The Epic Story of Fortnite

does do that. It manages to burst free of its confines and then next thing, you know, everyone knows about it, or at least recognizes little elements that are common to that video game. So games like Pac Man or Donkey Kong, lots of people know about those. Well. Recently, the video game Fortnite has managed to do this and burst out of those small niche adiences of video gamers. Millions of

people play Fortnite. Millions of people will watch other people play Fortnite, either in tournaments or in live stream sessions that sort of thing. There are hundreds of videos of people talking about the game or doing some of the notable dances that are featured in the game. Epic Games, which developed and published Fortnite, made three billion dollars in

revenue in eighteen, largely because of that game. There are a lot of stories about Fortnite, some of which criticize how the game seemingly lifts elements from other games and pop culture memes without compensation or credit. But where did this game come from and how did it become so

popular so quickly? Well, I'm going to do my best not to turn this into an episode that's secretly about Epic Games, the company that aches and publishes Fortnite, but it would be a good idea to get a quick rundown of that studio and what was going on when the company first announced development on Fortnite. So here's the super quick version of Epic games history. Maybe in the future I'll do a full episode about Epic Games and

will really dive into the details. But back in a college student named Tim Sweeney launched a computing consulting business

called Potomac Computer Systems. It became clear that the business was going to require more work and time than Sweeney could dedicate to it while also doing his college studies, So around that same time he also got interested in developing games, and he created a somewhat primitive computer game called z z T. It was a simple top down computer RPG style game with as key art, and he released this game under that Potomac computer or system's company name.

But Sweeney also released some code that made it possible for gamers to take this game and modify it themselves. And word quickly spread throughout the old computer bulletin board system communities, and the game was a modest hit. It actually did fairly well. The success inspired Sweeney to pursue game development on a larger scale within the shareware community. Shareware is a method of distribution in which a developer allows some portion of their work to be distributed freely

as much as people like. So you can make copies, you can give them to your friends, and there's no penalty. There's nothing wrong about that. Typically this software has some sort of limit built into it, so, for example, a shareware game might allow you to play the first level of that game for free, but then to get beyond this limitation, you would actually have to buy the full game. Well,

Sweeney set out to create his own shareware company. He also decided they needed a better name, and so he chose Epic Mega Games, and he later admitted that he chose that name, in part because it made people think his company was a lot larger than just a single person working out of his parents house. Sweeney began to form relationships and work with other developers as well, like Cliff Blazinski sometimes known as Cliffy B. He was another young video game enthusiast who was eager to get into

that industry. Um he was in high school when he first started to right to Sweeney and work with him. The company would release several games over the next couple of years, including a video pinball game and a game called jazz Jack Rabbit that ended up being very popular. But things really picked up in Now This was Right at the Dawn, a video game graphics cards, three D game design, and first person shooters like Castle, Wolfin's Line

and Doom, both of which were from ID Software. Sweeney and his team decided to develop their own game engine and three D first person shooter, a game they called it Unreal. It was an incredibly ambitious project, and they released the game and the game engine in after several years of development. The Unreal engine was an industry triumph, easily matching up against the more seasoned id's Quake two engine and the Unreal Engine would become one of the

standard game engines used throughout the industry. It's cemented Epic Games as a quote unquote real video game company. Epic would go on to release games like the Gears of War franchise, which was incredibly successful and the company did well in the two thousand's. Now this brings us up rapidly as we skip over a lot of details to two thousand eleven and the start of the story around

Fortnite itself. In two thousand eleven, Epic is wrapping up on its own Epic trilogy, which has since grown beyond three games, and the company was really celebrating they had just finished Gears of War three. The first Gears of War game was for the Xbox three sixty back in two thousand six. Gears of War two followed in two thousand eight, and Gears of War three finally came out

in two thousand eleven. The trilogy follows a human military force fighting off an alien invasion and centers around a protagonist named Marcus Phoenix, and Part three wrapped up Phoenix's storyline, and so in order to create a sense of closure and transition, the company held a game jam now, a game jam is like a hackathon. Developers team up with each other. Sometimes they work with people that they've never

worked with directly before. Sometimes they'll take on new roles on the team that they normally wouldn't on a project, So a programmer might become the art director for a game jam. Their goal is just to create a fun game within a certain amount of time, such as forty

eight or seventy two hours. They have to come up with a concept developed the gameplay, the mechanics, the art, the music, everything else, and then they show it off to each other and it helps inspire creativity and outside the box thinking and gives developers a chance to experiment. Sometimes it can create the earliest version of a future game. A short time after this game jam, some of the Epic team began talking about a possible future game that

would become Fortnite. The Fortnite itself wasn't actually spawned directly from the game jam. It wasn't one of the games developed during that uh that that project, but the experience of the game jam lad the team to talk about possibilities now. The team imagined a game in which players would control a human survivor of a zombie apocalypse, and this would be a multiplayer game, so they could team up with other players and increase their odds of survival.

