Epic responds to claim of stolen Fortnite character skin (update)

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An artist says the Taro skin was plagiarized from an existing design.

Update: DeviantArt user Pyro-Zombie and DingDongVG on Twitter have both declared the accusation of plagiarism by Epic Games to be false. Using Google cache, they say they've found a different image was originally posted to DeviantArt and was only recently replaced with one resembling the Fortnite skin. Here's Pyro-Zombie's blog post explaining the situation.

Original story: Taro is a new Fortnite skin added to the game's store on November 14. Yesterday, an artist named Ruby Ramirez wrote a post on Facebook showing Taro side by side with a character design uploaded to DeviantArt more than two months earlier. The similarity between the two is striking. The horned mask, the belt, the hair, the shoulderpads, even the overall color scheme resemble each other.

Forbes reached out to Epic Games to ask about the accusation of plagiarism and received the following reply: "We take these claims seriously and are in the process of investigating them."

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.