Shout Out / Fortnite

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Save the World

• Prior to the game's official Beta release, banners based off content creators and YouTubers were given out as part of a special event.
• Plankerton is riddled by these. "From Husk Till Gone" quest, for instance. Or "Plankhattan Project" (also BluGlo here, GLOPP there).
• One Canny Valley mission has Ray trying to build a robot replacement for Anthony, complete with sending it for training with a specialised See-Bot - who somehow grows sadistic and cruel.
  "They say his methods are unorthodox, but he gets results..."
• There's a higher-level location called Twine Peaks.
• There's an Outlander perk called "Fist of the South Moon".
• "The Blockbuster" questline briefly leads to Dennis thinking his son from the future will save the world from a robot uprising. "The Long Road Home" even reveals that the boy's mother is named Sarah!
• The new Halloween questline for Save the World in Chapter 2 involves a haunted hotel. With a hedge maze in front. Yes, it's the Overlook.
• The Bladey Acres event is about slashers that only ever plague summer camps.

Battle Royale

Season 2

• The "Bear Force One" glider's description says "It's so fluffy!"

Season 3

• The Reaper skin for the Battle Pass is clearly a Writing Around Trademarks version of John Wick. This one in particular gets hammered in - It's part of the "Hired Gun" set, which includes a parachute designed after his Boss 429 Mustang and the "Trusty No. 2" pickaxe, whose head consists of a combat knife and, of course, a fucking pencil.
• The description for the Valentine's Day-themed "Tat Axe" axe simply reads "No regerts!" in reference to this Milky Way commercial.

Season 4

Season 5

• When the giant cube first appeared in the fifth season of Battle Royale, its massive size and runic symbols may remind some of the All-Spark cube, a critical MacGuffin in Transformers (2007), while some even compared it to Nintendo's GameCube console. In the next season, after it beamed hostile transdimensional aliens into the battle map, the cube ended up acting somewhat like a giant Tesseract, which Loki used to beam alien invaders into our world in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film The Avengers.

Season 6

• The "cube monsters" from Season 6 borrow design elements from the Ledgerdomain stone creatures in Ben 10.
• With the addition of the zombie-like cube fiends, Epic deliberately added a new weapon that could one-shot them while being weaker against players. It's a crossbow.

Season 7

Season 8

• From Season 8, the Boom Bow launches arrows but uses up your shotgun shells, nodding to Dutch's gunpowder-wrapped arrows from Predator, or Rambo's shaped-charge arrows from Rambo: First Blood Part II. It could even be a nod to Link's Bomb Arrows.

Season 9

• The Tsuki skin also resembles Ayano Aishi, the main character of Yandere Simulator. The description for the skin reads "Unpredictable and unforgiving.", which may be a reference to Ayano being, well, a yandere.
• The event featuring the battle between Mecha Team Leader and the Devourer is one big shout-out to Pacific Rim. Some notable moments referencing scenes from the film include:
  • Mecha Team Leader firing chest missiles is similar to Striker Eureka finishing off Mutavore.
  • Mecha Team Leader tackles the Devourer into the ocean like Gipsy Danger pushing Slattern into the Breach at Pacific Rim's climax.
  • The Devourer leaping on Mecha Team Leader from behind, like Leatherback ambushing Cherno Alpha.
  • Mecha Team Leader loses an arm and collapses onto the ground like Gipsy Danger in Anchorage.
  • Mecha Team Leader wields a sword one-armed to finish off the Devourer, like Gipsy Danger defeating Otachi.

Season X

Chapter 2 Season 1

• The Flatfoot skin is a clear reference to John McClane, being a bare-footed, tank top wearing (female) cop whose Back Bling is a pistol duct taped to her back.
  • The fact that it's a Hispanic female also nods to Renee Montoya from DC comics.

Chapter 2 Season 2

• Skye and Oliver seem to be based on Finn and Jake from Adventure Time.
• This season added NPCs to the Battle Royale map that get exclamation points over their heads when they spot players and cardboard boxes to sneak around in à la Metal Gear.

Chapter 2 Season 3

Chapter 2 Season 4

• The Boundless superhero skins' original styles (as they appear in the item shop, before you start customising) tend to be Captain Ersatz takes on existing superheroes.
  • Blastoff (yellow and red with molecule icon) - DC's Firestorm
  • Dynamo Dancer (female in blue and red with sidecut) - Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel
  • Mighty Volt and Hunter (metallic blue and green respectively) - Blue Beetle and Green Lantern
  • Wanderlust (blue and yellow) - Invincible
  • Hypersonic (blue and white with icicle pattern) - Frozone
  • Polarity (female redhead in black with spider web icon) - Marvel's Silk

Chapter 2 Season 5

• The Menace skin resembles Spartacus and Crixus from the Spartacus television show.
• Lexa is an Animesque robot girl who mentions the professor that built her is like a father to her, bringing to mind Battle Angel Alita and Astro Boy. There's also Orin, her identical twin brother from their original reality who's been trying to find her for some time. They actually lean in on this one for the August '23 Crew Pack, with both Lexa and Orin getting a medieval redesign.
• Jonesy recruits Daryl Dixon; both of their actors, Troy Baker and Norman Reedus, were in Death Stranding as enemies, and Troy Baker also has experience playing a lead character surviving a zombie apocalypse in The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II.

