Epic Games' Fortnite is one of the most popular modern games on the planet, and it helped to establish the battle royale genre as a heavy-hitter for many in the industry. However, Pokemon has been an international phenomenon for much of its 25-year history, and Nintendo recently confirmed its Switch entries Sword and Shield are the third best-selling Pokemon games ever made. Two great tastes taste great together, as they say, and one artist recently combined Fortnite and Pokemon in an interesting way.
At the end of Fortnite Chapter 2 Season 4, Marvel Comics characters helped players take on Galactus before the world eater could destroy the in-game map. That event resulted in Season 5, in which the center of the map became a barren area called the Zero Point that fans can explore using skins based on a number of newly introduced pop culture crossovers. The season began by adding a skin based on Din Djarin from The Mandalorian, and has since included God of War's Kratos, Halo's Master Chief, and Terminator's Sarah Connor.
However, Fortnite artist worrywirt has taken a particular interest in the design of the Apollo island map itself, uploading an image recreating it in the style of the Town Map from Pokemon Emerald to Twitter on January 30. They followed this up posting the image to the r/FortNiteBR subreddit Sunday, where it has gotten over 3,000 upvotes as of this writing.
Fans of the Generation 3 Pokemon games will no doubt appreciate seeing Fortnite's map recreated in the Game Boy Advance style, complete with blocky roads that lead to points of interest such as Pleasant Park and a character sprite based on John "Jonesy" Jones. This is not the first time worrywirt has done this kind of project, as they point out a previous map created using key locales from Season 3 on Twitter.
While Pokemon landmarks are popular subjects to recreate in games such as Minecraft, the stylized maps that appear in each title are also iconic to many fans of the franchise. One fan previously turned their Animal Crossing: New Horizons island into the map of Sinnoh from Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, though The Pokemon Company and Game Freak have yet to confirm official remakes of the fan-favorite DS games.
Fortnite itself is also no stranger to Pokemon-related content. One Reddit user recreated part of the Kanto region using Fortnite Creative Mode after it was introduced in 2019, and no doubt there are plenty more projects like it online. While worrywirt seems to spend much of their time creating special skin concepts for Fortnite, perhaps the attention this Emerald-style map has garnered means fans can expect more unique maps going forward.
Fortnite is available now on Mobile, PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.