At Least It Will Be Satisfying To Wreck Fortnite’s Cybertruck

The internet is full of things to cheer you up, or at least distract you, when you’re sad. One of my go-to videos is Moonlight winning Best Picture at the Oscars in 2017. Another is the video of the Cybertruck reveal, where Elon Musk dares a guy to break the monstrosity’s armored windows, but when the guy throws a ball at the car the glass cracks. It’s a good video because Musk is terrible, and his truck is terrible, so it’s satisfying to watch them both be humiliated on a public stage. If you want to experience some of that humiliation in virtual form, the Cybertruck is in Fortnite. 

The Cybertruck is a quest reward, where getting a certain amount of XP in different game modes earns progress toward unlocking the car and some variations. (If you’re not a Fortnite player, it’s worth noting that the Cybertruck isn’t a discrete vehicle, but rather a cosmetic for in-game SUVs.) The car can be earned for free, but will also be on sale in Fortnite’s item shop in August. The quest can also be progressed in Epic-owned Rocket League, which has its own terrible version of the truck.

People have been rightly mocking this since its reveal on Monday, when the Fortnite Twitter account posted a trailer featuring the Cybertruck in a car-vs-car game of tug-of-war, a reference to a Tesla video showing a Cybertruck against a Ford about which Eurogamer writes that “Tesla's original video shows the Cybertruck winning, though Ford said Tesla cheated and asked for a rematch.” The most common jabs have been that you shouldn’t be able to drive the Fortnite Cybertruck in water or up hills, and several very funny fakeouts of supposed in-game footage of the truck that are just pictures of dumpsters. Players have been saying that anyone sporting the vehicle in-game should be driven from the match on site; I woke up early this morning curious to see this happening, but since the truck can’t be unlocked yet, we’ll have to wait a bit to see if players stay true to their vow. 

This reaction reflects feelings about the real-life Cybertruck, which is a universal laughingstock: a constantly-recalled, blemish-prone, janky, dangerous machine that highlights Musk’s bad taste and worse decision-making. I recently saw my first Cybertruck in the wild while biking through Brooklyn a few weeks ago, and I was weirded out by how it looked both too big and too small, a disturbing hunk of angles that calls to mind Homer’s disastrous car design from The Simpsons except in no way funny. 

The bad car is the brainchild of a bad man, who has driven Twitter into the ground and is currently being a weirdo about Kamala Harris running for President and saying some appalling shit about his trans kid. While it’s gross to see Fortnite get in bed with this guy, even if you could argue it’s at a remove, it’s also not totally surprising; Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has the kind of free speech, “no politics” politics that are prone to jumping the track. Part of me worries that, since kids are going to see the Fortnite Cybertruck, this is some effort to launder the car’s reputation–and, by extension, Musk’s reputation–to a younger generation, though I also have zero faith that the real-life car will still be on the road by the time your average Fortnite player is old enough to drive.

When I booted up Fortnite this morning to look for the truck, I was prominently greeted with a Pirates of the Caribbean event replete with a Jack Sparrow character. Players are torn on whether the skin actually resembles Johnny Depp, and this feels like an obvious outcropping of Epic’s recent deal with Disney rather than anything more nefarious, but the two events combined caused me to heave a deep sigh. We have enough bad men in and around games to not need to tap in guys from other fields to make things worse, and it feels like one more symptom of how different Fortnite is from what it started as. Of course it was never some happy wonderland, but we’re likely to see more and more questionable tie-ins as the game races after the metaverse ambitions that have already cost so many people their jobs. 

Because now I’ve made myself depressed, it will be fun to see who brings the shame of the Cybertruck on themselves and what happens in response, so at least we have that to look forward to. I will take a particular delight in wrecking one of Musk’s trucks while kitted out like a trans guy cat.