Marvel has some big plans for bringing The Avengers to the world of video games, but considering how sparse the details remain, it seems we’re still a long way off from getting our hands on whatever big-budget spectacle the company is cooking up with publisher Square Enix. In the meantime, Marvel has announced it’s readying another, albeit less ambitious, crossover event based on Avengers: Infinity War that will see a bit of the box-office juggernaut bleeding into the hottest video game in the world right now, Fortnite.
Entertainment Weekly has shared some details of a special Infinity Gauntlet mode that’s coming to the free online shooter tomorrow and will be playable for a limited time. In it, 100 players will be dropped onto an island to fight to the death, as per usual, but hidden somewhere on the map will be the Infinity Gauntlet itself, powered up with all six Infinity Stones. The first person to find it will transform into Thanos and be able to use the power of the gauntlet. Entertainment Weekly stops short of mentioning what exactly this all-powerful artifact will allow you do to your fellow Fortnite players, but given what we know about Thanos and the nature of the gauntlet, odds are it isn’t pretty.
According to the announcement, the idea for the mashup mode grew out of Infinity War co-directors Joe and Anthony Russo’s Fortnite habit. “While we were editing Infinity War, we’d take breaks to hop on and get in a few games,” Joe Russo told Entertainment Weekly. “And then we started thinking, ‘how cool would it be to have some kind of Avengers–Fortnite mashup?’” So the Russos apparently got in touch with Donald Mustard, a creative director at Fortnite developer Epic Games, and the three hashed out a concept that evolved into the special mode Fortnite fans will be able to check out tomorrow.