the right button (or key, if you’re on keyboard) at the right time to succeed. If you’re curious all you need to do is download Fortnite via the Epic Store, create an account and select the mode from the (admittedly rather bewildering) main menu. To underline once more, you do not need to pay a single penny to play the game and, like the rest of Fortnite, game progression is not based around mobile-gaming-like microtransactions.

The legacy

Fortnite Festival might be new to Fortnite, but it has a very long history in gaming. This mode is developed by Harmonix Music Systems, the most prominent Western rhythm-action studio. Harmonix got their start on the PlayStation 2 with cult hits like 2001’s FreQuency and 2003’s Amplitude but struck it big with 2005’s Guitar Hero. Coming packaged with a plastic guitar, this was a surprise smash hit and launched its own minigenre.

Harmonix sold the Guitar Hero IP to Activision in 2006 and began development on the more ambitious Rock Band series. This built on Guitar Hero by adding microphones and drums (and eventually keyboards), resulting in a massive boom of sales, driven by a huge DLC library of songs. Sadly the bubble soon burst and by 2010, Rock Band 3 was a sales flop. Harmonix tried again in 2015 with Rock Band 4, but few were interested.

More recently Harmonix hit tough times. Their games DropMix, Audica and Fuser were all sales disappointments. Then they were gobbled up by Epic Games and set to work on Fortnite. So, when you’re playing Fortnite Festival you’re secretly playing the resurrection of Rock Band. This was underlined earlier this year with the unveiling of the PDP Riffmaster, a brand-new guitar controller that will be compatible with the mode.

I’m a long-time Rock Band fan and will be picking up this guitar, and just in the late 2000s I’m very much ready 2 rokk. Now, if only they’d add microphone support so I can subject other players to my off-key karaoke…