They would traverse a world ruined by this apocalypse, and they would other resources, scavenging and harvesting them from stuff like trees or rocks or houses or whatever. Then they could use that material to construct bases to protect themselves from zombie hordes which would spawn at night. It was sort of combining elements of several other games that already existed, stuff like Minecraft and Left for Dead. Producers have also cited the game Terraria as one of the big influences

in their early development. The goal was to create a survival building game and marry it to a third person or a first person shooter game, and make sure that both of those elements were designed well and fun to play. The view of the team was that most games, generally in that space, we're good at one thing but not the other thing. So building games were really good at building, but weren't so great at combat. Combat games were great at combat but not so good at building. They wanted

the best of both. Now, there's no definitive source that I could find about when Fortnite became an ef shoal project, but it sounds like there were serious discussions around this

idea starting sometime in August two eleven. Initially, the thought was to create a game with a dark, gritty tone, really you know, kind of of of foreboding art style, But the team decided that they wanted something that would come across more timeless, not to mention, a style that wouldn't put as heavy a strain on computer processing power or development time. If you make it more realistic, you've got to figure all that stuff out, so they opted

for a brighter, more cartoonish approach. The name Fortnite came out of an email thread where they were just debating on what they should name this game. Since the goal was to survive a zombie attack each night by building a protective base. Someone suggested Fortnight as a possibility, and it clicked, and they decided to announce the game just a few months later after they had decided to actually make it. This would be in December two thou eleven, at the Video Game Awards show on on Spike TV.

Well at that point, the team had only been actively working on the game development for three weeks. There was no game yet. Cliff Blazynski, now the design director at Epic, took the stage for the reveal. The announcement included a video showing off the idea for this game, with characters rushing into a town to scavenge, then heading back to build a tower base just before a group of zombies would attack. The whole thing was a cinematic It was not gameplay. There was no game to show off at

that point. It was just the idea for a game. A year later, Epic would be a very different company. A three thirty million dollar investment would hand over a significant but technically minority stake of ownership of the company to a Chinese conglomerate. Game designer and self promoter. Cliff Blazynski would leave the company, and the Fortnite game would undergo some changes early in its development. I'll explain more into the second, but first, let's take a quick break

to thank our sponsor. Okay, time for a quick check in with Epic Games. Circa mid two thousand and twelve, Fortnite was now well and truly in development, and the company projected a release date sometime in two thousand thirteen. The public knew about the game thanks to those two thousand eleven Video Game Awards announcements, and Cliff Lazynski was frustrated. He was finding it difficult to convince people that his

ideas for new games were viable. And then you have a Chinese company called Tencent Holdings Limited make a huge deal that Epic just couldn't refuse. Ten Cent, and a press release on Epic Games as website was described as quote a leading provider of Internet and mobile and telecom munications value added services in China end quote. Today it's the world's largest gaming company, as well as a contender for one of the top social media companies in the world.

Since its founding in it has had a long history of investing in other companies. It's much better known in China that is in the United States. But trust me, this company is a huge deal. It was during this time that several important people left Epic Games, among them producer Rod Ferguson. He left Epic to go work on a game called BioShock Infinite with Irrational Games, and Cliff Blazynski, who felt he had hit this creative roadblock at Epic and he wanted to try his hand at creating his

own studio. That story is a pretty fascinating one in its own right, and someday I'm going to have to talk about his experiences and what happened, because it was one of those tragic stories of failure in tech that I think still sting a lot of people to this day. Anyway, their departures gave the gaming community concern about the future

of Fortnite. Everyone identified these guys as being leaders. This was in a time when some game developers were very public figures like Cliffy B, and they were sometimes known for living like rock stars. Cliffy B certainly embrace that lifestyle and that portrayal, so a lot of people thought, well, without them there, what's going to happen to this game? Who is still at Epic Games that can help this

