Fortnite developer still wants Nintendo crossover

Epic Games is still keen for its rapidly-growing gaming metaverse to include characters from the world of Nintendo - but it has also acknowledged that securing characters from the Mario maker in Fortnite has proven extremely difficult.

"I don't know what the word for, like, making diamonds is," Epic Games' Saxs Persson said when asked by Axios how hard it had been.

"Nintendo has their strategy and we have our strategy, and we hope at some point" to use their characters, Persson continued. "Our players would love it."

Fortnite has managed to amass a cross-platform, cross-publisher, cross-medium mountain of franchises over the years, with everyone from Capcom, Square Enix, Bandai Namco, Microsoft, Sony, Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. involved.

Most notably, Fortnite features characters from PlayStation and Xbox franchises such as God of War and Horizon, plus Halo and Gears of War. As with all content in Fortnite, all of this crossover content is available to play on any platform.

Fans have long wondered if this has been Nintendo's sticking point - that unlike Sony, which allows you to play as Kratos on Xbox, or Microsoft, which lets you run around as Master Chief on PS5, the house of Mario does not want Luigi, Link and Samus let free outside the bounds of its own console.

A previous Nintendo crossover in Rocket League - a game also owned by Epic Games - saw Nintendo content for the racer appear as default items on platforms other than Switch. And while Epic may have been happy with that... well, that's not in the spirit of how Fortnite operates.

Back in 2021, documents dating back to the previous year were made available publicly during Epic Games' court trial with Apple. In it, fans spotted tentative plans for Metroid's Samus Aran to join Fortnite as part of the game's then-upcoming bounty hunter season. Alas, those plans never came to fruition.

Perhaps now Fortnite has a flurry of new modes, there's a way forward? Could Lego Mario pop up just in Lego Fortnite, perhaps? Or Jack Black's Peaches from the Mario Movie turn up in Fortnite Festival? The mind boggles at how much money that could make.