How Joel McHale Outlasted Ninja In A Fortnite Tournament

The greatest Fortnite player alive today is undoubtedly Ninja. He's managed to become a household name for anyone who plays Epic's Battle Royale shooter, and is regarded as one of the most ardent players in the community. It takes a lot of time, energy and dedication in order to become one of the best at a game like Fortnite. But, imagine that one of the very best players in the game managed to lose to an actor and comedian like Joel McHale, who doesn't even play video games. Yes, it happened, and Joel explained how.

The actor was on Late Night With Seth Meyers, talking about his wedding anniversary. However, the conversation shifted over to McHale's kids and what they're into, and given that they're teens they happen to be into Fortnite. McHale then explained how he was invited to a celebrity event featuring Ninja and Markiplier and other YouTube celebrities, and he was teamed up with Markiplier. He said that his strategy for the third-person shooter was essentially to hide...

The setup to the story was a story all on its own. Every time McHale name dropped someone like Markiplier or Marshmallow, the audience in Seth Meyers' studio were as silent as a mouse, but McHale had to remind them that to kids and teenagers people like Drake, Ninja, and Markiplier are huge stars.

The comment section was actually less interested in how Joel McHale used his "coward" tactic to skim a win over Ninja in Fortnite and more perplexed at the idea that no one in the studio audience knew what McHale was talking about.

The thing that many people tend to forget is that while Ninja and the rest of the Twitch streamers may have reached hundreds of millions of viewers, and accrued billions of cumulative views, the reality is that Ninja has a global reach. His audience isn't just contained within the a certain part of the U.S., nor is it contained within the continent. It's something that's easy to forget when someone mentions PewDiePie, Markiplier or Ninja on a talk show and the audience essentially reacts with silence and ambivalence. It makes for awful reactions on live TV but it's also important to keep in mind that the small audience in a TV studio isn't representative of the global audience that these content creators reach.

You can check out McHale's full story in the video below.

On the upside, at least the audience seemed to react to his jokes even though they obviously weren't all that interested in Fortnite and the celebrities that the game has spawned.

Although, it certainly speaks volumes to the popularity of Epic Games' third-person builder-shooter when celebrities from the mainstream are able to talk about the game on a late night talk show as if it's something special.