project stay on track? Now, I think this is one of the big problems with the cult of personality mentality in general, not just for video games but for everything, because it tends to put all the focus on one or two rock stars, and it ignores the hard work and contributions of countless people who makes stuff possible. And so typically this means we have a unrealistic view of what's happening the people who are rock stars are in fact remarkable. For the most part, they are talented people

who do a lot of work. But it still does the rest of the team a disservice to assume that if someone person leaves, the whole project's going to fall apart. Still, the departures were definitely an issue that the game development team had to take into account. Meanwhile, the three thirty million dollars that ten Cent provided to Epic gave them plenty of safety net for what the company planned to do next. While still developing games, Epic prepared to make

a big shift in how it generated revenue. One of the most lucrative assets the company had was its Unreal Games Engine, which many other developers would rely upon when they were building out their own games. Traditionally, a company would have to pay a subscribe shin fee for the use of the Unreal Engine. Epic released Unreal Engine four in March two thousand fourteen, and a year later, Epic

made it free to download. The plan was to step away from focusing only on triple A titles from big publishers and to leverage the growing community of smaller developers. The new revenue generating strategy was a royalties agreement, so instead of a set monthly subscription fee, companies would pay out five percent of royalties for any commercial application of the Unreal game engine that earned more than three thousand

dollars per quarter. So if your project didn't earn at least three thousand dollars per quarter, you weren't charging anything. This was part of a major shift in the video game industry as a whole. Back to Fortnite, it didn't take long into the development process for the designers to realize that they needed more elements to make the game

they wanted to create. Originally, they thought about making a building game and releasing it super fast, But while testing and building the game, they realized that they needed some more components to make the game fun. To play an important element in any video game, As it turns out,

some people tend to forget that. During the development process, they decided they needed some stuff like progression, in which players are rewarded for doing well in the game, maybe a skill tree, or being able to improve items and equipment. The game had a sort of RPG component to it, and so the company began to seek out developers who had worked in that space because they didn't have expertise in RPGs and they wanted to find people who could

contribute to the game's development. With that in mind, and the release of Unreal Engine four changed things for the development team as well. Initially they had been using Unreal Engine three. They chose to abandon that and go with the latest version of the game engine, which meant some of that early work needed to go as well. They had borrowed a lot of assets from a lot of their earlier games games like the Gears of War franchise, while all of that needed to be tossed aside, they

had to redevelop things. All of this meant the game was taking longer to finish than the team had initially planned. One of the big game elements that emerged during this turmoil was the actual building mechanic in the game. Initially, the idea was that building structures in the game should include some sort of mini game or extended activity, such as maybe just standing in place and holding down a

button as the structure goes up. So imagine that you're trying to build a wall, and you start, you pick the wall from your list of options, and you see an outline on your screen, you place the outline where you want to go, and then you hold down a button while this wall starts to assemble. The team figured out this wasn't very much fun and it was antithetical to the fast pace of a shooter. If you have a fast action game, you can't have your back turned to all the action and try to build a wall.

So the decision was made that game characters would have schematics that would allow them to build certain structures, and all they would have to do is select the appropriate schematic and the location for the build, and then hit a button and that was it. It would just build itself. The game would construct the structure for you, assuming that you had the raw materials necessary to build whatever it

was you wanted to build. You meanwhile, could run along and you could build the next section, or shoot enemy players or actually, at that time, it wasn't even enemy players. It was uh enemy AI because it was a p v or player versus environment game, so players could spend less time building individual components like a section of a floor or a wall, and they could build entire bases very quickly, like within a minute or so. Those environments

were also destructible. The pre existing and vironments were destructible. The stuff that players built were destructible, So anything that you saw in the game, you could, in theory breakdown or it could be destroyed by the enemy forces attacking you. Players would harvest resources from structures, so you could run up to a house and just start whacking at it

with like a pick axe and start taking materials. That way, enemies can knock structures down, and that Bick needed a lot of talent to work on the game to create all the structures and elements in those destructible environments. So if you thought, well, we're gonna have a house here,

what sort of stuff goes in the house? Bookshelves, couches, television's, radios, microwaves, refrigerators, stoves, all these sort of things were assets that had to be built in the game, so they started hiring people to build those assets. As this was happening, the designers began to shape the game to make it more cartoonish

