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Drake playing Fortnite on Twitch sparks great day for memes

Two rappers, a professional video game player and an NFL star team up in a virtual, 100-man fight to the death. The memes practically create themselves.

Daniel Van Boom headshot
Daniel Van Boom
2 min read
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Epic Games

Something beautiful happened on Wednesday night. The worlds of video games and hip hop collided on Twitter, and hilarity ensued. 

Here's a TL;DR: Super popular rapper and singer Drake nonchalantly tweeted that he was playing Fortnite on Twitch. The internet briefly exploded.

For the uninitiated, Fortnite is a battle royale-style video game. It sees you being parachuted onto a weapon-laden map with 99 other players -- last one standing wins. Twitch, meanwhile, is a streaming service for video games and esports. It has over 100 million monthly users. Drake, his tweet announced, was playing with Ninja, a popular Twitch streamer. 

Man, it was good. The internet followed by either watching the stream itself or manically refreshing their Twitter feed (guilty).

At the time of writing, the tweet is 5 hours old and has amassed over 107,000 retweets. "Drake" is the top worldwide trend, with over 500,000 tweets. Remember, the tweet was made just after 10 p.m. PT, so most of those tweets and retweets happened while the US was asleep. Most of those tweets and retweets were glorious.

This one, parodying Drake's "Views" album cover, was particularly popular.

The whole thing broke Twitch's record for most concurrent streamers, with 600,000 watching at once. Chrissy Teigen, model and famously good tweeter, wanted in.

Oh, and by the way, rapper Travis Scott and NFL player JuJu Smith-Schuster joined Drake and Ninja's team.

Yes, despite Fortnite and Drake seemingly having very different fanbases, all of twitter was about it.

It could be a huge win for Fortnite, which is in something of an arms race with PUBG, the game that inspired it. It's a good time for a boost in interest, as it was last week announced the game would be ported in full from PC, PS4 and Xbox One to iOS and Android.

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