Marie Gicquel / Photo credit: LIONEL BONAVENTURE / AFP 21:00 p.m., August 08, 2023

The free-to-play online video game "Fortnite" will offer its players a virtual tour of a Holocaust museum, said one of the game's creators. The initiative - which triggered a wave of anti-Semitic reactions on X (formerly Twitter) - aims to make the history of the Holocaust more accessible.

Visit a museum dedicated to the Holocaust through a video game. This is indeed what the free online game Fortnite offers. One of its creators, Luc Bernard, announced this Monday on X (ex-Twitter) thus arousing a torrent of anti-Semitic reactions on the network. This very first virtual museum aims to make the history of the Holocaust more accessible to the 400 million users of this game, published by the American studio Epic Games.

The first Holocaust Museum in Fortnite has been approved today by Epic Games.

Super proud that we will be the first to bring something like this to Fortnite's 400 million + players.

80% of Americans haven't visited a Museum. So this is game changing. pic.twitter.com/6FINFhi1fY

— Luc Bernard (@LucBernard) August 1, 2023

Opening in a few weeks

Tickets will be free in order to reach a younger and more international audience, with Luc Bernard arguing that a majority of Americans never go to the museum. This vast virtual exhibition returns, among other things, to Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogroms of November 9 and 10, 1938, but also to the Holocaust in Tunisia and Greece and exhibits the portraits of some resistance fighters including Josephine Baker.

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This museum will open in a few weeks on Fortnite and players will have to respect certain rules. They won't be able to dance or break objects like they can elsewhere in the game. This initiative is reminiscent of Israeli and German players who had virtually recreated the Jerusalem Holocaust Memorial on the game Minecraft.