Check Out Fortnite's Official NFL Skins, With One Catch

fortniteCredit: Epic Games

It's not a giant surprise, but it's still impressive to see. Fortnite is hugely popular among professional athletes, and it's football season, after all. Epic Games just announced an official partnership with the NFL to bring licensed jerseys to the popular battle royale game, letting players don the jerseys of their favorite teams as they blast each other into oblivion. Let's take a look at the reveal trailer here:

The skins themselves are impressive: they're quite a bit more realistic than most of what we tend to see from this game, but then again the sport itself has done a lot of the work for them. Football pads and helmets already have an oversized, cartoony quality that turns out to be right at home in the Fortnite aesthetic, and the verisimilitude even holds up when it comes to doing weird dances. Art imitates life imitates art: it's not like we haven't seen plenty of NFL players doing Fortnite dances on the field.

Fornite had soccer jerseys with the World Cup a while back, but the best they could do without the official license was approximate coloring. This will no doubt make boatloads of money, though of course most of it will be in America. I can already imagine some of my mainly free-to-play friends picking these up immediately.

The catch is that while you'll be able to cosplay as whatever player you want by changing the number on the back, you won't get any names to go with them. I imagine that the licensing teams at the NFL wanted to stop things one moment short of "allowing people to shoot guns are images of real people in an officially licensed game." It shouldn't be hard to get the feeling across, but don't expect to live out any sort of dark Tom Brady fantasy here. My guess is that each team will have one face that goes along with it, and it will be up to fans to guess at who they are.

There will also be a Fortnite jersey for those that don't want to pick a real team. The NFL Jerseys will be available on November 9 at 7:00 p.m. eastern time.

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