Ninja’s Fortnite tournament was an exhilarating and unprecedented e-sports experiment

As I found myself seated at a gaming PC on the floor of the Luxor hotel’s exuberant Esports Arena, preparing to play Fortnite among the best players in the world, I can say my confidence levels were not very high. I had never played video games competitively before, though not for lack of trying. I consider myself an above average player of most shooters, from the early days of Halo and Call of Duty to now Destiny and Overwatch. Yet the feeling of playing under this kind of pressure and against players of this caliber was alien to me.

But I went to Las Vegas last weekend to see what the first big Fortnite e-sports tournament was going to look like, and specifically how it would feel to participate in it. Unlike most e-sports competitions, this one let members of the public compete, and it all centered on the chance to play against Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, the most popular streamer on Twitch and one of the world’s most talented Fortnite players. Just a few minutes into my first match on Saturday evening, one of nine consecutive games Ninja would participate in, I found myself under fire. Seconds later, an opponent descended on me and took me out with a shotgun blast. I never stood a chance.

I looked up at the big screen behind me and off to the left, an enormous monitor featuring Ninja’s perspective spanning the entire back wall of the arena. Below it, Ninja was playing on his own custom machine located center stage. I wanted to see whether it was the Twitch star that had taken me out. Thankfully, it wasn’t; my poor performance wasn’t broadcasted to hundreds of thousands of people watching online. But in a way, it would have been an honor to say I got to personally face off against one of the best, even if I inevitably lost. And that’s precisely what made the event, officially called Ninja Vegas 18, such an unprecedented e-sports experiment.

Battle royale games like Fortnite and Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds are popular in part because they let a large number of people — as many as 100 — compete on a randomized and uncertain playing field. You never quite know who you might have to fight and under what circumstances. That makes it endlessly fun and variable, but it also makes it especially difficult to organize, broadcast, and commentate over in an e-sports setting, because action is happening everywhere at once.

Normal e-sports games, like shooters and so-called MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arenas), typically feature four to six-person teams competing against one another, while other classic e-sports competitions for games like Starcraft center on one-on-one competition, similar in ways to chess. Battle royale, on the other hand, is an entirely new genre with its own format hurdles. A PUBG tournament, held last year at Oakland’s Oracle Arena, was a kind of trial run attempt at a team-based battle royale tournament, with 80 professional players competing in the same game as part of four-person squads. I watched it live, and while it was a clear work in progress and a ton of fun, it was admittedly hard to figure out what was happening given there were 20 teams all fighting at once. It was even harder for the event organizers to try to capture and digest it all for online viewers in real time.

But Ninja’s Fortnite event was different. It didn’t focus on teams, nor did it exclusively cater to pro gamers. It was designed to play to the strengths of the battle royale genre. In particular, the genre’s innate randomness and the idea that any player you engage in a fight with could be an average joe or one of the best on the planet. To recreate that energy, the player pool was opened to anyone who paid the $75 entry fee, and it consisted of a mix of Ninja fans, casual players, semi-pros, and world-famous streamers. Ninja even had a bounty on his head; killing him in-game netted you $2,500, while winning a game also earned you a separate $2,500. Everyone played live, at dedicated machines set up and wired on a private network on the floor of the Esports Arena.

“This format is something that’s super attractive — the bounties are incredible,” Ninja told me in an interview before the event kicked off. “It’s not just about winning. If you kill a top player, like me, it’s super rewarding.” He said that the format is about storytelling, and helping create memorable moments out of the ingredients these battle royale games give to players. “The more ways you can tell a story and paint a picture, the better it is. There’s so much to paint. The developers need to make sure there are the tools in the game that allow that story to be told.”

As popular streamer Guy “Dr DisRespect” Beahm wrote on Twitter, “Competitive Fortnite will certainly be interesting to watch. I’d be more into watching solos and duos rather than squads,” referencing games that feature just individual or two-person teams. The key, he added, is going to be “making superstars of the sport” to help people watching online follow along more easily. “What made this competition easy to follow was they created a narrative around following Ninja and his engagements,” he replied later to a fan.

As Beahm smartly points out, Ninja’s Fortnite tournament became a fascinating hybrid entertainment event, one that was extremely accessible even to the most casual of fans. It was one part meet-and-greet, one part legitimate competition, and one part celebration of Ninja’s meteoric rise. On a deeper level it was a remix of the e-sports formula that created something entirely new and refreshing. Fans weren’t just able to see their favorite player compete, but they were also given a chance to play against him. It’s a stark contrast to team-based e-sports like Overwatch or League of Legends, which operate more like traditional sports leagues. And pros and semi-pros eager to make a name for themselves were given ample opportunity to do so on the biggest possible stage. (It’s no surprise that developer Epic Games has designed a similar upcoming tournament, called the Fortnite Celebrity Pro-Am, featuring celebrities and pro players to be held at this year’s E3 in Los Angeles.)

