[STEAM] Inside Scottie Pippen’s new Fortnite game

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NBA legend Scottie Pippen is turning one of his most treasured pieces of sports history into a playable Fortnite experience.

Pippen’s new Unreal Editor for Fortnite game, titled, Don’t Drop the Ball, went live on Monday, July 27. Developed in-house by The Ball Foundation, the game is a 10-minute competitive chase built around the ball from the Chicago Bulls’ Game 5 win over the Los Angeles Lakers on June 12, 1991 — the night the team clinched its first championship, with Pippen in a starring role.

The Ball Foundation is Pippen’s organization built around the Game 5 Ball, the actual basketball from the Bulls’ 1991 title-clinching win, which he held onto privately for more than three decades. Beyond the Fortnite game, the foundation has published a mobile game called

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, and has announced that it’s developing a documentary in collaboration with a major Hollywood studio, as well as a virtual museum where fans can explore the ball’s history. It’s also positioning itself within Web3 and has built an AI-driven social media personality modeled on the ball itself. Separately, the foundation runs a philanthropic arm, Ball Cares, focused on inner-city community development, education and scholarship programs, and youth sports funding.

The premise of the Fortnite game is straightforward, with Pippen telling GamesBeat in a written interview that he wanted to keep gameplay “simple.”

“Everybody starts in the city and races to the arena,” he said. “The ball is at half court. Once you grab it, everybody is coming after you. Hold it the longest, and you win.”

The Game 5 Ball itself has personal significance for Pippen, who kept the physical object out of public view for more than three decades before deciding to digitize it for the Ball Foundation project.

“That ball was there the night we won our first championship,” he said. “We scanned it so younger people could understand what that moment meant. Now they can compete for it instead of just hearing about it.”

Pippen said he set the creative direction for Don’t Drop the Ball and left execution to his team at The Ball Foundation.

“I wanted the competition and the feeling of 1991 to be there,” he said. “I gave the team that direction, and they did exactly that. Now it’s in the players’ hands. They create the next moment.”

Fortnite wasn’t necessarily the starting point. “My team brought Fortnite to me,” Pippen said. “It is one of the biggest platforms in the world, and it has the fun and competition we wanted. We’re not stopping there.”

On timing, Pippen framed the launch as less about a specific trigger and more about handing the ball’s story to fans. He noted that the project has been roughly a year in the making, starting with the ball and growing into an ecosystem of games, tournaments, and live events.

“The time is always now,” he said. “I wanted to pass the ball to the community, and this was the right way to do it.”

Asked about the underlying goal, Pippen pushed back on framing it purely as legacy preservation. “I don’t look at it as just preserving my legacy,” he said. “It’s about taking a real piece of sports history and sharing it with people around the world. Instead of leaving it in a case, we’re letting people compete for it.”

The Ball Foundation built the game entirely in-house, according to Pippen, who said he was “involved throughout” with the effort. On the business side, Pippen described a mix of revenue paths rather than a single model: brand partners, tournaments, in-game spaces, rewards, and live events.

“Web3 can be part of it, but it is not the whole thing,” he said. “The game and the community come first. I wanted people to do more than look at the ball. I wanted them to be part of it.”

Don’t Drop the Ball is available now in Fortnite using island code 8996-5981-8979, or through the official

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site. The Ball Foundation is promoting the launch with social posts including tournament and game night announcements on its Game5Ball social channels.

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