Fortnite: Save the World, the game that spawned Epic's money-printing battle royale, still exists, and after nearly a decade it's going free to play

Well, here's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Fortnite: Save the World, the game that gave us Epic's absurdly popular battle royale, has been quietly persisting for the better part of a decade, just chilling in the shadow of its offspring. And now it's going free to play. I know: was it not F2P already? Apparently not! Fortnite: Save the World had a long journey into existence. It was announced in 2011, but didn't actually appear until 2017, after several delays and significant changes, and even then it only launched in early access. Epic's plan was to make the switch to F2P eventually, but by 2020, when it left early access, that plan had been dropped entirely. In the meantime, Save the World had already been entirely overshadowed by Fortnite Battle Royale, which was originally conceived as a mode that could capitalise on the popularity of PUBG, before it was spun off into its own separate free-to-play game. Fortnite Battle Royale became synonymous with Fortnite—if anyone said "Fortnite", they were inevitably talking about the spin-off, not Save the World. And you could be forgiven for assuming that Save the World had ridden off into the sunset (with other Epic live service games like Paragon). But it's still here, and come next month you'll be able to check it out without dropping any cash. It's going to open its doors to the masses on April 16, and Epic's encouraging pre-registration by promising some rewards once enough people sign up, including a cosmetic skin. Given how competitive the live service market is these days, it'll be interesting to see what the level of interest is in returning to proto-Fortnite. It costs nothing to check out, so maybe folk will be intrigued to see where one of the most popular games ever made got its start.