Peter Griffin, from the animated Fox show Family Guy, was added to Fortnite recently. But he wasn’t the same rotund father fans known from the series. Instead, he was turned into a strange buff version of Peter Griffin. And now, series creator and Griffin voice actor Seth MacFarlane has seemingly revealed why the change was made.
Last month, Epic’s popular battle royale Fortnite ended its blockbuster OG season and began Chapter: Season 1. As part of this new season, Peter Griffin joined the game as both a playable skin and as an in-game boss who appears on the battlefield. But Peter in Fortnite looks a lot different than he does in the show. The in-game canonical reason for this is that he went to Meowscles (a cat/human hybrid character within Fortnite) and convinced the feline to give him some expired slurp juice to instantly buff him up. Yes, this happened. This is all real. We live in a weird world.
Yet, the actual reason why the Family Guy star is different has nothing to do with Meowscles or slurp juice. Instead, as revealed in a January 11 video interview with IGN, MacFarlane claimed that the change was because Epic “didn’t have the budget to create his actual body.”
I’m not entirely sure if MacFarlane is joking. He doesn’t seem to be. But if that’s the case, it seems odd that Epic Games can’t afford to make a big Peter Griffin. It’s also possible that MacFarlane—who admits in the same interview to not knowing what Fortnite is and having to ask someone to explain it to him—didn’t fully get Epic’s explanation. Perhaps the devs meant the game’s performance budget, or maybe resources for skins in the update were limited. I also have to imagine that an accurate Peter Griffin would be too big a target and not be balanced for the PvP modes in Fortnite.
Oh, and by the end of this interview, MacFarlane interrupts himself when talking about how Epic stuck Peter’s head on another body and starts discussing a TV Guide cover featuring Oprah’s face on another woman’s body. It’s literally him doing a cutaway gag in real life.
After doing that and possibly noticing that nobody else was laughing or knew what he was talking about, he ended the conversation with a sad: “Anybody remember that?” The whole moment had big “Please, clap” vibes.
Anyway, yeah, blame Epic’s lack of a budget (apparently) for Peter Griffin being a swole monster in Fortnite.
