By Jaden Lee
Graphic source: Epic Games
December 6th, 2018. It’s been seven years since Season 7 of Fortnite first dropped. For any high schoolers reading this, you probably remember this as sometime during the holiday season of your late elementary school years.
Epic Games leaned hard into the Christmas spirit that year—covering the map in snow, adding holiday-themed skins, and even introducing a game mode where you blasted each other with snowball launchers. Experiencing a brand-new Fortnite season on top of the usual Christmas excitement was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
But it’s been a long time since Fortnite has come close to the level of attention and hype it had back then. The game peaked at nearly 80 million daily players; today, that number sits around one million, and it continues to fall. Older players often say the game has become too complicated, with new features dropping nonstop. And the addition of AI bots has made wins feel less rewarding than they used to.
Still, even with all the frustration current players might have, many of us look back on the “good old days” of Fortnite with real nostalgia. And in what seems like an attempt to bring back that feeling—and maybe some of those players—Fortnite is reviving one of its most beloved seasons: Season 7.
Season 7 will return on December 11th, 2025, as part of the Fortnite OG playlist. The update is expected to bring back classic point of interests (POIs) like Happy Hamlet, Frosty Flights, and Polar Peak. Polar Peak will also include the Infinity Blade, one of the game’s earliest and most infamous mythic weapons. Items like the driftboard, boomboxes, and possibly even planes are rumored to be unvaulted as well.
While many players, including myself, are excited for the season’s return, we should be careful not to assume this means Fortnite is “back.”
Epic has tried multiple times to reintroduce OG features and modes, but the success has never lasted. The bigger issue is that the game, no matter how many updates it gets, can still feel repetitive—similar weapons, the same building mechanics, and a familiar player base that hasn’t really changed.
And reaching its former peak would be almost unimaginable. For reference, Fortnite’s 80 million daily players at its height was nearly eight times the current daily player count of Minecraft, a game widely considered one of the greatest and most popular of all time.
Still, even if Epic isn’t able to fully recapture Fortnite’s old magic, the return of Season 7 will definitely bring a wave of nostalgia. And honestly, during the holiday season, that might be enough.