As for Ninja’s event, it was a resounding success. Although Ninja won only one of his nine games, the level of competition from both professional players and relatively unknown competitors was wildly entertaining, creating dozens of crowd-pleasing moments and surprise victories. And viewers agreed — more than 667,000 people tuned in to Ninja’s personal Twitch stream at the tournament’s peak. It broke the platform’s all-time concurrent viewer record Ninja himself set back in March when he live streamed a Fortnite session with Drake, NFL player JuJu Smith-Schuster, and rapper Travis Scott.

After the event concluded, Ninja said the biggest surprise was just how stellar the competition was. “A lot of these kids were super good and calm in an intense but friendly environment,” he told me. He said it reminded him of the competitions he used to engage in back during the heyday of Halo, when he first made his name as a professional e-sports athlete. “It felt so good,” he added of the feeling of getting to compete against players he knew were among the best.

That’s because pro and semi-pro players flew out from all over the country to compete. Zachary Zager, a 20-year-old Fortnite player who came from Georgia and plays under the handle “BuBuBoosh,” said the event was his first semi-pro competition. He’d been playing for quite some time in exclusive Discord chat servers, where top Fortnite players organize private scrimmages and other training sessions. “I’m a big fan of Ninja,” Zager told me before the event. But it was “the stage” that really drew him in. “I want to be a pro player. I’m hoping to just get some experience, have fun, and make connections.”

Other players, like 19-year-old Joey Garcia, also from Georgia, came out as part of an established team. Playing under the name “Gone,” Garcia is signed to SpaceStation Gaming, a professional e-sports organization now owned by popular social media star Shaun “Shonduras” McBride. SpaceStation sent two of its players to compete in separate heats, not necessarily for the money, which is paltry compared to other e-sports tournaments that can feature prize pools in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Rather, it was about the exposure and the fun the format allowed.

Another player, who goes by the online handle “Blind,” said he came from Los Angeles hoping to make a name for himself as a competitive Fortnite player and potentially get signed to a pro team. Blind, who wished to remain anonymous as he says he’s not willing to tie his real name to his gaming persona, couldn’t have asked for a better outcome. He defeated Ninja in the first game of the evening, went on to win that match, and then won the very next game. All in all, he earned $7,500. But more valuable is the reputation he gained. “I did not think that was going to happen,” he said modestly. “I’m already getting some organizations reaching out.”

For the Esport Arena, the event couldn’t have gone better, and it’s the start of what may prove to be a fruitful relationship with the battle royale genre. “It’s impossible to not be thinking about battle royale games,” said Jud Hannigan, the CEO of Allied Esports, the organization that owns and operates the Esports Arena and similar live video game facilities around the world. “People want to come out and get their hands on a keyboard, as well as rub shoulders with people like Ninja. We’ve love to expand it. The opportunities are endless.”

Hannigan said the point of investing in experimental events like these is figuring out what exactly fans want from e-sports, especially with new genres like battle royale. There will always be the contingent of players who passively watch online via Twitch and other platforms and who enjoy the team-based traditional approach of, say, the Overwatch League. But as popular streamers like Ninja blur the line between professional athlete, entertainer, and celebrity, e-sports are starting to evolve to accommodate what his fans and fans of other streamers might want out of a live event. “It’s about generating an experience you can’t get at home,” Hannigan said.

There is perhaps no better example of this than a player by the name of “4DRStorm,” who won the eighth match of the night in a stunning performance that had even Ninja shocked. Like everyone else who competed, 4DRStorm was anonymized during the competition, meaning only the commentators and fans watching online could see his name, but not other competitors. In his final few engagements, he displayed supreme confidence, toppling a gigantic fort to take out one player and then deftly and without hesitation dispatching his final two opponents with a rocket launcher.

With the victory screen displayed, 4DRStorm casually brushed the dust off the shoulders of his in-game character with a celebratory emote. Yet when the Esports Arena’s live camera feed panned over to him, viewers and attendees were shocked to see a short, alarmingly young teenager with messy brown hair and glasses. He is 14 years old, and he had just won $2,500 in front of more than half a million online viewers.

The player, whose name is Elijah, came all the way down with his parents from Washington, he told me after the event. He knew he was good at Fortnite — he wins a lot of games with his friends, he said. But he didn’t know he could hold his own against the best. That’s partly because he’s never played competitive games before, or even a shooter game before Fortnite. His parents, standing next to him, radiated with pride.

When I asked him how he was able to compose himself under the circumstances, he said he “felt a flow” and just went for it. Elijah said he’s aspiring to a long-term career in e-sports. What better way to kick off that career than in front of Twitch’s largest-ever audience and some of the world’s best Fortnite players in attendance.