Live from Risky Reels
Event Time: December 14th, 2019
Description: Live at Risky Reels was a collaborative event between Epic Games and Disney, introducing the world of Star Wars to Fortnite. Players saw a space battle between the Millennium Falcon and TIE Fighters, ending in a victory for the Falcon. Afterwords, the Falcon landed at Risky Reels. JJ Abrams, Geoff Keighley, and Ben Schwartz exited the Falcon and hosted a Star Wars game show with votes coming in from the Fortnite player base around the world. Players then saw a live premier of a scene from the upcoming The Rise of Skywalker movie. The event ended with JJ and friends leaving in the Falcon, but not before The Emperor delivered a critical voice line that tied in to the upcoming film. After the event, lightsabers and blasters were added to the Fortnite loot table, and there were crashed TIE Fighter points of interest on the map. Everything in the event happened in live time, with the actors having live mics and reacting to the Fortnite playerbase in real time.
Execution: I served as the only Analyst on the Live From Risky Reels event. All things considered, the scope of this event was massive. Since everything was live, we needed a tech infrastructure that could deliver live video, audio, and report player pawn position across the entire Fortnite ecosystem back to our actors for this to work. This was easily our biggest hurdle, and testing for this proved to be exceptionally difficult. Since everything was live, it was difficult to develop testing strategies that both confirmed what we needed to know and didn’t expose any of the upcoming event to players ahead of time.
As far as scope and tech demands go, this was the largest event I have been a part of with Fortnite, and arguably this was our largest event outright. Not only was the event demanding, but we had to constantly pivot and adjust throughout the course of the event. Scope changes were somewhat constant, and the event itself had some live tech hurdles we had to overcome. The entire execution of the event was very intense, and we had an entire “war room” set up in LA for the live performance of JJ and Geoff. We did not publicly disclose viewership figures for this event, but the spectacle of it all was insanely impressive.
