Epic's bringing the joy of mocking a passing Cybertruck to Fortnite

If you're playing Fortnite tomorrow and find yourself wondering why that vehicle model in the distance won't fully load in, it's not a graphical bug. That's just the handful of polygons composing the chassis of the Cybertruck, arriving in Fortnite tomorrow in an official collaboration with Tesla. Unclear if Tesla's marketing team was aware that this Fortnite season's slogan is "Wrecked." Happy accidents?

The Cybertruck's looming incursion was presaged with a grim omen yesterday, when the Fortnite X account posted a teaser image showing a fragment of the Cybertruck logo. Today, the collaboration got a full reveal with a short trailer, showing that Fortnite fish guy towing a bunch of junk before his tow chain snaps, sending his Cybertruck speeding down a road that's missing the people you might expect to see pointing and jeering when a Cybertruck drives by.

We won't know how true-to-life the skin is until it's drivable in-game. Will Fortnite's Cybertruck carry the same risk of falling apart while jumping a sand dune? Or visibly rust if it suffers a light misting of Chug Jug juice? Will your player character also suffer lacerations if they bump up against the tailgate a bit funny?

Considering you can pay for the skin, probably not. It's not like a company would sell you a truck knowing it's liable to fall to pieces. But at the end of the day, Fornite's a game where Batman uses assault rifles without complaint—it's not terribly concerned with faithful portrayals.

As a carnival of corporate branding, there's nothing sacred about Fortnite, even if seeing Goku hit the Griddy evokes something close to a religious awe. But something feels sacrilegious about forcing him to share space with a real, actual vehicle that—since it started hitting streets in November 2023—has already generated three real, actual recalls over potentially lethal faults.

If you're wondering how public sentiment is responding to the incoming shapemobile, declarations that it's every Fortnite player's "civic duty" to destroy Cybertrucks on sight have already been retweeted thousands of times. Simultaneous with its Fortnite crossover, the Cybertruck is also coming to Rocket League, where I suspect it'll be doing a lot of detonating. Just a gut feeling.