With characters like Jones, Peely, and Fishstick, along with some more recognized names such as Darth Vader, The Rock, and Deadpool, the story of the island has never slowed down and doesn’t seem like it will any time soon. So dive in with us, as we take it from the top, and recap everything that has happened in the Fortnite Battle Royale world so far.
Chapter 1
Season 0 to Season 2
Dates: October 25th, 2017 to February 21st, 2018 Up till Season 2, Fortnite was nothing more than your run-of-the-mill Battle Royale. Sure it might have been the first to take the leap into the genre, but players weren’t even thinking that the game could potentially develop a groundbreaking storytelling mechanic with the island itself as the main character. But all of that changed when Season 3 started.
Season 3
Dates: February 22nd, 2018 to April 30th, 2018 Season 3 brought with it the first ever Fortnite live event. Somewhere in the middle of the Season, players started noticing a comet in the sky and theories started circulating about how it was either an April Fools joke or about how the comet was going to destroy Tilted Towers. Alas, neither of these held true, and at the end of the season, the Meteor crashed into what was then Dusty Depot and created a new POI called Dusty Divot. Dusty Divot now housed the Meteor and was filled with Hop Rocks, consumable items that would apply the low gravity effect to the player for a limited amount of time when interacted with.
Season 4
Dates: May 1st, 2018 to July 12th, 2018 With Season 4, and the Meteor crashing into Dusty Divot in Season 3, Fortnite was taking its first steps into being a somewhat story-driven game. Season 4 brought the new Rocket POI, and started dropping hints about a strange entity called The Visitor, who was teased only in loading screens to be contained inside the Meteor. Eventually, as a finale to Season 4, the rocket launched and started whizzing around the map in what was Fortnite’s first major in-game event. The rocket started slipping in and out of rifts until it eventually disappeared in a rift above the map. This rift was here to stay and spread across the sky in a crack-like effect. It was also revealed that the Rocket was actually The Visitor’s escape route from the island.
Season 5 and Season 6
Dates: July 12th, 2018 to December 6th, 2018 These two seasons told the story of Kevin the Cube, a cube that appeared on the Fortnite map after a succession of lightning bolts hit the ground and summoned it. Kevin would then proceed to spend the remainder of Season 5 roaming around the map while burning runes into the ground. The cube left a total of Seven cubes, which in hindsight, is obvious foreshadowing to The Seven themselves. To end the season, Kevin rolled into Loot Lake and turned it weird, purple, and bouncy. Cue Season 6. Kevin decided that he had slept long enough and rose out of the lake while carrying an island with the Loot Lake house on top of himself. The entire Loot Lake area was turned into a low gravity vortex around Kevin and renamed Leaky Lake. Eventually, Kevin decided he had had enough, started spinning and glowing, and caused every player on the map to be teleported to another dimension. This event was known as the Butterfly event and was the first major hint that dimensions other than the island also existed in the Fortnite multiverse.
Season 7
Dates: December 6th, 2018 to February 28th, 2019 Season 7 was a bit more chill (pun intended) than the events preceding it. Players were given a break from the multi-dimensional story of the island and were instead faced with the threat of the Ice King. The Ice King came to the island after his iceberg collided with the coast and covered a quarter of it with snow, along with a mysterious sphere of ice forming above Polar Peak. Days later, the Ice King himself emerged and blanketed the island in ice and snow. This lasted for most of the season before an entity known as the Fire King escaped from the Ice King’s castle and warmed the island up again by defeating the Ice King and forming a volcano.
Season 8
Dates: February 28th, 2019 to May 9th, 2019 After the Ice King was defeated and the island was restored to its normal unfrozen conditions, players were able to relax when the only major change to the island was a pirate invasion. Or so they thought. Season 8 quickly turned back to the reality-warping theme that the island was following when players discovered The Vault. The Vault would end up being at the center of the Season 8 finale when players would be allowed to enter it and choose what weapon they wanted to be unvaulted. The Vault also contained the Zero Point, a center of energy that players could only observe and not interact with. The Zero Point would also save the map from the volcanic eruption that ended the event.