and the Fortnite aesthetic began to emerge. Designers began to create progression strategies for tools in the game game and incorporated more science fiction elements into the design, and the general philosophy was that no idea would be outright denied, but the team would deliberate on which elements should receive attention first, and the plan was to continue this process once the game hit release, it would get updates for

as long as people were playing the game. The developers would listen to the community of players, and the community would tell the developers which elements they should focus on next, and they would provide more content. That was the plan well from the earlier stages of development. The plan was to make the game an ongoing projects, so this was not something new. This was something they had thought about

for a while. In fact, there were announcements that Cliffy b had made before he left the company about how the company was going to act as kind of like a dungeon master or game master for role playing game. They would create new scenarios, tools, monsters, challenges, that kind of stuff for the community. All that was decided on while the game was still being made. The Epic team in North Carolina was in charge of the project, but they also worked with satellite offices in Seattle and Poland

to bring it all together. I watched a great video from Game Informer that published in April two thousand fourteen, it's available on YouTube, so if you go and search for Fortnite and Game Informer, you should be able to pull that video up. And they mentioned that the game development team around that time was around hundred ten people. The video of gameplay in that interview literally polished. This was two thousand fourteen. Interestingly, the game wouldn't actually launch

for three more years. Epic held a closed alpha test of the game on December one, two thousand fourteen. Only a few thousand people could participate, and it was meant to give Epic feedback on how gamers played the game that they had designed and what they might have to fix or tweak based upon actual people playing the game. A second closed alpha test followed in March two thousand fifteen, and the plan then was to open up a beta test in the fall, but instead Epic chose to go

with a closed beta, meaning it was invitation only. They limited the participation to around fifty thousand players. It wasn't until July two thousand seventeen that gamers at large finally got their hands on Fortnite. Even then, the game was released in early access, and it wasn't the version of Fortnite that everyone tends to talk about today. I'll explain more in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So why did it

take so long for Fortnite to launch? If that documentary back in two thousand fourteen showed gameplay that looks almost identical to what the game is today, what was taking so long? Well, part of it was that Epic was developing the game as a service. The original plan was to release Fortnite as a free to play game and then include content that players could only access if they paid for it, so you would have in game purchases.

You would be able to play the game for free, but if you want some of the bells and whistles, you would have to cough up dough in order to get it. Also, Epic began work on another title around that same time called Paragon, and the two games were competing for in company talent and time and resources, so when the game did release in early access, it required

would be gamers to pay for that privilege. By the way, Paragon would end up being released first, and then Epic would focus on Fortnite, and then eventually Epic would shut down Paragon. It was a project that did not did not meet the success that the company had hoped for, so the early access version of Fortnite was called Save the World. This was pretty much what the original concept

had been years earlier. Players would gather resources and use those resources to build forts and then defend those forts against zombies. The company said it intended to offer Save the World up as a free to play game sometime in two thousand eighteen. This was in two thousand seventeen. Skip ahead now it's early two thousand nineteen as I

record this, and it still has not happened. The basic version of Fortnite that player versus environment, Save the World version is thirty nine dollars cents for the standard version. The Deluxe edition, which contains more character models and weapons plus some other stuff, is fifty nine dollars and ninety nine cents. So one of the things Epic Games has done has create a lot of different character models, a

lot of different weapons, a lot of different emotes. U uh, these various elements that allow you to customize your character to some extent, to a great extent, but it's almost like baseball cards. You have to collect them in order to be able to use them. But a different version of Fortnite did launch as free to play, and it's this version that really captured the attention of a lot

of gamers. This is the famous Battle Royal mode, which Epic released in September two thousand seventeen, just a few months after Save the World entered early access. Now, if you're not familiar with Battle Royal or Battle Royal, if you prefer style games, i'll summarize. The name comes from a Japanese film called Battle Royal, in which a class of students is transported to an island and then they are forced to fight to a last man standing competition.

