Is Fortnite a music game now?

What are Music Video Games?

Imagine: you’re holding a piece of plastic that’s about two-thirds the size of an electric guitar. You may be surprised, but it’s also in the shape of an electric guitar. There aren’t any strings, but between the top few frets are colorful buttons and where the pickups ought to be is a wiggly bar.

To an onlooker, it seems like you’re wiggling that bar and pressing those color-coded buttons at random. What they don’t know is you’re absolutely and unabashedly shredding it to Blue Öyster Cult’s “Godzilla.” The Rock Meter is off the charts. You’re a hero of the guitar; a veritable Guitar Hero.

There is an entire genre of games dubbed music video games. Some obvious games pop into mind when you think of the genre: the aforementioned Guitar Hero (2005),1 PaRappa the Rapper (1996), Rhythm Heaven (2008), Dance Dance Revolution (1998), Wii Music (2008), and Trombone Champ (2022) are just a very few of the massive repertoire of music video games.

But what makes a game a music game? A clear indicator would be if a game relies on an instrument-shaped controller. Guitar Hero and Rock Band (2007) use controllers in the shapes of guitars, drum sets, and microphones. (I used to kill it singing “Eye of the Tiger” on Rock Band 2 (2008), by the way. Just ask my mom.) For Donkey Konga (2003), Namco and Nintendo created the DK Bongos that connected to the GameCube just like any other controller.

The goal of Donkey Konga is to get as many points as possible as you play the bongos to tunes like Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping”, Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5, and Koji Kondo’s theme for The Legend of Zelda. “How do you get these points?” you ask. Simple, just watch this performance of the theme song to the Pokémon TV series: https://youtu.be/5Lo_N__xqtk

The vast majority of music games operate in this same way: the player must perform prescribed actions as icons move across a “highway.” (Music games that work like this are often referred to as rhythm games because the brunt of your actions must adhere to predetermined rhythms.)

Donkey Konga is not the only game to use the DK Bongos. Somehow developers at Nintendo found a way to use the bongos to control a platformer.2 In Donkey Kong Jungle Beat (2004), “instead of performing prescribed rhythms, the player controls [Donkey Kong’s] movements by playing the bongos.”3 That sounds ludicrous, but it works. In Jungle Beat—probably one of the first platformer/music game hybrids— players perform their own improvised bongo pieces as they jump around the jungle and collect bananas.

So is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) a music game? I mean, the gameplay inevitably relies on your performance of a magical ocarina, but you don’t need an ocarina controller to play. The same goes for other entries in the Legend of Zelda series. You play the ocarina, a five-belled horn, drums, and a fish-bone guitar in Majora’s Mask (2000); a conductor’s baton in The Wind Waker (2002); wolf howls in Twilight Princess (2006); a pan flute in Spirit Tracks (2009); and a harp in Skyward Sword (2011). In all of these Zelda games, the accurate performance of music is vital to accessing the magical properties of the instruments you receive, and is thus essential to gameplay and plot advancement.

I’ve written elsewhere that these performances allow players to actively contribute to the musical architecture of these games.4 This active role in musical architecture is the very conceit of music games. The above Zelda games even utilize interfaces similar to those of rhythm games. Take, for example, the interface that appears when, in the form of a wolf, Link howls a tune in Twilight Princess:

That looks like prescribed pitches and rhythms organized on a highway to me!5

Does that make these Legend of Zelda games—whose primary genre is action-adventure—music games? Yeah, I think so, even if the core gameplay isn’t limited to playing Saria’s Song with the fairy ocarina Saria gifted you. Playing music is central to advancing through these games.

Fortnite

I can't wait to drop off the battle bus and meet some of you on the battlefield in Fortnite. — Reggie Fils-Aimé, former Nintendo of America President, E3, 2018

As Will Smith once said, “Fortnite[!]”6

I never played Fortnite (2017) at its initial release. Shooting games have never been my favorite, and playing one where the primary demographic was kids didn’t appeal to a 15-year-old me. Aside from the occasional babysitting job where I had to assuage the whims of a 10-year-old, I didn’t get into Fortnite until I visited some friends in Ohio in 2024. It had the same cartoony aesthetic, but Fortnite had grown up with its demographic. In a way that I hope is self-aware, the game had leaned into the memes and pop culture phenomena that had helped shape its audience. You could now play as Luke Skywalker, Ariana Grande, Prince Zuko, a pickle named Big Dill, and so many other characters and real-life figures—and have them do TikTok dances. By then, Epic Games had even contracted Harmonix (the dev studio behind Guitar Hero and Rock Band) to create Fortnite Festival (2023), a free-to-play rhythm game included with Fortnite. As the spiritual successor to the Guitar Hero franchise, Fortnite Festival works just like the games in the early era of rhythm games—the objective is to score highly by performing to icons for pitches and rhythms along a highway. Players are afforded the ability to play with peripheral guitar, microphone, and drum controllers, but traditional controllers/mouse and keyboard work just as well.

