Ralph Lauren, the design house that developed the Polo shirt and accompanying horse polo logo, has developed a collaboration with the popular video game Fortnite to create one of the sport’s first forays into the virtual world.
The Fortnite x Polo Ralph Lauren collaboration consists of a physical range of polo shirts, caps and other apparel alongside a series of themed costumes based on its historic 1992 Stadium collection, including an in-game item that looks distinctly like a polo mallet.
This collection marks a range of firsts for the brand, the game and the sport of polo itself.
For Ralph Lauren, it marks the first time since 1971 that the Polo player emblem has been redesigned to incorporate Fortnite’s Supply Llama which has become an icon of the video game.
For Fortnite, whilst it has collaborated with other fashion labels before, it has not had an integrated line of digital and physical fashion items in the same way the work with Ralph Lauren has.
However, for the sport of Polo itself, it provides a virtual spotlight in a way the sport has never seen before in computer games.
Polo has almost never received representation in the virtual world, with the only exceptions being a game for the Atari 2600 in 1983, and a mobile phone game for Android in the 2010s.
In a space where nearly every sport with a professional league has a computer game, from Australian Rules Football, Handball, Hurling, Gaelic Football, Curling and many others, to say nothing of the legions of fictional sports invented for video games, this represents a missed opportunity.
One of the biggest growth factors for association football in the United States was the release of FIFA International Soccer, which coincided with the country’s first World Cup.
Polo, a fast, dynamic, intense game in large arenas with inherent handicaps built into the rules would appear to be a perfect fit to convert into a video game format, and this in turn can help to teach young, interested players the rules and inspire them to consider learning the sport.