“Fortnite doesn’t hold a candle to my boyhood games of ‘fort night,’” reads the subhead for a recent column at the Wall Street Journal. In it, Charlotte, North Carolina attorney Mike Kerrigan laments that his kids don’t do the same sorts of things for fun that he used to when he was their age. To make his argument, Kerrigan takes Fortnite’s name very literally, and the internet is having fun doing the same.
“I feel sorry for them, but not because Fortnite doesn’t seem fun,” Kerrigan writes. “It just can’t be as entertaining as the real thing. By real thing I don’t mean the combat featured in the game. I mean a memorable activity from the summer of 1980, when I was 9. I mean, quite literally, ‘fort night.’”
And what, you may wonder, is a “fort night?”
“With nothing but a couch, a bedsheet, a broom and a T-shirt, we reveled in the wonder of boyhood. Our joy was pure because it flowed directly from the indispensable and most precious thing a child possesses: imagination.”
Meanwhile the internet has been reveling in Kerrigan’s linguistic games. Proving that imagination isn’t the sole province of children, people on Twitter fired back:
Grand Theft Auto doesn't hold a candle to my boyhood games of 'being charged with grand theft auto' https://t.co/pI5lA9w32e
— Jake Baldino (@JakeBaldino) June 25, 2019
street fighter doesn’t hold a candle to punching a car all night
— Cookie Bustle Longplay (@ZaaackKoootzer) June 25, 2019
pokémon doesn't hold a candle to my boyhood games of "make a snake fight a duck"
— andrew webster (@A_Webster) June 25, 2019
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1143618979103199233
call of duty doesn't hold a candle to my boyhood games of 'fighting in world war II'
— raina douris (@RahRahRaina) June 25, 2019
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1143595590145564672
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1143621607161679872
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1143624172146483201
https://twitter.com/embed/status/1143642449027444736
Fortnite doesn't hold a candle to my boyhood memories of this game literally taking a fortnight to load successfully… pic.twitter.com/sECZq1lSmN
— Ros Jones (@rozjonez) June 25, 2019
Fort Night doesn't hold a candle to Fortnite, writes John Kerrigan 30-years from now, bunkered with his children in a post-apocalyptic fort https://t.co/EQbECiWdIF
— Hard Drive (@HardDriveMag) June 25, 2019
“I hope my boys never lose sight of life’s simple joys,” Kerrigan writes near the end of his column. “I hope someday they have their own stories to tell and look back as fondly on their childhood as I do on mine.”
They’ll certainly have this one.
Correction: a previous version of this article cut off part of the quote “I feel sorry for them, but not because Fortnite doesn’t seem fun” mischaracterizing its meaning
