By Staff Writer Ben Pfeffer.

The famous music producer Marshmello hosted a virtual concert in Fortnite. If that didn’t make sense, let me explain.

Fortnite is and has been a very popular online video game, a third person shooter, over the last year. In this game, players can roam free as they are in a giant battle on a map.

Due to this roaming, Fortnite has events every so often that players can view and attend by roaming to the events on the map at the specified time they are scheduled to occur.

Marshmello is a famous music producer who has had seven of his songs reach the Billboard Hot 100 including one song (Happier ft. Bastille) reach the top ten, as it peaked at number 3.

These seven songs that you may have heard of are Happier (#3), Friends (#11), Wolves (#20), Everyday (#29), Silence (#30), Alone (#60), and Danger (#62).

Saturday, February 2nd at 6pm EST, Marshmello hosted his, approximately ten-minute, concert in Fortnite. This event has been hyped up for weeks prior and Marshmello even added “Pleasant Park,” a town in Fortnite, to his list of places that he is touring.

Fortnite has had many other hyped up events in the past, like rockets going off in real time and cracking the sky, giant purple cubes appearing, and an evil Ice King covering the map in snow, but for this event new skins and challenges were put out.
Afterwards, many players were saying that the Marshmello event was the best event yet.

So, why is that? What happened at the concert to make it so groundbreaking to Fortnite players? What was so great about a live music event in the game?

Reportedly ten million concurrent users attended the show in the “Showtime” mode.

This was a small glimpse into what an augmented reality and virtual reality future could consist of.

In the future we will likely have massive crowd attend virtual reality events that display the millions of avatars there in the events that still manage to feel personal, somehow.

The biggest part is obviously, since it’s not real, there were things that could not happen at an actual concert.

Massive holograms were shown moving and dancing throughout the concert as well as things in the sky kept flying to form a Marshmello head. Since it is a video game, they created a part of the event where every player jumped at the same exact time on the beat drop after the producer told everyone to jump.

However, the part that made this event a glimpse into what the future could hold is that it was an interactive concert/event.
For example, during the song Fly, all the players started floating and flying at once and during the song Happier, beach balls were launched into the crowd and they could be interacted with.
This isn’t, however, the first-ever live performance in a video game, like many have been saying.

In 2018, Minecraft hosted a “Coalchella” festival which came five years after Monstercat hosted a live charity festival in the same game. Second Life also had many live concerts presenting bands like U2 and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, so Fortnite is only following an old idea and improving on it.
Despite all of this new hype around the virtual concert, nothing can and ever will replace actual, live music where the crowd can watch a musician work and feel the music.

That sensation cannot be replicated through a screen or virtual reality headset. But, that being said, this was an interesting event to say the least and its success could lead to many more events like it in the future.