Last Thursday, The Game Awards 2021 took place. It was a messy, advertising-filled event that gave away a few awards every now and then. But before Geoff Keighley was in charge of the Game Awards, He ran Spike TV’s Video Game Awards. And in 2011, a decade ago this weekend, his old awards show debuted a trailer for a new game called Provided. Maybe you heard about it?
In December 2011, Provided Developer Epic Games was in a completely different place. Today the company is considered a Valve-like tech company that does business with other developers, runs its own PC game store, and licenses its popular Unreal Engine to other teams around the world while battling tech giants like Apple and Google in court.
In 2011, however, Epic was best known as the studio behind it Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, and the Unreal Engine. And in December 2011 the company came up with the release of Gears of War 3
Input Fourteen days, a colorful experiment. It felt like the company was trying something new and moving away from it transmission and Unreal tournament and towards the future.
Although at the time no one really knew what this new game was except Epic. Hell, in an interview after the show, even Cliffy B and Epic don’t seem to quite understand what Fourteen days is. No one, I would suspect within Epic, could have expected what would eventually become of this project – one of the most popular online video games of all time.
In this first trailer are the seeds of Fortnites See survival mode. Building structures, collecting resources and the waves of evil monsters attacking players; it’s all there. Just a little different. ONEnd of course, as long as this mode is still available today in 2021, it would be silly and imprecise to call what this trailer shows modern Fourteen days. That wasn’t supposed to come until September 2017, when Epic launched a Battle Royale mode that was built on the foundation of the decent, but never very successful, survival game it had worked on for years.
Battle Royale was a direct response to the sudden popularity of games like Unknown player battlefield
Of course, almost five years later and Fortnites Online Battle Royale mode is the game now, with Survival mode still there but not nearly as supported or popular as PvP mode, which is helped enable crossplay across consoles and popularized the Battle Pass system we see in so many games today.
And now, 10 years after that first teaser trailer, Fourteen days remains incredibly popular, attracting celebs like The Rock to join its in-game mega-events. Fourteen days helped make Epic a very wealthy company and enabled them to become a real Steam competitor in the form of the Epic game store, and changed the entire video game industry for better or for worse. Not bad for a weird experiment with a bad logo that showed up at the VGAs on Spike in 2011.
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