Top Twitch streamer Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins experienced an odd glitch in Fortnite, showing a disco ball in the sky, which fans believe is a leak of what is to come with a mysterious New Year event.
Data miners first leaked details of a potential in-game live event coming for New Year at the end of 2018, when they discovered a disco ball in the game files.
Linking this with Ninja’s own New Years event, speculation began as to what Epic Games had up their sleeves for ringing in the bells for the start of 2019.
Discoball New YorkWorlds Colide! pic.twitter.com/HIUISy4dYx
— FortTory – Fortnite News (@FortTory) December 18, 2018
Along with the disco ball in the game files, the leaker FortTroy also found another file with the name ‘NewYearTimer’, confirming that something is planned.
However, it looks like Epic Games made a slight error when implementing the event, as the Disco Ball can, in fact, be seen in all its glory when players are in replay mode – and Ninja himself discovered.
Suddenly noticing the huge disco ball in the sky, Ninja exclaimed “Are you kidding me? Happy New Year’s dude, what?!”, clearly excited at the prospect.
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As his duo partner Jack ‘CouRage’ Dunlop suggests, it appears that there will be some kind of party come New Year’s eve and moving into 2019.
Fortnite players on Reddit have been speculating as to what effect the disco ball might have, with one suggesting it may cause everyone to dance on the spot, similar to a ‘boogie bomb’ (which are throwable disco balls).
Previous live events have been more extravagant than this, however, with the ‘Butterfly’ event taking players into a matrix-like world, playing a cutscene and then dropping them back onto a changed map.
Epic Games always have a surprise or two up their sleeve, and although they probably didn’t intend for this glitch to give away part of it, it is helping to build anticipation.