Season 9
Dates: May 9th, 2019 to August 1st, 2019 Welcome to the future. Season 9 brought players to a futuristic version of the Fortnite island. The map featured POIs like Neo Tilted and brought the infamously controversial addition of Mechas. This season also introduced Slipstreams that allowed players to zoom around the map. Season 9 was relatively tame in terms of map changes throughout the season, but made up for it with a giant-scale battle between the Mecha Team Leader and a monster called the Devourer. The Mecha Team Leader’s antics also caused the Zero Point to be pulled out of the Vault, and eventually caused it to explode and transform the map back to the past version of itself.
Season X
Dates: August 1st, 2019 to October 13th, 2019 Season X was the final season of Fortnite Chapter 1. Most players also believed that it would be the end of Fortnite itself, especially since the whole concept of Chapters hadn’t been revealed as of yet. The explosion caused by the Zero Point at the end of Season 9 had caused events from all over the Fortnite timeline to collapse onto the map. The game now featured old locations like Dusty Depot and a frozen version of the Meteor with its trail and all. Kevin The Cube also reappeared, and The Scientist explained who The Seven were and what they had to do with all of this. This season’s major event was a beefed-up version of the Season 4 Rocket event. The map was filled with rockets zooming across the map through rifts, and the Meteor collided with the Zero Point. The event was then forced to rewind, after which the Meteor crashed into Zero Point again. This caused a black hole to appear, swallow up all of Fortnite, and send the game offline for two days before the start of Chapter 2.
Chapter 2
Season 1
Dates: October 15th, 2019 to February 20th, 2020 Season 1 of Fortnite was considered a letdown by most of the player base given how the new map was mild at best. The season also did nothing for the story except provide a few gold items littered around the map as a hint towards Midas, an upcoming NPC in the game.
Season 2
Dates: February 20th, 2020 to June 17th, 2020 Chapter 2 Season 2 heralded the introduction of both mythic items, and the in-game AI bosses. These included Midas, Brutus, Meowscles, Skye, and TNTina, along with their henchmen, who all patrolled one of the major POIs on the map. These bosses would also drop mythic rarity items. Frankly, calling these items “broken” was an understatement. The season’s storyline was based around Midas challenging the Fortnite storm, and failing to do so using The Device. A malfunction in The Device caused the seas around the island to rise and form a huge wall of water, which was stopped from crashing down by a mysterious force.
Season 3
Dates: June 17th, 2020 to August 27th, 2020 This season had no particularly major story events taking place in the time that it was running. The only major takeaways here were that the Agency was taken over by a new boss, Jules and that the battle pass featured an Aquaman skin in line with the season’s water-based theme.
Season 4
Dates: August 27th, 2020 to December 1st, 2020 Season 4 of Fortnite’s second chapter was easily the best so far. The season was a full-on crossover with Marvel, with Galactus being the main threat for the season and the battle pass being riddled with characters like Thor, Iron Man, She-Hulk, and Wolverine. The story went that on Earth 616, Thor Odinson had become Galactus’ new herald, and had helped him locate the Zero Point. The Devourer of Worlds had realized that if he devoured the Zero Point, he would be able to consume every reality at once. Galactus finally arrived through the rift, but was fought back by the player and the superheroes combined after they forced him to eat a mouthful of bus bombs.
Season 5
Dates: December 2nd, 2020 to March 15th, 2021 Season 5 started as soon as Season 4 ended, with the players being shown a cutscene where Agent Jones was asked to stabilize and contain the Zero Point. To do this, he jumped into Zero Point itself and traveled the universes while enlisting the help of the best hunters and assassins out there. Throughout the course of the season, these bounty hunters would keep players distracted as Jones worked to stabilize Zero Point. The season also added the likes of Master Chief from Halo and Kratos from God of War to the game. The season ended with Jones trying to access secret files on the group known as The Seven, but finding out that the Imagined Order (the agency that he worked for) had betrayed him.
