10 DLCs That Single-Handedly Saved Video Games
2. Battle Royale - Fortnite
These days, it's hard to imagine Fortnite as anything other than a battle royale game. It has mastered the formula and jammed itself into our collective consciousness as the quintessential title of the genre.
This is exactly why most people forget that Fortnite's battle royale was originally just an alternative game mode that came with a free update.
The base version of Fortnite is actually the still-active, though rarely updated, "Save the World" mode. It's your typical four-player co-op campaign where the players build bases (aka the "fort" part of Fortnite) and try to defend them against hordes of zombies.
The campaign failed to catch people's interest back in 2017, which is why Epic decided to look at what their much more successful competition was doing and try to recreate it in their own game. In only two months, they developed a new, free-to-download battle royale mode "inspired" by the popularity of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.
The battle royale completely outshone the original vision of Fortnite. It became an international success that no other title in recent video game history could even hope to compete with.
See, kids? It turns out that copying your friend's homework can work sometimes.