Maya Hall
Lantern Staff
Current Butler sophomore Paul Persighel was given the opportunity to participate in the Fortnite Creative World Cup in New York City, New York this past July. Participants of the tournament were chosen online through video submissions of their own gameplay. The particular competition Persighel was involved in was the one that popular YouTube gamer, Ninja, personally chose three players out of the top 20 to send to New York.
Persighel is studying computer science. He began playing Fortnite his senior year of high school, beginning on Xbox then switching to PC shortly after.
“I started my senior year of high school just playing [Fortnite] with my friends on Xbox, and then it just piqued my interest,” Persighel said. “I switched over to playing on PC a couple of months later, and I just fell in love with it. I’ve played a lot of games. I started off with Minecraft back when I was in seventh or eighth grade. I played Madden and NBA 2K, a whole bunch of sports games, but I never really played any shooter games until Fortnite. It’s my first shooter game that I got into.”
A competition was announced online by the YouTuber Ninja on his YouTube channel. It was to select players for his own team at the tournament. Ninja had created a specific map of the game and players were supposed to take videos of them trickshotting (a type of sniping playstyle to show off the player’s skill) on the map that he created and submit them online. There were thousands of submissions, so Ninja’s team had gone through and selected 20 videos from players. Out of that 20, Ninja himself picked out his top three to be sent to New York for the tournament, and Persighel was one of them.
“It was a lot of fun,” Persighel said. “We spent two days with Ninja, and I got to meet a whole bunch of Fortnite YouTubers… We got to play on a huge stage at the Arthur Ashe stadium. It was crazy just being on that stage with everybody watching; it was unbelievable… I was more nervous during our practice run with nobody in there than I was with everybody in there. Once we just got sat down, it was like I was playing at home pretty much.”
The tournament took place over three days and had an overall prize of $30,000,000 which was divided into sections.
“My section was $3,000,000, so our team got $295,000 that we split four ways, so I got $73,750,” Persighel said. “I still haven’t gotten it yet, but I’m probably going to save it for K-State.”
Persighel’s Fortnite username is “Taco”, and his Twitter account is @TacoWithaWeirdT. Check it out to see his impressive video submission for the competition.
