Local musician discovered by Fortnite after posting on Reddit

At the beginning of 2023, alternative hip-hop artist WhyTri started posting videos of his music on Reddit. He didn't think much of it — for him, it was a way to share his art with a wider audience.

"I did a series called 'video games my songs should be in,'" he says. He'd dress up as different characters from games to go along with his music. "I did Madden, I did Resident Evil, I did Cyberpunk, just games that I was playing." The first two videos did pretty well, and he got feedback, both good and bad, on his music.

The day before Christmas, WhyTri, whose name is Dimitri Jean, found himself eating alone at a Chinese buffet in Chelsea. "My day was going terrible," he says. "I was just... going through my emails." As he scrolled, he came across a message in his inbox from a production company that works with Epic Games. "I'm thinking it was spam. So I ignored it."

Epic Games is a North Carolina-based game developer and distributor. They're behind Unreal Engine, a software tool and 3D gaming engine that powers hundreds of games on major platforms. Epic Games is currently worth almost $32 billion.

The company is probably best known for Fortnite, one of the most popular games in the world. It has amassed millions of players since it came onto the gaming scene in 2017. In the month of November, the Fortnite had 100 million players, according to Epic Games. "It's a free for all battle royale," WhyTri explains. "The goal is to survive that environment and win by being the last one. There are multiple skins, multiple characters. They have multiple seasons where they just change the whole game for players to really enjoy and dive into it."

So when WhyTri got that email from the production company, he really did think it was spam. How in the world would one of the world's leading gaming companies know about him and his music? "It was Reddit," WhyTri says.

The production company working with Epic Games found the videos WhyTri had posted. They looked him up, loved his music and reached out to him with a serious opportunity — to work on the music and vocals for Hades, a new character in the Fortnite season called Myths & Mortals. The season is based on Greek mythology and features characters like Zeus, Medusa and Aphrodite.

After that email, WhyTri began working with Epic Games on the sound for Hades, god of the underworld. "They presented a pitch deck. The design, words that they felt like was the mood, what they wanted Hades to really capture," he says. From there, WhyTri developed what he thought Hades as a character sounds like vocally. "Basically a more sinister Bane from Batman. I came home and did a bunch of demos."

The song "You're All Mine" is the result. WhyTri worked on it with Spencer Sotelo, the vocalist for the progressive metal band Periphery. The track is gritty and dark, a perfect companion to the intimidating character design for Hades in Fortnite.

"You're All Mine" is the lobby music for Hades, which means that "once you unlock the song, before you actually play the game, you're in something that's called the lobby," WhyTri explains. "You can pick songs that you unlock to be the lobby music, which will play every time you start the game up. Anytime you're not playing the game itself, that music will be playing."

The feedback and interest in Hades as a character has been "amazing," he says. "People are just flooding Fortnite YouTube comments... just to see the response is wild."

It's an important moment for WhyTri, who started making music in 2017. Before he ventured into hip-hop, he was a dancer and made clothing. He brought those skills along with him as he put out music. "It gave me this ability to really know how I want to be perceived," he says. "But also how I want to connect with my audience when I'm performing live or putting out music."

WhyTri says that his first project, an EP called "Sith Sounds," was bad.  "I was trying to make more boom bap-ish music... it wasn't really me. It took me a little while to understand that." His recent music has drawn comparisons to Tyler the Creator or Danny Brown, but over the years, he's developed a distinct sound that he calls "alternative crunk"— it's raw and bold, with enough bounce to get people moving and jumping around.

WhyTri is currently working on an album with producer Jon Glass called "Alternative Crunk LP." It will solidify that unfiltered, energetic sound WhyTri has been crafting and mastering over the past few years.

Voicing the god of the underworld has provided a unique opportunity for WhyTri. As a Fortnite player, it's surreal for him to turn on his PC, load the game and hear his music. "I was just a little Haitian kid from Everett," he says. "So to be at this point in my career,  I think 16 year old Dimitri would be very proud of himself. That gets me very emotional thinking about it."

Correction: A previous version of this article included the previous headquarters location for Epic Games. The company is now based in North Carolina.