Ninja Plays Fortnite with Drake, Travis Scott and JuJu Smith-Schuster, Breaks Twitch Records

Fortnite
Ninja played Fortnite with Drake, Travis Scott and JuJu Smith-Schuster (Photo via Ninja / Twitch)

If you were waiting for the day where two of the most famous rappers would join an NFL player to play video games with a professional gamer, your time has come. The uber-popular game Fortnite, a product developed by Epic games, has been the video game of choice for Ninja, a top streamer on the ‘Twitch’ platform. But this wasn’t a normal night for the blue-haired master of the game. Ninja was joined on Fortnite by rap superstars Drake, Travis Scott and JuJu Smith-Schuster of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

If you never thought you’d see the day where that sentence would be written, don’t worry. I never thought I would write it. Let’s get some backstory on all the parties involved.

For those who don’t know, Fortnite: Battle Royale is a multiplayer game mode on the Fortnite game and it is much like Players Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG). The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world where players jump out of a ‘battle bus’, parachute down to various locations on one map and fight to survive. They use a range of weapons from assault rifles to silenced pistols, RPGs, damage traps, shotguns, ‘impulse grenades’ and even a ‘launch pad’ to fight enemies while avoiding a storm that does damage if you remain in it. Last one standing wins. Fortnite is free to play and is available cross-platform on Xbox One, PS4 and PC.

Twitch is a video streaming platform similar to YouTube but their central goal is to bring video game fans together to watch other gamers play any number of video games on the various gaming systems. Twitch members can either create free accounts or pay a small fee (or link their amazon prime account) to be a subscriber to their favorite channels and support their favorite gamers.

Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins is one of, if not the best (sorry Myth), Fortnite player out there right now. He recently crossed the 100,000 subscribers mark on Twitch but after his night with these stars he surpassed over 180,000 subscribers. The 26-year-old is an esports star who has played competitive Halo. He began his esports career in 2009 and won his first Halo championship for Halo 4 at the Halo 4 Exhibition as a member of the Warriors team.

Drake and Travis Scott are currently two of the hottest acts out in the rap world. Drake is a three-time Grammy award winner with 27 nominations under his belt to go along with 70 top 40 hits, a rap record 23 top 10 hits on the Hot 100 and he also racked up six certified platinum albums. Travis Scott has not been in the mainstream rap game quite as long as Drake but he’s already found success in his brief stint in the major public eye. Scott has two platinum albums of his own. Travis Scott and Drake have done some work together in the past. JuJu Smith-Schuster is a wide receiver for the Pittsburgh Steelers who made some waves in his rookie season with his hilarious personality and stellar play.

So now that we know all the players involved, let’s set the stage.

About a week ago Drake followed Ninja on Instagram and the popular streamer promptly freaked out after reading the ‘Champagnepapi’ username.

At the time, we weren’t fully aware that Drake, or Travis Scott for that matter, played the super popular game. But then on Wednesday night we fully learned what was going on. It was supposed to be a normal night for Ninja on Twitch but at about midnight eastern, everything changed. Drake hopped on the stream with Ninja.

(Drake joins in the below video at about the three hour mark)

Watch Dont get comfortable.. always keep grinding | @Ninja on Twitter and Instagram from Ninja on www.twitch.tv

Ninja was playing on PC and Drake was on his PS4 but the team at Epic games helped them all connect throughout the night. Shortly after the two started to play, a new stream was created and Drake used his Twitter platform of over 36 million followers and tweeted a stream link out for his fans. Then the madness ensued.

Ninja and Drake played a few rounds of duos as Ninja talked to Drake about game strategy, his ‘Gods Plan’ video, where he records his music and informed him on some of the records the two were breaking. As they recorded their first win, Ninja and Drake set a new Twitch streaming record.

Ninja and Drake set a new viewer record at 635, 429 people watching them play Fortnite on Ninja’s twitch channel. It smashed the previous records set in January by Tyler1 in his much-awaited return to League of Legends and then broken shortly after by Dr Disrespect at 388,000 views. They also topped the trending topics on Twitter.

Drake said on the stream he had only been playing for a month or two and he made it known on numerous occasions he was nowhere near the same level as Ninja. The 6God also said he often takes breaks during 20-hour recording sessions to play Fortnite in the studio with his team. The two played a few more duo games and recorded another win before heading to squads to play with a couple of their personal friends.

But the night didn’t end there. Ninja wanted to bring in some more big names to the game so he called on JuJu Smith-Schuster as Drake used his connections to bring Travis Scott into the fold.

They attempted to get Smith-Schuster in the game but Ninja told his viewers that JuJu wasn’t properly prepared to play with them. Smith-Schuster had initially tried to link up with Ninja and stream on his MacBook to his own Twitch channel. After failing to get that to work, Ninja told his viewers that Smith-Schuster went to his local Best Buy to buy a brand-new gaming PC. Smith-Schuster eventually joined around after 2 am with the stream still over 300,000.

Things started off a little rough as the foursome had some connectivity issues thanks to an inordinate amount of friend requests in their inboxes and they couldn’t accept game invites. Then as they started to play, people were ‘stream sniping’ them, otherwise known as watching the stream and just ambushing wherever the streamer is. After a small rough patch, they figured out how to avoid those issues and the squad managed to pull off a win before their night ended.

Watch Squads with Drake, Travis and JuJu you heard me. | @Ninja on Twitter and Instagram from Ninja on www.twitch.tv

Overall the night was a massive success for everyone involved. Ninja’s channel and mainstream reputation got a huge boost tonight. Drake, Travis Scott and JuJu Smith-Schuster add another win to their record and also get some more gaming fans intrigued in them. Twitch and Fortnite have to be just estatic about the results of the night and the huge numbers they pulled in to watch the game. But of course, the true winners were the internet collective who took to Twitter to make jokes and create some fantastic memes.

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