It can be easy, when talking about Epic Games’ ridiculously popular free-to-play online shooter Fortnite, to get a little lost in the hyperbolic woods when describing how weird the game can be. Yes, this is a video game where Homer Simpson, Eminem, and Goku can run around shooting each other with assault rifles; a video game that saw the reveal of a vital piece of Star Wars movie lore get dumped almost in passing; a video game that once dared to invite its players to bask in the soothing tones of Weezer Island. All of this is strange—but strangeness to a shared purpose, one that makes a lot more sense once you accept that the game itself exists to be the pot in which all of human artistic achievement is melted down into pure, unfiltered, capital C Content. Even by those heady standards, though, there’s shit that’s just plain weird—like the revelation that a long-discussed, never-filmed scene from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill is somehow going to make its way into the game.
This is per no less a source than Tarantino himself, who dove head-first into the world of digital brand integration this week when he hosted a big Fortnite event at his own Vista Theater, complete with Uma Thurman on hand to help with the shill. Besides the basic absurdity that often accompanies R-rated brands getting crumpled up and crammed into the teen-focused Fortnite model—someone whipped up a prop copy of the back of the Bride’s beloved Pussy Wagon, for instance, but now with its first word replaced with one of the video game’s smiling cats—it’s just plain odd to see Tarantino in such blatant pitchman mode. And that’s before he got to the reveal that the collaboration (which will kick off in a few weeks, once the game’s now relatively tame-seeming current Simpsons event is over) will not only be obviously timed to the release of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, but that it’ll be themed around a chapter of the story that Tarantino never got to film.
We speak of “Yuki’s Revenge,” which would have fit into Kill Bill: Volume 1, and would have seen Gogo Yubari’s sister seek vengeance on Thurman’s bride. (Did we need to mention that people who buy a ticket for The Whole Bloody Affair get a free Gogo skin for the game? Was that already simply assumed?) The script for the sequence has been floating around on the internet for years, but Tarantino never filmed it, citing both pacing and cost. Now, it’s somehow being used as the crux of this Fortnite event, with Epic’s Instagram posting an image citing “The Lost Chapter,” and showing a Fortnite version of Yuki herself. Notably, though, nobody has said what the fuck any of this actually means—whether the sequence has somehow been animated in Fortnite, or will serve as a loose plot for players to shoot their way through, or whether it’ll play in some other, non-obvious way. (Notably, this part is not the new footage that has been added to The Whole Bloody Affair, which extends the original movie’s animated sequence about the origin of O-Ren Ishii.) The actual script for the chapter is brutal stuff, featuring a drug-addled Yuki acting practically like a horror movie villain in her pursuit of vengeance—so god knows how any of this is actually going to translate into the goofy cartoonish shooter game.
