Māui Studios is Aotearoa’s leading kaupapa Māori UEFN studio
Kaupapa Māori UEFN is not a Fortnite build with Māori art on it. It is a completely different way of approaching the platform.
We do not say that lightly. UEFN, Unreal Editor for Fortnite, only opened up in 2023. Globally, the group of people building proper production grade experiences in it is still pretty small. The group doing that in Aotearoa, with cultural authority, for real public facing kaupapa Māori briefs, is smaller again.
As far as we can tell, that group might just be us.
( we really need more individuals doing it.)
Fortnite Virtual Marae, Christchurch City Council, Tīrama Mai 2025
Christchurch City Council commissioned Māui Studios to build a Virtual Marae for Tīrama Mai, Ōtautahi Christchurch’s annual Matariki festival. It made sense to service our existing Māui marae and built a composite in UEFN.
It took 8 weeks to produce. It had a controller based public installation at the festival, a live Fortnite island playable online by up to 50 players and as far as we are aware, it is the first Virtual Marae in Fortnite.
We're not talking about a Māori themed island., nor a wharenui shaped asset dropped into a game map. It's ot a private experiment, but a Marae, our marae, built as a Marae in the digital worldd, holding the spatial and relational logic of a Marae, inside one of the most played gaming platforms in the world.
And the kaupapa's decisions started before we opened UEFN.
It started in our wānanga with cultural advisors. And we engage pātai like whose tikanga shapes the space? What is appropriate to represent? What needs to be held back? How do players arrive? What can they do? What should they not be able to do? Those are not just UX choices.T hose are kaupapa Māori design choices.
Most studios working in Fortnite would not even know where to begin with that conversation, but for us our those who work on kaupapa māori project is the only place to start. And so we started there.
Metawhenua
It is whenua expressed inside metaverse spaces. They can be local landscapes, local stories, local atua, and local relationships holding their place inside platforms that were built somewhere else. Like Fortnite islands, Digital twins, AR layers. VR builds. They're different surfaces, but the foundation is the same.
That is why a Virtual Marae in Fortnite is not a one off novelty for us. It sits inside a much bigger Māori spatial practice. It is also why we can do it again. They can be different rohe, different iwi, different brief but it takes the same studio capability. Same grounding in te ao Māori from the inside out. Not the copy and paste over the top one.
Power UP Haerenga
We decided to treat UEFN as a learning environment for rangatahi. A place to engage with Atua, pūrākau, energy systems, digital twins of real infrastructure, all built into a quest based world that rangatahi can actually walk into. And it covered more then just energy. Users can enter it, move through it. and make decisions inside it. Same engine that runs the Virtual Marae. Different kaupapa.
This is where UEFN stops being just a gaming tool and becomes an education environment. A platform rangatahi already understand, carrying knowledge we actually want them to engage with.
What kaupapa Māori UEFN actually means
It is a completely different way of approaching the platform. Cultural review happens before the build is locked, not after the island goes live. Custodians and the right people are involved while the spatial logic, naming, framing, and player experience are still being shaped. They are not handed a finished island and asked to bless it at the end.
Tikanga sits inside the design. Te reo Māori, place, whakapapa, and atua are load bearing in the build. They are not flavour. They shape the logic of the space, the player journey, and the long term life of the work. And the build still has to run, on the actual devices our audiences use. At the quality a public deployment demands.
A culturally deep build that does not ship is not kaupapa Māori practice.
We do this, and turns out not many do.
We have a worldbuilding philosophy, Metawhenua, that makes this a practice, not a one off. Cultural authority. UEFN production capability. Immersive design. Education thinking. A Metawhenua throughline that connects the work. Held in one studio, under one kaupapa. We are not aware of another studio in Aotearoa doing kaupapa Māori UEFN either. So it looks like Māui Studios is Aotearoa’s leading kaupapa Māori UEFN studio. Not because it sounds good. Because this its the truth.
