After a week of Drake dropping hints about playing the rapidly growing PVP shooter Fortnite with renowned Twitch streamer Ninja, he finally hopped on a stream last night to play alongside one of the world’s best players. In addition, Travis Scott and NFL rookie JuJu Smith-Schuster also partied up with Drizzy and Ninja to play Squad Mode in Battle Royale. Fans of Ninja, along with fans of the massively-followed artists, poured into the live stream by the hundreds of thousands to watch them play the game. As if the game hadn’t already been meme-friendly enough, the memes quickly surfaced all over social media once news got out of such a stream actually happening.

Aside from the laughs, though, this intersection of different media influencers felt surreal in a strange way. Over the past few months, Fornite has garnered millions of players, to the point where it has ultimately become a nerdy, cult-like phenomenon among hardcore gamers and casuals alike, akin to Call of Duty in the early 2010s. Due to the notion that we’ve rarely seen amalgamations of gaming and music, especially on such a huge scale, it feels like an odd milestone to have two of the most successful modern rap artists publicize themselves teaming up with a well-known Fortnite diehard. The overall success of the stream was unprecedented: it broke the Twitch record for the most viewed stream by a solo broadcaster. Whether this monumental Drake/Travis/JuJu/Ninja stream actually had cultural significance, or if it was just a bunch of superstars in three different fields messing around online, I think it was at the very least a night of fun for anyone to enjoy, and ultimately some cool shit for the artists to do that gamers and fans would love to see more of.

Written by Anthony Vega

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