Easter Eggs You Missed In Fortnite

For the uninitiated, an Easter egg is a sort of secret tucked away inside a video game, waiting to be discovered by those who play. And an Easter egg can take many forms, from a simple room like the one found in Adventure on the Atari 2600 to the murderous ice cream truck found in Hitman: Absolution. Easter eggs are mostly meant to be fun, and with that in mind, it should come as no surprise that Fortnite — a game that screams fun based on its aesthetic alone — is chock full of them.

Fortnite's Easter eggs run the gambit in terms of what they accomplish. Some are mysterious, with their intent left to the imagination. Others are cheeky nods toward certain aspects of the game itself. And others act as tributes to past titles that Epic — the studio behind Fortnite and its popular Battle Royale spin-off — has worked on in the past. You'll find a smattering of these secrets below, documented along with our best guess as to what exactly they could mean.

Ready to find some Easter eggs?

Fortnite's emotes are the stuff of legends, and because its Battle Royale off-shoot is free-to-play, it makes sense that Epic would concentrate on delivering solid dance moves to its player base. But do you know what also makes sense? Having a playable area to show off those dances. Perhaps a dance floor with lit-up tiles and a disco ball would do the trick?

That's exactly what you'll find in the Loot Lake Factory.

If you can get your squad to that location on the map, you'll notice four sets of glowing tiles in each corner of the Factory's floor. By dancing on all four tiles, you'll activate a disco ball, which rises up from the floor and provides your team a few seconds of disco-inspired fun. It's the perfect opportunity to show off the Floss emote you just purchased, but don't get too carried away: there's still a game to win, after all.

Fortnite has permeated pop culture in a way that makes it feel inescapable. And because of that, some might believe that this title is what put Epic Games on the map. But the company has a long and storied history, and in no place is that more evident than in some of the Easter eggs found in its newest blockbuster.

In one particular house, you'll find a kid's bedroom that looks pretty inconspicuous. There's a bed, a dresser, and a poster on the wall. But if you look closely at that poster, you'll see that it's actually an aerial view of an Unreal Tournament map called "Facing Worlds." Epic, long before it struck gold with Fortnite, developed the Unreal series of games, and later went on to create the Unreal game engine that powers both Fortnite and its biggest competitor, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

The poster is a small acknowledgement of the company's past, tacked to the wall of an otherwise normal-looking room. But it serves as a reminder that Epic has been doing shooters for a very long time.

The Unreal series isn't all Epic can hang its hat on, either. For instance, did you know that Epic also developed the first four Gears of War titles? And that it was the studio behind retro-blaster Shadow Complex? Those are pretty well-known games, but they don't get any Easter egg love inside Fortnite. Instead, Epic chose to use the same medium it used for Unreal — a poster – to show some love to one of its earliest original IPs.

In another Fortnite bedroom, you'll find a poster with a gun-wielding rabbit on the wall. The letters above the character spell out "Jazz Jackrabbit," which might seem like a bit of in-game fiction to those unfamiliar with Epic's past. But Jazz Jackrabbit is very much real, having starred in two Epic-developed games that released in 1994 and 1998. If you're a curious gamer, you can pick up the Jazz Jackrabbit Collection on GOG, but we're not sure how well they hold up these days.

The Fortnite team has been quite adept at dropping environmental Easter eggs into the game. And, as players have found out, those seemingly innocent Easter eggs can actually impact the game later on. Which is what makes this giant footprint, found between Snobby Shores and Greasy Grove, so intriguing. It looks like it could belong to a large dinosaur — perhaps a T-rex — but there aren't any dinosaurs in Fortnite. Yet.

Fan speculation on this Easter egg has been off the charts, and some are all but certain that there's at least one dinosaur roaming around inside Fortnite, even though it hasn't been spotted. One player believes the meteor impact that kicked off the arrival of Season 4 was actually the delivery of an enormous dinosaur egg, and that could make future iterations of the map very interesting if the theory holds true.