The administrator for the competition designates certain areas on that island as being safe zones save zones, just meaning that you wouldn't automatically be killed if you were there, and other areas on the island go to becoming off limits, and if you are there when it goes off limits,

they're automatically killed off. Now, if this sounds a lot like another story called Hunger Games, well it's no big surprise Hunger Games that that those books came out after Battle Royal had had come out, and they both cover

very similar territory. One Brendan Green, a video game player and mod maker who uses the handle player Unknown, oversaw a new game called Player Unknowns Battlegrounds, sometimes known as pub G. This game was based off of some mods that Green had created for other games, and these mods all made a battle Royal started game mode for for these various games it created it, the games didn't natively support it, so Brendan Green built mods that allowed it

to happen. And typically the way it works is that you have a map, and you have group of players who are all competing against each other. I they're solo or in teams, and they're all in different parts of the map, and a section of that map, typically designated by a circle, is the safe zone. Being outside the safe zone means you start taking damage a certain amount of damage per unit of time, and the goal is to be the last player alive at the end of

the match. The game became enormously popular very quickly, despite the performance issues and bugs. People famously talked about how they would have the most incredible beast of a video game rig and still struggled to run pub G at

at its highest settings. Now Epic must have been paying really close attention to how popular pub G was becoming because this was right around the same time that they were releasing the Save the World version of Fortnite, and so they launched their own Battle Royal mode in September two seventeen, and it closely resembled pub G's approach. It's

incredibly similar. In fact, it was similar enough that it prompted Cheong Han Kim, who was a games developer and a businessman who had become the CEO of the pub G corporation, to criticize Epic Games and to threaten legal action, and in January two eighteen, pub G filed a lawsuit against Epic Games and then dropped it six months later, and they didn't really comment on why they dropped the case. Now.

One reason Kim might have been worried about Fortnite is that pub G relies upon the Unreal Engine for its games engine, so pub G developers sometimes have to work with Epic support to implement new features for the pub G game. So the worry was that Epic might find out about pub G's plans for upcoming features, and then Epic could rush to implement similar features into Fortnite and released them before pub G could do it. Undercutting the competition.

It didn't take very long for Fortnite to catch up to pub G and then to pass it in popularity. The fact that it was a free to play game gave it a big boost. Because pub G is not free to play. If you want to play pub G, you have to go and purchase the game, just like you would for a normal video game or any other

most other video games. Fortnite, however, is different. You can download the Fortnite Battle Royal game for free and start playing right away, but if you want certain in game items, certain weapons, skins, characters, emotes, if you want to get a very specific dance, then you have to pay extra. You have to do that those in game purchases, and

lots of people were doing that. Not only that, but Fortnite became one of the most popular games to watch someone else play, primarily through these streaming service Twitch players with handles like Tofu t f U E and Ninja rack up mill millions of viewer hours on the streaming service as they play games, and that elevated Fortnite's profile further.

It also helped that Epic would open up Fortnite so that would play on other platforms Originally it was to be PC only, but then it went Mac and PC and now it's also available for consoles and mobile devices. And to be clear, pub G didn't invent Battle Royal. I don't want to make the claim that pub G created this game mode and Fortnite stole it, and the Battle Royal version and pub G and the Battle Royal version in Fortnite don't exactly play the same way, not

not entirely. Fortnite is cartoonish, the physics are not nearly as realistic. It's a faster paced gameplay, this little swimmier than pub G is. And the fact that you can build stuff in Fortnite, you can construct barriers and ramps, and you can get over mountains this way. You can't do that in pub G. It creates a totally different gameplay experience than you would find in pub G or other Battle Royal games. So there are elements to Fortnite

that really said it of heart. So lots of other games have also got similar Battle Royal modes, including the most recent Call of duty game Black Ops four with Blackout.

So I don't want to suggest that you know pub G has a an exclusive right to the Battle Royal game Mode, but that people were criticizing Epic Games, saying, it looks to me like the game that you had promised for years and years and years wasn't doing as well as you wanted, so then you copied a game that was doing really well, and that's how you were able to turn it into a success. Whether that's true or not, you do have to admit that Fortnite is

an enormous success. Also, the lawsuit between pub G and Epic Games, that's not the only legal headache that Epic has had to endure thanks to this runaway success of Fortnite. One of those things that you can purchase in the game would be an emote or an action that you can choose your character to make based upon a keystroke. So you might have emotes that are like a particular pose. But in Fortnite, the emotes that are really famous are

the various dances. Epic has created animations of numerous dances, some of which were already famous memes, and therein lies the problem, well, one of the problems. The other problem is that there's some really litigious folks out there who are hoping for a meal ticket, I think, but there's fault on all sides, I would argue. So one of the dances you can purchase, at least at one time, was called Fresh, which was a nod to the source of this dance, the television show Fresh Prince of bel Air.

