Five Days Until Chapter 2, Season 2 And ‘Fortnite’ Is Rickrolling Its Players

Fortnite

Epic

There are just five days to go until the launch of Fortnite Chapter 2, Season 2. The game is not teasing any event, any coming changes, anything about the new season at all, and even dataminers are clueless.

So what does Fortnite decide to do late yesterday? Rickroll its players.

It started with a tweet that Fortnite posted yesterday saying the account “liked” a video of a bear making a friend.

The video in question is actually posted by Fortnite itself, and shows the Fishstick and Polar Bear skins dancing to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up.

The same Rickroll is happening in the game itself. Fortnite’s loading screen (seen above) promises a new “OP” skin that players can buy, but when clicked on, it takes you to the page for the new emote. Yes, it uses the official Rick Astley song, as Epic seems to have secured the rights to it. This concept would clearly not have worked if they didn’t have the actual song.

The meme of Rickrolling, an internet bait and switch where a link ends up going to Astley’s song and video, is now actually older than a good chunk of Fortnite players. Rickrolling started to crop up on 4chan in 2007 and started to spread to the wider internet around 2008. It lasted for years and years, though obviously has been a pretty dead meme for quite a while now. The last major Rickroll I can remember before this was a “leaked” Westworld trailer in 2018 that ended up being actress Evan Rachel Wood playing Never Gonna Give You Up on the piano.

Fortnite

Epic

I am somewhat less amused about Fortnite Rickrolling all of us when everyone is desperate for any information or teases or hints relating to what is coming in a season that allegedly starts in just five days after multiple delays and four months of almost nothing but silence from Epic. The only potential clues we have are a gold skin and some gold props that could imply some sort of Midas/El Dorado theme for the new season, but that has not been teased in the game at all.

By now, Fortnite would have normally been running some ongoing map event that leads into the next season for weeks now. Instead there has been nothing, and at this rate, I have no idea if we’re even going to get traditional season teasers like we have in past seasons days before launch. Fortnite seems pretty committed to this “zero clues, zero hype” philosophy which is the exact opposite of how this season started with the black hole event.

I am not buying the Rickroll emote out of spite and I hope that we hear something from Epic soon about the new season. Otherwise, I guess we just drop into this Thursday completely blind, or expect some new last-minute delay, which at this point, would not surprise me. Stay tuned, I suppose.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Pre-order my new sci-fi novel Herokiller, and read my first series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.

Tweet