Of course, the footprint could just be in there for fun. And that would be okay, too.

Season 4 of Fortnite brought more than just a meteor strike to the in-game world. It also introduced some map changes that left fans scratching their heads. The most mysterious addition of the new season came in the form of a hatch, placed somewhat randomly in the middle of Wailing Woods. And no one can break into it, which means no one knows what's inside.

Many fans immediately drew parallels between this hatch and the one found in the TV series LOST, and while you're not likely to find Desmond Hume inside Fortnite's version, some believe that the hatch will play as large a role in the overarching Fortnite story as LOST's did in that universe. Perhaps the hatch contains a vault to protect someone — or something – from future meteor strikes. Or maybe the hatch alludes to other types of destructive events coming to the Fortnite world in the near or distant future. Whatever the case, players really want to know what's inside that hatch.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the inspiration for this truck monster, located between Retail Row and Lonely Lodge. Some believe this Easter egg is a tribute to Optimus Prime from Transformers. Others have noted the similarity it shares with The Truckasaurus, a machine that debuted in The Simpsons and went on to cameo in several Simpsons video games. And both sides have some compelling arguments.

However, most fans and Fortnite-related resources have taken to calling it The Truckasaurus, and based on appearance alone, it seems this enormous entity has a lot more in common with the car-destroying Simpsons creation. It has the head of an 18-wheeler, though it differs in that its torso, along with its arms and legs, are made from other vehicles. But one has to keep in mind that this is the world of Fortnite, and someone likely built The Truckasaurus with whatever was lying around.

The real question we should be asking is this: how did they get it to stand up?

The Battle Bus is to Fortnite what the plane is to PUBG: it's the mode of transportation that gets you to the map, and it's what you leap from as soon as you've chosen your landing spot. But it should go without saying that buses are clearly not meant to fly, and no one should be shocked that a Battle Bus failed to remain airborne. Which is why you can find one that crashed just northeast of the Shifty Shafts.

The Battle Bus flies at a fairly high altitude, so it's pretty remarkable how little damage this one took after falling. There aren't any dents to speak of, nor are there any missing parts. The satellite dish, which should have broken off on impact, also remains intact. But realism aside, the crashed Battle Bus is a nice inside joke for players, and an acknowledgement that, hey, not all of this wacky Fortnite tech works 100% of the time.

And you can usually find some decent loot on top of it, too.

When the people of the internet band together and work toward a common goal, anything is possible. And in the case of Fortnite, there's no better example of that than how fans rallied to right a certain wrong in an Epic-sponsored #Boogiedown contest. The contest promised that the winner would get his or her emote submission added to the game, and while the now-legendary Orange Shirt Kid didn't win, justice prevailed in the end.

Fortnite players, enamored with Orange Shirt Kid's dance — which is also a great exercise move — petitioned Epic via Change.org to add the dance as an emote in the game. And Epic listened.

Players signed in on May 1, 2018 to find that a new emote called "Orange Justice" had been placed into Fortnite's in-game store as a sort of Easter-egg-meets-meme tribute to the kid who had the guts to lay it all on the line.

Exactly how big is Fortnite right now? It's big enough that our artificial intelligences are playing it, apparently.

There's a pretty neat Easter egg hidden within the confines of the Google ecosystem — one that can only be discovered when a user queries Google Assistant on a mobile device or a Google-connected home speaker. By asking, "Where we dropping boys," you'll get a response from Google's AI that says, "I'll be dropping at Lucky Landing. Because I'm feeling lucky." Lucky Landing, of course, is the southernmost point on the Fortnite island, known for its stone buildings and the fact that not many people drop so far south. Now we know it's also the preferred drop spot for the AI combatants who set our alarms and play our Spotify music.

This Easter egg is a neat addition to Google Assistant, but we can't help but want more. Perhaps we can get a full voice-only version of Fortnite, sort of like Bethesda did with Skyrim? It's not clear how that would work, but it would certainly be entertaining.