So summer festival season is officially dead. Rumours are circulating that live music might be off the cards until Autumn 2021 (honestly, don’t play with me). So, it looks like we should get used to artists staging concerts on Instagram and YouTube livestreams. I guess the feeling of bouncing around a room with thousands of other sweaty bodies is one you won’t be feeling for a while.
Ever the provocateur, Travis Scott — the rapper behind one the past decade’s most acclaimed rap albums, ASTROWORLD, and its accompanying festival, held in Houston in November 2019 — is apparently gearing up to hold an online performance on the gaming platform Fortnite. Nothing’s been formally announced, but @HYPEX, a Fortnite updates account with a knack for debunking coding in the game’s software, has spotted little easter eggs that suggest something huge is coming.
Originally, the changes spotted were thought to be new, upcoming costumes for characters, but a deeper look unveiled little morsels of information that add up to something more. Decrypting the new audio and texture (no, honestly, I don’t know how they do this either) unveiled Travis’s Billboard chart topper, “Highest in the Room”.
From that point on, everything started to unravel: the festival seemed to be getting built on a meteor in the sky that’s hurtling towards the island of Sweaty Sands in the game.
Soon after, they noticed that a concert stage was being built on it.
At this point, there’s been no formal announcement of Astroworld’s arrival on Fortnite, though some fans think it might coincide with Travis’s birthday on 30 April. What’s more, there’s still the small issue of Fortnite being a survival game. How might fans enjoy the show without having to watch their backs all the time? All that and more will be revealed in due course.