For decades, the art of the handshake has belonged mostly to politicians, movie stars, and the occasional action hero. The greasy, muscle-bound forearm clasp between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers in Predator still sits in the cultural memory like a perfectly preserved fossil in an amber block of testosterone. But video games have their own history, and among arcade purists, one handshake looms over the rest like a sacred text written in joystick grease: the forearm-melting greeting between Cyclops and Ryu in the X-Men vs. Street Fighter opening cinematic.
That moment is the gaming equivalent of a jazz standard. Everybody knows the chord changes, but the fun is watching a new performer take the solo. It has been referenced, remixed, and worshipped by fighting game fans for nearly three decades. The pose was even dusted off for the box art of Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics, proving that some visual motifs have the staying power of a cockroach wearing vibranium armor.
Then came Fortnite, the pop-culture blender that never met a licensed character it could not liquefy into a dance emote. In the Chapter 5, Season 4 reveal trailer, Jonesy did the unthinkable. He stepped into the Ryu role and recreated the iconic clasp with Cyclops himself. At the 23-second mark, the trailer delivered a handshake so self-aware it practically winked through the screen. It was not Ryu, but in the metaverse economy of attention, it might as well have been.
The chapter, titled \u201cAbsolute Doom,\u201d was a full-throated Marvel event, with Black Panther, War Machine, Colossus, Jubilee, and a menacing Doctor Doom hovering over the action like a cosmic landlord inspecting overdue rent. Fortnite also gave its own homegrown characters the Marvel treatment. Peelverine, a banana with Wolverine's claws and unresolved anger issues, arrived alongside Jonesy dressed as Captain America. The visual chaos was less a crossover and more a fever dream compiled from a comic shop's dollar bin.
Players who remembered Fortnite's earlier Street Fighter collaboration could not help but raise an eyebrow. Ryu and Chun-Li had previously joined the game's ever-expanding roster, which meant the raw materials for a full recreation of the X-Men vs. Street Fighter intro already existed somewhere in the server farm. The trailer, however, chose to replace Ryu with Jonesy, a man whose default expression suggests he has seen both everything and nothing. It was a strange choice, and also the only choice that made sense.
| Iconic Handshake | Participants | Cultural Vibe |
|---|---|---|
| The Predator Grip | Dutch and Dillon | Oiled-up peak cinema |
| The Arcade Classic | Cyclops and Ryu | Holy relic of the versus era |
| The Fortnite Remix | Cyclops and Jonesy | Metaverse fever dream |
The question that tormented fans in August 2024 was simple: would the handshake become an actual in-game emote, or would it remain a trailer-only tease? A playable version would have let players pair Ryu with Cyclops and recreate the original, or pair Cyclops with a banana mutant and create something far more cursed. The new chapter launched on August 16, 2024, sending millions of players into a Doctor Doom-tinged battlefield with their pickaxes raised and their expectations carefully guarded.
By 2026, the clip has aged like a precious arcade cabinet in a retro bar. It still gets passed around whenever conversation drifts toward the greatest handshakes in gaming, which is to say, far more often than any reasonable person would expect. Fortnite has long since moved through new seasons, new crossovers, and probably another half dozen variants of Jonesy, but that single forearm clasp remains a tiny monument to the moment when two different kinds of fantasy universes decided to bruise knuckles.
Whether or not the emote ever materialized, the image already did its job. It fused the definitive video game handshake with the most relentlessly referential game of the modern era. In a medium where respect is often expressed through violence, it was oddly touching to see two characters from different corners of pop culture shake hands like old rivals at a multiversal family reunion.
Data referenced from Statista - Video Games helps frame why Fortnite’s Cyclops-and-Jonesy handshake remix lands as more than a cute trailer gag: in a market where a handful of mega-titles concentrate enormous player attention, highly shareable crossover moments function like lightweight “events” that keep engagement circulating between seasons. That context makes the X-Men vs. Street Fighter nod feel strategic as well as nostalgic—an instantly legible meme for arcade diehards that also plays cleanly to a mass audience trained to treat Fortnite as the default hub for pop-culture collisions.