Fortnite's latest live event drew in 10.5 million players to see Godzilla, Hatsune Miku, Homer Simpson, and countless other characters fight a giant squid man

Fortnite is at it again with a new escalation of its increasingly ridiculous crossover shenanigans, this time with a season finale event that drew in 10.5 million live in-game participants, according to a post on the official Fortnite X account. The post adds that over 3 million people tuned in for livestreams of the event across various platforms.

The event, Zero Hour, concluded the game's latest chapter with an Avengers: Endgame-esque mass showdown against the Dark Presence, which appears to be a super jacked lovecraftian horror. The real star of the show is the lineup of crossover characters, which included Superman, Iron Man, Godzilla, Hatsune Miku, King Kong, the K-Pop Demon Hunters, Homer Simpson, some Star Wars stuff for good measure, the Power Rangers in Megazord form, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, some random blokes from Squid Game—oh, and some Fortnite characters, too.

In other words, this is what Fortnite was always going to morph into once it added Thanos all those years ago. It's a monument to the mashup, a turgid growth of cross-generational appeal and mutually beneficial licensing deals. It's incredible, it's awful, it's kind of funny, and it's definitely stupid. In other words, it's exactly what we deserve. Naturally, players have taken to social media to share their enthusiasm.

Epic's co-founder Mark Rein discussed what it takes to pull off such an ambitious event in a post on X, building off a thread praising the studio's lawyers. The post reads, "I negotiated the original licensing deals for Fortnite and, while we do have a great legal team, it was mostly the vision of our design and development team combined with bravery of our partners that made this all possible. Imagine the audacity of what we were asking them to do with their beloved and sacred intellectual property and the trust that required in us!"

He ends that spiel by saying "in many ways we're still just getting started," which you're welcome to interpret as a promise or a threat at your discretion. The phrase "sacred intellectual property" might send me to a very dark place mentally, but I'm not above the appeal of a Hatsune Miku-Godzilla team up. I'm hip! I get it. Say what you will about the cynical aspects of Fortnite; that it's upping the ante all these years later is no small feat.

Oh yeah, and I think the bus driver, like, died.