Professional Fortnite has taken off at LHS as seniors Nathan Stoddard and Andrew Severn have formed their own pro team.

Fortnite has grown rapidly in popularity since December of 2017. This has resulted in drawing a wide spectrum of players from casual gamers to competitive professionals. These pros join teams to compete in tournaments and other competitions, often for money.

“EGU is the name of our pro team, and we came up with it because we’re epic, gamers and united, which makes up EGU,” Stoddard said.

Pros often practice with each other in games called scrims, which is short for scrimmages. In these games, there are usually anywhere from 10-40 pros that queue up at the same time to compete against each other while the rest of the lobby is made up of normal players.

“The best we’ve done in a scrim was on the first game of the night one night where we dropped 15 kills in a scrim and won it, and at the end we each had 10 health,” Stoddard said.

While Stoddard and Severn may not be as well known in the pro community, they have run into several famous players in scrims.

“On the first day we played scrims we ran into FaZe Cloak, and I killed a Cloud 9 player, which is a pro team,” Severn said.

Severn and Stoddard have continued to improve in the pro circuit, and have succeeded in several events. They are currently ranked the No. 1 duo team in Kansas, according to Fortnite tracker rankings.

“We’ve recently started playing scrims, we’re moving up in leagues, and we have a couple wins and a second place on league night, which is pretty big, and we’ve also been doing wagers, which is where you wager money on kills or placement, and we’re undefeated in that,” Severn said.

EGU was formed because Severn and Stoddard wanted to showcase their gaming talents, and casual gaming wasn’t enough for them.

“It’s more fun of an environment when you’re playing against opponents of the same caliber and level and not players that are garbage and do not know how to play the game,” Stoddard said.