Harmonix’s Fuser was an excellent game that had a regrettably short tail. It released in late 2020, offering a flexible DJ experience that let you mash together layers from all kinds of different songs… or, y’know, just dropping Smash Mouth into everything instead.
Unfortunately, the game was delisted a mere two years later, leaving wannabe DJs/inappropriate Smash Mouth users with no outlet for their song smash shenanigans. Until now. Kinda, anyway.
In case you weren’t aware, Epic actually snapped up Harmonix back in 2021. Since then the developer has lent its musical expertise to a sort of diet Guitar Hero in the form of Fortnite Festival. Music tracks get added pretty regularly, and they can even be used outside of Festival mode to create jams—where other players in close vicinity can contribute different tracks and instruments, and they’ll all sync up together to create a new banger or some auditory horror.
Usually you need other players to come along for a full jam, but this week’s 34.40 update has changed that: You can now solo jam by selecting different instruments and songs, and it’s basically a semi-resurrected Fuser.
It’s not quite as intricate, of course. You can’t queue up songs or transition them smoothly like you could in Fuser, but it’s close enough that I had way too much fun tinkering around with it for 10 minutes in a private lobby.
Sadly I don’t actually own that many songs in Fortnite so I was fairly limited in what I could do, but I smashed together a couple of moments from Britney Spears’ Work Work and Jennifer Lopez’s Love Don’t Cost A Thing and hey, it sounded pretty dang good.
It’ll definitely be one of those things that’s more fun if your music library is more plush with songs than mine is, but I can’t help but wish Epic would let Harmonix turn this into a full Fuser Lite mode sometime in the future. You could deal out a rotating list of songs just like Fortnite Festival does and then let people dressed as Goku or Godzilla create some melodic abominations for a while.
As a certified rhythm game fiend—hell, Fortnite Festival is the whole reason I even installed the game originally—I’m all here for more ways Harmonix can twist and contort its old ideas and jam it into Fortnite’s mould. Though if they could fix how outta whack Festival’s whole calibration is first, I’d be even more grateful.