'Fortnite': Why the Tilted Towers Meteor Attack Was So Damn Exciting

Tons of Fortnite players seemingly lost their minds Wednesday when they thought the meteor that’s been growing in the sky over the game’s island would destroy the Tilted Towers location forever. But alas, it seems like all of those clues hinting at a catastrophic meteor crashing down on 4/18 were false, as nothing happened. But Fortnite developer Epic Games succeeded in manufacturing a complete frenzy that drove fans wild with excitement, and it even spawned an unofficial in-game event.

For Wednesday night, a redditor by the name of “xsqoof” organized a “Tilted Towers Wake Ceremony” that blossomed into a widespread, unofficial in-game event in which as many as thousands of players congregated on Tilted Towers and ripped the place to shreds with their pickaxes.

“Every tree, every building, every car,” the post read, referring to the destruction. “Once everything is gone, we all have a massive dance party to pay respects to the city. Be there, to honor this soon-to-be fallen location by standing united and in harmony.” Amazingly, the Reddit post got more than 25,000 upvotes and tons of traction in the greater Fortnite community.

Since the comet first appeared in the sky, players began experiencing phantom rumbles on their controllers that seemed connected, and they spelled out “SOS D5 418” in Morse Code, seemingly referencing “SOS” and “D5,” the location of Tilted Towers on the game’s map, but also “418.” Pretty much everyone thought this meant that something horrible would happen to Tilted Towers on 4/18 — April 18 — so the meteor crashing down made the most sense. But April 18 came and went with nothing major beyond an increase in meteors appearing over the island.

Before Wednesday ended, another redditor going by “the_monotonist” supposedly ran the mysterious rumbling noises that play when players look at the meteor in the sky through a spectrograph and came up with the following result:

The image should be familiar to just about any Fortnite player, as it’s the “L-Dance” used mostly to taunt people in-game. Essentially, this means that Epic Games was trolling fans all along, at least when it comes to anything special happening on April 18. With Fortnite being such a new and insanely popular game, millions of players don’t really know what to expect from a game like this. Battle Royale games like this and PUBG are still incredibly new, so gamers are still getting used to what we can expect from this type of game.

That being said, there’s tons of evidence remaining to support Tilted Towers still getting demolished eventually. There’s supposedly a meteor hidden in the game’s code underneath the city, which could mean drastic changes are still in store, perhaps at the end of Season 3 on April 30.

So what if 4/18 actually corresponds instead to the month of April in 2018. If the meteor levels Tilted Towers at the end of Season 3, paving the way for a drastically different map in Season 4, that would make a lot more sense than something this big happening in the middle of a season.

The next big Fortnite date to look out for is definitely April 30, because something exciting is guaranteed to happen, even if it’s just the end of Season 3.