In that show, Alfonso Ribero, who played the character at Carlton, did an iconic dance to Tom Jones's song It's not Unusual. Fortnite didn't lift the song, but it did lift the dance, and Alfonso has filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming they're capitalizing on his celebrity and didn't give him any credit or compensation. Actor Donald Fazan pointed to another instance in which Epic Games had included animation that copied a dance he did in the television series Scrubs Terrence to Millie.

Ferguson filed a lawsuit against Epic Games for using his Millie Rock dance. Anita Red, acting on behalf of Russell Backpack Kid Horning, filed a lawsuit because of the game using the floss dancing move, which Horning had made famous. In an airing of Saturday Night Live, Katy Perry was playing a song and she threw a whole lot of focus towards Horning, who then did the Flaws dance. It went totally viral and became a huge meme of itself.

But here's the thing, he didn't invent that dance. You can just do a quick search on YouTube and you will find there are lots of videos that well pre date that Saturday Night Live performance, one going all the way back to two thousand ten of people doing that dance.

So my guess is that particular lawsuit won't go very far ultimately once they're able to show that this kid didn't create that dance, and that while that that particular Saturday Night Live episode might have elevated everyone's awareness of the philosophy, it's not like that kid has any claim to ownership of the dance. The cases, however, bring up a question can a dance be copyrighted? Can you copyright dance moves? As of the recording of this podcast, that

remains a pretty unanswered question. And also there are a lot of people point out that there's a long history of of various artists doing dances and making them famous and and profiting from them without having a actually invented them. Beyonce has lifted lots of dances from from films. Michael Jackson did not invent the moonwalk, but he sure did make it famous, So I'm not sure that this particular

argument will go much further. However, it has led to a lot of people criticizing Epic Games in Fortnite for taking content or taking performances and not crediting the people who originally made those performances famous. So let's sum up Fortnite. It's a video game that was conceived in and shown

off way too early. Epic Games has admitted they talked about this game far too early in the in the process, it didn't go into a closed alpha until two thousand and fourteen, transition to a closed beta in and stayed that way until going into early access as a player versus environment survival game in they you'd have to actually purchase.

Later that year, a new variant that was free to play and one that closely resembled another game came out, propelled the entire title into the spotlight, and now it is a true phenomenon. The Fortnite Tracker network currently tracks more than fifty seven million, five hundred thousand players of the game. Some estimates for the total number of players

across all platforms runs as high as eighty million. Now, Epic uses its own game launcher on the PC rather than going through valves Steam Service, which does allow for tracking. That means Epic doesn't have to share revenue with Valve because they're not selling their game or using valves Steam

Service for that purpose. And the popularity of Fortnite has allowed Epic to launch its own video game store to rival Steam, and Epic is offering up incentives like a lower revenue cut than what Valve demands for featuring games in its store, and it's also offering up other incentives, so if a developer uses epics Unreal Engine, they get

more bonuses for listing their game in Epics game Store. Now, some gamers might complain that Fortnite isn't a quote unquote serious game, or maybe that it lifts too many features from other sources without credit, or that they aren't playing in Steam, and because Steam is the established video game store that irritates people personally. I think that competition is always a good thing, but there's no denying that the game has become an enormously powerful force in pop culture

in general and gaming in particular. As the company's name attests, it is truly Epic. At some point in twenty nineteen, the save the World mode is supposed to go into free to play mode. At that point, Epic will rely entirely on in game purchases to generate revenue from Fortnite, But the game has already paid off in large amounts, and if Epic Game Store is successful, it will likely go down as one of the biggest wins in video

game history. That's something worth dancing about. Well. That wraps up this look at Epic Games is Fortnite and the phenomenon it has created. If you guys are Fortnite players, or you have any specific thoughts on the subject, or maybe you have a suggestion for a future episode of tech Stuff, get in touch with me. Send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com,

or go to tech Stuff podcast dot com. You can find the archive of our older shows there and other ways to get in touch with me on social media. Don't forget to pop on over to our merchandise store that's over at t public dot com slash tech Stuff. Every purchase you make goes to help the show, and we greatly appreciate it, and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics, because it how stuff works at home, wh