But that’s Fortnite Festival, not Fortnite itself. Is Fortnite, a pioneer of the Battle Royale genre, a music game? I would like to proffer my personal response: maybe, I don’t know.

Fortnite is the only game I know where you can use emotes (categorized as “Jam Tracks”) to form a band with Jar Jar Binks on vocals, a banana on lead guitar, Sabrina Carpenter on bass, and Shaquille O’Neal on drums—all while gunfire blasts around you. And they don’t even have to be playing the same song! Jar Jar can sing “Espresso” as Shaq plays the percussion parts from John Williams’ Star Wars theme. While that sounds like it would be cacophonous, Epic Games had enough foresight to make each performer play at the same tempo and in the same key. But it’s truly the wildest smörgåsbord of musical performance I’ve ever witnessed. One player at a time can manipulate the group’s performance keys and tempi, which can lead to some of both the coolest and funniest mash-ups as you boost the tempo from 60bpm to 180bpm and change the key from D Major to G-sharp minor with just a couple button clicks. And while you and a few others do all the mashing up, Emperor Palpatine can do the “Hot to Go” dance on the side.

But is any of this essential to the goal of Fortnite, to being the last person or squad standing at the end of the battle royale? Not at all, if that’s really the point of the game. If the point of the game is to have fun with friends and strangers on the Internet and across every current gaming platform, starting a Slipknot/Olivia Rodrigo cover band with Lady Gaga and three General Grievous’s certainly does the deed.

Bibliography

click to expand

• Austin, Michael L. “Music Games.” In The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers, 140–158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
• Gastrow, Jason. “Donkey Kong Jungle Beat.” YouTube Video by videogamedunkey. December 21, 2022. 4:33.
• Moseley, Roger, and Aya Saiki. “Nintendo’s Art of Musical Play.” In Music in Video Games: Studying Play, edited by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, 51–76. New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014.
• Nelson, William. “Link’s Sword is Mightier than the Pen: Composing and Performing in the Super Mario and Legend of Zelda Series.” Venture: The University of Mississippi Undergraduate Research Journal 6 (2024). 108–124. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/umurjournal/vol6/iss1/10
• Reale, Steven. “Transcribing Musical Worlds; or, Is L.A. Noire a Music Game?” In Music in Video Games: Studying Play, edited by K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner, 77–103. New York and Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014.

Ludography

click to expand

• Bemani. Dance Dance Revolution. Arcade and PlayStation. Various composers. Konami, 1998.
• Epic Games. Fortnite. Various systems. Original music by Phill Boucher. Epic Games, 2017.
• Harmonix. Guitar Hero. PlayStation 2. Various composers. RedOctane, 2005.
• ———. Fortnite Festival. Various systems. Various composers. Epic Games, 2023.
• ———. Rock Band. Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and Wii. Various composers. MTV Games, 2007.
• Holy Wow Studios. Trombone Champ. Windows, macOS, and Nintendo Switch. Various artists. Holy Wow Studios, 2022.
• Namco. Donkey Konga. Nintendo Gamecube. Music by Junko Ozawa, Jesahm, and various others. Nintendo, 2003.
• NanaOn-Sha. PaRappa the Rapper. PlayStation. Music by Masaya Matsuura and Yoshihisa Suzuki. Sony Computer Entertainment, 1996.
• Nintendo EAD. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Nintendo 64. Music by Koji Kondo. Nintendo, 1998.
• ———. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Nintendo GameCube and Wii. Music by Toru Minegishi and Asuka Hayazaki. Nintendo, 2006.
• ———. Wii Music. Music by Kenta Nagata, Toru Minegishi, and Mahito Yokota. Nintendo, 2008.
• Nintendo EAD Tokyo. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat. Nintendo GameCube. Music by Mahito Yokota. Nintendo, 2004.
• Nintendo SPD and TNX Music Recordings. Rhythm Heaven. Nintendo DS. Music by Tsunku and Masami Yone. Nintendo, 2008.
• Sega and Xeen. Rhythm Thief & the Emperor’s Treasure. Nintendo 3DS and iOS. Music by Tomoya Ohtani, Naofumi Hataya, and Takahito Eguchi. Sega, 2012.