Season 6
Dates: March 16th, 2021 to June 7th, 2021 Season 6 followed Jones on his adventure to locate The Seven and ask for their help in fixing the Zero Point and saving reality. Jones summoned one of The Seven using a device called the Looper and found one of them inside another meteor. Jones was greeted by a member known as the Foundation, who was played by none other than Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The heroes eventually failed to fix the Zero Point, causing it to explode and the island to be blasted back to the past. The season was titled Primal and brought our characters back to the past with locations such as Boney Burbs and Colossal Crops further strengthening the pre-historic theme.
Season 7
Dates: June 8th, 2021 to September 12th, 2021 Season 7 of Fortnite was titled as Invasion, and calling it fitting is an understatement. While still being stuck in the Primal biome, the IO, along with Jonesy and the Foundation start picking up UFOs approaching the Island. The season was then spent following the IO’s journey to build a device to counter the alien threat. Throughout this time, an alien mothership had parked itself on top of the island and was covering up most of the sky. Our protagonists eventually built the Mothership Countermeasure Device, used it to destroy the spaceship, and also caused the Zero Point to send out a wave of energy and revert the map back to normal from the Primal version.
Season 8
Dates: September 13th, 2021 to December 4th, 2021 Unlike Chapter 1, Season 8 of Chapter 2 of Fortnite was the last season for the chapter. The season itself was titled Cubed and featured the return of none other than everybody’s favorite cube, Kevin, along with a few of his siblings that all dropped when the destroyed alien mothership crashed into the map at the end of Season 7. These cubes eventually summoned and formed the Cube Queen, who was looking to destroy the island much like the Ice King back in Chapter 1 Season 7. By the end of the season, the Cube Queen had successfully emerged out of the sphere that she was contained in, and opened a rift to her homeworld, allowing millions of alien ships to come through. Simultaneously, Jonesy was being tortured by the IO but was rescued by the Foundation, who officially revealed himself to be The Rock. Following this, The Rock and Jonesy headed to the epicenter of the island where they planned on flipping it over to defeat the Cube Queen. Upon their plan succeeding, the island was flipped over to reveal a new island with the codename “Artemis”. Players were caught in a tsunami and were stuck swimming back to the island for two days before the game became playable again and Chapter 3 officially started.
Chapter 3
Season 1
Dates: December 5th, 2021 to March 19th, 2022 This season officially inaugurated the beginning of Chapter 3 of Fortnite. The season progressed through two main storylines, one followed the Scientist trying to bring an entity known as the Paradigm, and the other followed the Imagined Order trying to tunnel through to Artemis from the underside of the island. The season continued to follow both storylines and ended with The Scientist actually reaching the Paradigm and finding out that she was already on the way to the island. On the other hand, the IO ended up reaching the surface of Artemis after causing severe earthquakes and numerous sinkholes to appear on the map.
Season 2
Dates: March 19th, 2022 to June 4th, 2022 Season 2 of Fortnite Chapter 3 featured the return of a large-scale Mecha battle in its finale. The season spent the major part of two months building up to how The Paradigm had arrived in the Fortnite universe and was preparing to fight the Imagined Order. The IO was also revealed to be building a new weapon called The Collider and wanted to destroy reality yet again by using the Collider on the Zero Point. The end of the season featured a battle between the Mecha Strike Leader, piloted by the Paradigm, and the IO forces. The Mecha Strike team eventually destroyed the Collider, but the Zero Point had been destabilized enough to cause the Reality Tree to appear on Artemis.
Season 3
Dates: June 15th, 2022 to September 17th, 2022 (expected) Fortnite Chapter 3 Season 3 is still underway, with an expected season finale having something to do with the Reality Tree and Darth Vader.
