Gaming Has Its Own Fyre Festival After A Disastrous ‘Fortnite’ Festival

The notorious Fyre Festival has captured the internet’s imagination multiple times since its flame-out two years back. The initial fascination with seeing a luxury music festival implode on the launchpad was just the first time Ja Rule and Co’s grifting captivated social media. It has since sparked a pair of documentaries — which have also sparked memes of their own.

But now it seems the world of video games has its own Fyre Festival after a disaster of a festival revolving around the massively popular game Fortnite. to make this absolutely clear, Epic — which makes Fortnite — had nothing to do with “Fortnite Live,” a two-day festival held near Norwich, England.

According to The Guardian, hundreds of people have asked for refunds after the festival was “branded a shambles,” which is a delightfully English way of saying it was a complete disaster. “Fortnite Live” cost 12 euros to attend, with unlimited access wristbands costing an extra 20 euros. But once patrons waited through extremely long lines to get in, they didn’t actually have all that much to do.

Visitors said there were not enough activities for the estimated 2,800 who turned up. There was also only space for four children to practice archery at the same time and just one climbing wall tower with room for three climbers.

Here is an image of that climbing wall.

Here’s a remarkably bleak quote from one woman who was not named but you should definitely be wary of.

“Fortnite is all about hunting people down and killing them. I felt like doing that to the people who organised it. There would have been hell to pay if they had not agreed to pay refunds to people who bought wristbands.”

Exciting Events, the company that organized the shindig, said part of the problem was that only eight of its 19 employees showed up to work on Saturday. Shaun Lord, the owner of Exciting Events, did say he’s issuing refunds but won’t say how many. He also says that some people had a great time!

“There are a lot of people who have told me they have had a fantastic time and their kids have thoroughly enjoyed it,” he added. “We will take everybody’s feedback into consideration and we will act on it.”

It certainly was an interesting idea for a festival — take the stuff that makes Fortnite interesting and let people do it in the real world. But maybe just go to a single rock climbing gym or archery range and do all these things one at a time. Seems much safer, anyway.