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The team behind Among Us have taken to Twitter to note a number of similarities between their hit game and Fortnite’s latest mode.
Fortnite’s Impostors mode, which was announced yesterday, is a 10 player game mode in which two players are ‘imposters’ who are secretly working against the rest of the team.
The team must complete various tasks aboard a map called the bridge, while the imposters must kill their team members without being discovered. Those suspected of being imposters can be voted out.
The similarities to Among Us are hardly subtle, and haven’t escaped the notice of the game’s developers, such as Among Us programmer Gary Porter:
I haven't been tweeting much recently because I've been working so hard on upcoming content for Among Us. So it feels weird to be compelled to tweet again because of stuff like this.
— Gary Porter is at GDC (@supergarydeluxe) August 17, 2021
It has been noted that Among Us didn’t create the genre either, taking a large amount of inspiration from the party game Mafia. However, Among Us still provided a number of new mechanics and its own distinct themes – things that now can also be seen within Fortnite.
“It would’ve been really, really cool to collab,” said Innersloth community director Victoria Tran on Twitter. “Like game mechanics fine, those shouldn’t be gatekept, but at the very least even different themes or terminology makes things more interesting?”
Twitter user Stephen N. Parker also noted the somewhat similar nature of the two games’ maps.
Innersloth lead Unity programmer Adriel Wallick didn’t address Fortnite by name, but shared a comic that usually surfaces around conversations of plagiarism, adding:
“Everything in the world was already feeling insurmountable, so this was just another fun reminder of how tiny we all really are.”
Of course, it’s hardly new for Fortnite to launch a new game mode based on a suddenly popular genre. The game did not, after all, initially launch with a Battle Royale mode (arguably the reason for Fortnite’s enormous success), which was added following the popularity of similar titles, such as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
