A confused Fortnite The player noticed something while playing the popular free-to-play battle royale shooter and posted a screenshot on Twitter. From the image shared, it looked like a strange image of mold had appeared in the game. Why was there mold in it? Fortnite? It turns out you can blame Epic CEO Tim Sweeney for a decision he made decades ago.
On November 14th Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney responded to a player who posted a picture on X (formerly Twitter). Fortnite with what looks like mold in the game’s news feed. The person was confused until Sweeney responded with a funny explanation.
“This is the default Unreal Engine texture,” Sweeney tweeted. “I imported it into Unreal Engine 1 in 1995 while developing on a 90MHz Pentium. It’s still there, showing up when a programmer forgets to specify a texture.”
When another user asked if the picture was mold, Sweeney replied that it wasn’t and explained the origin of the strange looking texture.
“It’s a stock photo of cave pearls, a type of calcium carbonate deposit that forms in limestone caves.” Sweeney said.
When someone asked the all-important question: “Can I eat it?” The CEO replied: “Actually, yes
If you look around the internet you can find people Ask about mold Fortnite long before this Twitter interaction. people in 2015 had even already found out the original source of the image. But it’s still fun to get a direct answer from Sweeney and find out that this mold-like image – is like that The Powerpuff Girls or Dexter’s Lab—a strange, nostalgic artifact of the 1990s.
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