Chapter 2 Season 6

• "Gliding" while hanging from a chicken can sometimes lead to the chicken clucking "Ride of the Valkyries".
  • In chapter 3 the "playlist" is expanded to include the Blue Danube Waltz and the Superman theme.

Chapter 2 Season 7

• The opening cinematic for Chapter 2 Season 7 takes cues from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the piano scene, which also references a similar parody from Rick and Morty episode "Get Schwifty".), Signs (farmers discover alien crop circles in their fields), and Independence Day.
• The season introduces the Rail Gun weapon, inspired by the one from Eraser.
• More appropriate to the alien invasion theme, the season also had billboard ads that had subliminal messages in black and white.

Chapter 2 Season 8

• One of Fabio Sparklemane's styles has a night sky-patterned mane similar to Princess Luna's from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
• J.B. Chimpanski's Image Song "Space Chimp" has the lyric "Get your dang dirty hands off my space suit!", a reference to the famous line from the original Planet of the Apes (1968) movie, "Get your stinking hands off of me, you damn dirty ape!". The protagonist is an astronaut who finds himself on future Earth, where primates have become the dominant species.
• Fortnitemares 2021 introduces zombie versions of the custom superhero skins, inspired by the Marvel Zombies episode of What If…? (2021).

Chapter 3 Season 1

• From the battle pass, Lt. John Llama is a homage to 80s action heroes like Rambo, who shares his first name (although Rambo is actually a captain). The kicker here is the two-thumbs-up pose of his, resembling a meme from the fourth Rambo movie, where Rambo's guns would be photoshopped out of his hands to make him look like he's always giving thumbs-up.

Chapter 3 Season 3

• The long wait before the Collision event is peppered with radio chatter between Jones and the Seven, along with random prompts from a computer that tries to start up a playlist.
  "Now loading Smooth Jazz For Mech Battles."

Chapter 4 Season 1

• With the addition of The Incredible Hulk as a skin comes an apparently unrelated emote where you're a hitchhiker with sad piano music - which is basically the end of every episode of the old Incredible Hulk tv series.

Chapter 5 Season 1

• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles collab includes an achievement if you locate the Turtles' lair POI and then travel east - a deliberate reference to co-creators Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman.

Official LTMs

Imposters

• The game Fortfight is a spoof of the Street Fighter games and other arcade machine fighting games.
• Likewise, the dancing game is a light reference to DanceDanceRevolution, combined with motion-detecting dancing console video games, particularly Just Dance.

Others

• Save the World (also in Battle Royale, though not all were carried over) has an line of summer heroes dressed as color-coded dinosaurs.
• One of the rooms has pieces of artwork taken from Epic's own Unreal Tournament, including a poster with the Facing Worlds map. It's also possible to find posters referencing other games made by Epic such as Jazz Jackrabbit and Shadow Complex, not to forget arcade machines with Battle Breakers, another Epic Games' title.
• The "Chomp Jr." axe (a harpoon with a shark attached) has a description that says "They're going to need a bigger fort." A late July 2018 update added in a Laser Chomp glider, which is, of course, a shark with a frickin' laser beam attached to its head.
• The Sleuth skin has a bandaged nose à la Jake in Chinatown.
• If you grew up with "Sunday morning values and Saturday morning fun", then perhaps the Tomatohead's mask and the plunger-powered Grappler would very much ring a bell for you.
• Any botanist should realize that the Flytrap Battle Royale outfit set is not there by accident - it's a tribute to where Epic Games is headquartered, North Carolina, which is home to the famous bug-eating plant.
• The design of the King Flamingo skin pays homage to Captain Flamingo.
• Doja Cat:
  • "Say So" is an emote.
  • Joy's built-in emote, "Roller Vibes", uses Doja Cat's "Kiss Me More". Joy's artist, DahjaCat, is also named for Doja Cat.
• Many of the dances and emotes reference popular culture as well:
  • "Dance Moves" (the 'default dance') is based on Turk's dance from Scrubs.
  • "Fresh" is the infamous Carlton dance from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
  • "Tidy" is Snoop Dogg's dance from "Drop It Like It's Hot"
  • "Best Mates" is based on this video and even features a sound-alike version of Take On Me.
  • "Take The L" borrows from Pennywise's dance towards the end of It (2017).
  • "Intensity" is based on an early viral video, Technoviking.
  • "Dance Therapy" is based on the infamous warehouse dance from Footloose.
  • "Llama Bell" is obviously the More Cowbell sketch from Saturday Night Live. There's also "Showstopper", based on Chris Farley in the Chippendales sketch.
  • "Behold" is based on a memetic image◊ of Will Smith on the red carpet.
  • The "F" emoticon is a reference to "Press 'F' to pay respects".