Fortnite
"Fortnite Battle Royale" has also become a cultural online phenomenon, with several celebrities reporting they play the game, and athletes using "Fortnite" emotes as victory celebrations. A notable streaming event in March 2018, with streamer Ninja playing "Fortnite Battle Royale" alongside Drake, Travis Scott, Kim DotCom, and Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster, broke viewership records for Twitch to date, and led to Epic arranging a "Fortnite Battle Royale" pro–am with 50 pairs of streamers and professional players matched with celebrities at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2018 in June 2018. Epic Games is working to develop organized eSports competitions around "Fortnite Battle Royale", including a "Fortnite" World Cup tournament in 2019.
Battle royale game
One such game was the "Battle Royale" mod for "ARMA 2"/"DayZ", developed by Brendan Greene, known by his online alias, "PlayerUnknown", and first released in 2013. This mod was directly inspired by the 2000 Japanese film "Battle Royale", which told the story of a number of students transported to an island and forced to battle each other to be the sole survivor, lending to the mod's name. In Greene's case, to differ his offering from "Hunger Games"-inspired mods, he designed the mod to randomly scatter weapons around the map instead of from a central repository. Greene updated this mode for "ARMA 3" when the "DayZ" team opted to release their game as a standalone title. Greene continued to adopt his format as a consultant for "" before becoming the creative developer at Bluehole of a standalone game representing his vision of the battle royale genre, "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds". While "Battlegrounds" was not the first battle royale game, its release to early access in March 2017 drew a great deal of attention, selling over twenty million units by the end of the year, and is considered the defining game of the genre. In September 2017, the game broke the previous record for highest number of concurrent players on Steam, with 1,348,374 players on the game simultaneously. "Battlegrounds" explosive growth and how it established the Battle royale genre was considered one of the top trends in the video game industry in 2017.