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Two months after it was added to Fortnite, Epic has acknowledged the game's Impostors mode was inspired by Among Us.
A project borrowing elements from elsewhere in TV, movies, music, and video games is commonplace. Most of the time the creators of the project being borrowed from will see it as a compliment rather than having its content stolen. However, there's a clear line distinguishing the difference between paying homage and downright copying.
Epic crossed that line when it added Impostors to Fortnite back in August. The mode has players perform tasks while trying to find which of the group of ten is the impostor. If it sounds familiar, it's the exact same premise as hit game Among Us. So much so that devs at InnerSloth, the studio behind Among Us, spoke out of their disappointment over their IP effectively being stolen by Epic.
Two months later and Epic has admitted Fortnite's Impostors, which is still available to play right now, was inspired by Among Us. It has done so via a blog post detailing updates it has made to the game mode. “The game mode inspired by Among Us from Innersloth,” part of a sentence right at the start of the post reads. At the time of typing this, there is no such line or acknowledgment included in-game.
Among Us devs reacted in a number of ways when Impostors first launched. Gary Porter shared images of Fortnite's Impostors map and Among Us's very first map, highlighting how similar they were. Among Us community director Victoria Tran was the one who confirmed Impostors was not part of an official crossover with Fortnite, adding that the arrival of the mode in another game felt like a personal attack.
There's no word yet from InnerSloth as to whether there has been any communication between it and Epic regarding Impostors. Whether the two studios have been in touch and acknowledgment in a blog post was agreed upon as an appropriate course of action. There's also a chance it's the sign of something more, perhaps even an official crossover between the two games. InnerSloth devs said when Impostors was revealed that they would have been very open to working with Epic.